“I forgive you.”
I take her phone from her bedside table and text Kelly, so that I can tell him, too.
Gazebo. Soon.
I don’t expect to surprise him a second time. Cherish really hasn’t been in contact with her ex-boyfriend—I know because the last message is still the one that was there before I texted him last. If he’s got any sense at all, he’ll know it’s me.
I know he does when he sees the message but doesn’t respond.
Control.
He’ll come.
I put Cherish’s phone back and pull on clothes, careful with the lightweight sweatshirt so that it doesn’t rustle too loudly against my bandaged arm. I don’t want to wake Cherish after the night she’s had. It’s why I don’t touch her face or hair when I’m back at her bedside, standing over her. I keep a watch, but I don’t reach for her, and I don’t speak. I don’t remind her what I’ve decided—that I forgive her, that I’ll take better care of her—I just stare at the way the moon from the large windows across from our bed bathes her in light.
I want to count out tallies on her skin, or tear a wound into her forearm the way I buried an upturned nail in my foot—only so we’ll be the same.
Control.
I don’t let myself trace where it would be. I don’t let myself count aloud the numbers we won’t need anymore. I only pass the time it’ll take for Kelly to get to the Whitmans’ property by keeping a silent vigil over my Cherish, and not hurting her the way she’s hurt me.
Eventually I creep out of the bedroom, down the staircase, make my way to and through the kitchen, then out the door.
The air is still outside, and it’s thicker than it was inside the house. It’s closer than it was when I was swimming, which seems like it was forever ago. Everything feels different, not just the stagnant atmosphere that will only be broken by thunder and lightning—a violent release of tension so that things can go back to the way they were. The pool looks different, and the garden as I pass it. All the grounds are familiar and completely changed, as though yesterday the world split from the cellophane layer I did not know it wore.
It’s the Nichole Turner effect. I feel her as I walk the rolling lawn, see outlines of her through the corner of my eye as I make my way to the gazebo.
Control.
I can’t unsee her here, despite the things I’ve discovered and decided. I can’t deny the way this place has changed since she and my dad left yesterday afternoon, or the way she would no doubt suggest that it’s my fault. That I am to blame for the way it feels as though a veneer has been snatched away. That I tore it away like a volcano of shiny red crystals erupting from a wound.
Nichole Turner has seized my attention, and it almost costs me an advantage.
He’s doing a good job shielding his body with the gazebo post. He’s clearly done this before. But when he flicks his chin to the side to move his dreads from his eyes, even the shadow can’t conceal that it’s Tariq waiting up ahead and not Kelly.
I sent for Kelly, and Tariq Campbell came instead.
I only have a few moments to figure out what that means, so I slow my steps. I tuck my chin close to my chest, pull myself toward center, so that I can think. I banish Nichole Turner from my mind and shuffle through scenarios and probabilities.
Tariq with Jerry Whitman, showing off his bruised hand.
With me, in the kitchen, showing genuine concern. Leaning close a moment later and asking if we could steal a moment away.
Tariq smiling and exposing his best friend’s grill.
Kelly on the grass outside the gazebo when I pulled his shirt up to find a gruesome bull’s-eye.
Why is Tariq here?
“Hey, babe,” he says when I am close enough to hear. He’s still behind the post, casually leaning against it with one shoulder, one leg tossed in front of the other. He isn’t even facing the lawn; he’s looking out toward the golf course. There’s something about his voice, even though he called me babe. The same smugness that oozed out of him while he and Cherish’s dad talked in front of the grill. There’s something chastising in it, whether he means to lace the pet name with it or not. This will be a playful confrontation—I just don’t know why.
“I’m surprised at you,” he continues, reaching up to absently fiddle with his dreaded fringe before shoving off the pillar with his shoulder. For a moment, the movement puts him deeper in the gazebo’s shadow. “Trying to see our boy again when you know that’s against the rules. What’ll Mother think? How am I supposed to feel?”
And then his breath hitches. The laugh lines around his mouth ripple and then evaporate.
It’s all I need.
I didn’t expect it to be Tariq, and Tariq did not expect it to be me.
“I’m kidding, Fair,” he says, tries to recover by forcing a chuckle and sliding both hands into his pockets like I can’t see them balling up there. “I know you and Kelly don’t rock like that. Did Cherish lose her nerve?”
He’s come out of the gazebo and sauntered toward me, touching his hair again like he doesn’t mean to, and twice clenching his jaw while it’s strategically angled so that I see the way it hardens.
He thinks he’s seducing me. He thinks that I am an ordinary teenage girl, or any lovestruck teenager period. That I haven’t heard the words he’s said—or else that he can keep me from processing them by invoking a crush he has no way of knowing I have revoked.
“Are we not cool anymore?” he asks, and when he’s standing right in front of me, his dark eyes glistening with the light of the moon, he touches my hair.
I told Cherish she was bad at this—but Tariq is remarkably worse. He’s reckless while he tries to reclaim the mask he clearly wore with me. He’s forgotten the tension he cultivated between us with protracted nervous hesitation. The way that even an embrace seemed forward. He’s aggressive now, by comparison, touching me to force a swoon that won’t come.
“We must not be,” I say, letting my gaze untether from his to wander his face, his eyes trying to follow. “You came here in the middle of the night to find Cherish.”
“Come on, Farrah,” he says, lacing his voice with a masculine timbre before invoking a pleading tone that’s meant to buckle my knees. He wants me to think he can’t help it—that need to be believed by me. That it’s seeped into his words rather than being attached to them intentionally.
Kelly laughs—I hear him as though he’s still there, between our feet. When I glance down, I see him, faintly. I take a step back from Tariq to make room for his best friend, contorted on the grass, some of him swallowed in our shadows, and some of him alight. He’s glowing, his face upturned—but not toward me. He isn’t laughing at me now.