“Don’t blame me, sweetheart.” Zander smirks, holding up his hands as he follows me toward the end of the hallway. “Our boy got himself a little sideways last night. I only came by to watch the fireworks.”
A stab of anxiety, cold and piercing, knifes into my chest. “Alex did not do this by himself.” My tone’s confident, like I’m one hundred percent sure that my boyfriend would never trash his own hard-won apartment like this, but in truth I can believe it. I’ve been waiting for him to blow for days. There was no way he was going to be able to maintain his flat, sketchy, I-feel-nothing level of detachment forever. He was bound to snap. I was hoping I’d be there when it happened, so I could do some firefighting, try to minimize the damage both to Alex and to his surroundings, but it looks like I got here a little late.
I should never have left him in the first place. I should have refused to leave. He was so adamant that he was fine, though. He swore he just wanted to sleep…
“You’re wasting your time,” Zander calls after me. I walk through Alex’s bedroom door, and inside his room, the bed is unmade, a welter of tangled sheets hanging half off the mattress, showing the shiny silver fabric of the pillowtop underneath. Piles of clothes have been dumped all over the room, the odd shoe, separated from its partner, abandoned on the polished wood like a forgotten landmine, waiting to be tripped over or trodden on. Alex’s bedside table is crowded with crushed cigarette packets, pens, loose change, scraps of paper, receipts, and small plastic baggies—empty, bar a faint white residue that tells a disturbing story all of its own.
Alex is nowhere to be seen.
Spinning around in the three-inch heels I borrowed from Mom’s designer shoe collection, I lock onto Zander with a laser beam focus. He immediately retreats, backing into the doorframe. “Whoa, now, sweetheart. I really had nothing to do with this. Alex was on a tear when I got here. He didn’t stop until his eyes rolled back in his head and he hit the deck somewhere ’round three this morning.”
“Where is he now?” I’m not used to hissing at people. I don’t think Zander’s accustomed to people speaking to him this way, either. He scowls, a disdainful dimple punctuating his cheek.
“Who the fuck knows? Haven’t got a clue. He woke up at six-thirty, threw up in his guitar case, took a cold shower, and then he left. And before you accuse me of being a shitty friend, I did ask where the hell he thought he was going. He declined to part with the information.”
“You should have gone after him,” I snarl, pushing past him out of the bedroom.
He follows me, bare feet thumping against the floorboards. “Ha! Yeah, right. I make questionable decisions all the time, but I’m not that stupid, darlin’. I don’t have life insurance and chasing after a category five hurricane does not sound like a good time to me.”
God, I could throat punch him. “You should have called me, then. Told me what he was doing. I would have come.” My cell phone’s already in my hand. I’m already pulling up Alex’s contact info on the screen. A second later, I’m hitting the green call button.
“Sorry, but again…I wouldn’t bother.” Zander gestures to something on the floor. I stoop down and pick up…oh, that’s just fucking great. It’s his cell phone. Smashed beyond recognition, the metal warped and flattened.
“What the hell happened?” I look up at Zander, expecting a reasonable explanation for this, but then I see just how ridiculous he looks and realize I’m not going to get anything sensible out of him. “Urgh, never mind.”
Where the hell would he have gone? Did he run out of booze? Maybe he went out to grab some more. But no…Zander said he threw up in his guitar case. He couldn’t have been feeling well. More alcohol was probably the last thing he wanted. So then what? I stand by the front door, pressing my fingers against my brow, trying to think. “It’s his brother’s fucking funeral this morning, Zander. I can’t believe you’d let him do this. Not today.”
The music stops, the song that was playing coming to an end, and for one second a complete, consuming silence floods the empty spaces inside the apartment. It feels alive and angry.
“What did you just say?”
I give Zander a withering sidelong look, surprised when I see his expression. He looks stunned. I’ve seen him arrogant. I’ve seen him amused. I’ve seen him annoyed. But I’ve never seen him like this. The swagger is gone, and suddenly he doesn’t look like a member of a potentially very dangerous motorcycle club. He looks like the seventeen-year-old high school student that he is. “What do you mean, it’s his brother’s funeral today?”
Oh, this just gets better and better. “He didn’t tell you? Of course he didn’t tell you.” Makes perfect sense, really. Alex has been so shut down, getting him to speak to me has been a labor of love. Alex’s friendship with Zander is clearly complicated, but I can see it for what it is—a love/hate relationship. It didn’t even cross my mind that Alex would have kept this from him, though. Sliding my phone back into my pocket, I sigh, the weight on my shoulders far heavier than it was a moment ago. Telling this story isn’t something I relish.
“Ben and the woman who was fostering him, they were in a car accident. They…neither of them made it.” I keep it as simple as possible. I can’t talk about Jackie’s perforated lungs. How she drowned in her own blood. I can’t talk about Ben’s brain bleed, or how he slipped away from this world without anyone sitting on the backseat beside him, holding his hand.
Zander’s face is ashen. “That isn’t funny, sweetheart.”
“You think I’m joking? Christ, what kind of person would joke about something like that?”
“Tell me you’re fucking with me,” he persists. “That’s why he destroyed himself last night? That…” Shaking his head, Zander slumps back against the wall behind him, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Ben died?”
I sympathize with him. It doesn’t feel real to me, either. I still can’t wrap my head around any of this. “Zander, you gotta think. Did he say anything about where he was going? Anything that might tell us where he is. I don’t think he’s in his right mind. I’m really fucking worried.”
When Zander drops his hands, his eyes are red and bloodshot. He clears his throat. “Yeah. Yeah, um…” Frowning, he shrugs. “He said something about going to see his mom. He stormed out of here without a jacket. He said he wouldn’t need it. He took the Scout.”
“He rode the bike?” I look around, surveying the chaos and destruction that is Alex’s apartment, trying to mentally add up how many units of alcohol are still churning around his system. I throw my hands up in the air, turning toward the door, then turning right back again. “He’s fucking dead,” I whisper. “He’s probably driven head-on into a Mack truck and now he’s fucking dead, too.”
Tense, and with a face whiter than a sheet, Zander shoves away from the wall. “No need to get melodramatic, Parisi. If we’re lucky, he might have just paralyzed himself from the waist down. You said the funeral’s this morning?”
I nod, fighting the urge to dash into the kitchen and throw up in the sink; I could have done without the thought that Alex might ironically share the same fate as Cillian Dupris. “Yeah. In twenty minutes.”