“You get to be sad, Alex. You get to be lost, and hurt, and turned around. What you don’t get to do is ghost me. I’m not okay with that. We don’t do that to each oth—”
She deserves to chew me out for the shit I’ve been pulling over the past couple of days. I owe her better than I’ve been giving her, and she has every right to tear me a new one for vanishing on her so spectacularly, but in this moment, the air shivering with snow out of the Camaro’s window and everything so peaceful and quiet, all I want to do is kiss her.
I hold her by the nape of her neck, quickly pulling her to me, and I bring my mouth down on hers before she can finish her sentence. She tastes of cinnamon, and mint, and the ginger tea she likes to drink sometimes; I consume all of it, all of her, plunging my tongue into her mouth with a wild abandon that halts her breath in her lungs.
I guess she wasn’t banking on being kissed like she’s about to get fucked. It takes her a second to respond. When she does, it’s with a shuddering sigh that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up straight.
Her fingers wind into my hair, tracing down the sides of my face, running over my collar bones until she’s driving her nails into the tops of my shoulders, panting out sharp blasts of air down her nose. She’s so fucking bitable. I suck her lower lip into my mouth, tugging on it with my front teeth, and Silver lets out a little whimper that has another part of me altogether standing to attention.
Reluctantly, I break off the kiss before we go too far. Sure, I want her real bad. Goes without saying that I want my dick inside her, with her shivering out an orgasm on top of me, but this is more important than sex. I need to make things right with her. If we apologize and make up, communicating only through sex, we’ll forget how to actually talk about our shit, and I’m no genius when it comes to emotions but I’m pretty sure that’ll end in disaster.
I cradle her face in my hands, committing the dazed, heated look on her face to memory. Then I gently stroke the tip of my index finger down the length of her nose, rubbing away the wet sheen of her mouth so I can’t be distracted by how hot she is, all pouty and swollen like this.
“I let you down,” I whisper. “I’m fucking sorry.”
Her eyes still unfocused, she shakes her head, swallowing. “You didn’t let anyone down. That’s the whole point. No one expects you to just get up, dust yourself off and move on like nothing happened. You lost him, you lost Ben, and—”
The words, sharp as knives, flay me to the bone. I’ve been trying to outrun them ever since I found out Ben was dead, but this time I settle into my seat and I face them, I feel them, and I try not to flee from the truth.
Ben’s dead.
My brother is gone, and he isn’t coming back.
I’m never going to sit across from him at the diner and dip French fries into a milkshake with him. We’re never going to watch scary movies together. The sound of his incredibly rare laughter is never going to fill the spare room of the apartment I got just so he could come and live with me.
These are hard realities to face. I don’t want to accept any of it, but that’s the thing about death. It can’t be ignored. You just have to find a way to live with the hand it deals you, and that sucks more than I can bear.
Silver clears her throat, plucking at the collar of my t-shirt, worrying at the stitching. “I’m not mad at you for disappearing. Not really. I don’t know how you’re supposed to handle any of this, okay? There are no guidelines for coping with grief.”
“There are actually. There are millions of them online, and every single one of them is horseshit. I’m gonna be okay. I just need to figure out how to put one foot in front of the other, and…”
She rests her chin on my shoulder, curling my hair around her finger. “And?”
“And…I’m supposed to go to college, then get a good job, right? Pay off my loans over the next twenty fucking years and get a mortgage. Become a responsible human being who regrets covering himself in tattoos. That’s what comes next.”
Leaning back, Silver’s disturbingly quiet for a very long time. After a while she rests the back of her head against the frosted window behind her and lets out a long breath. “What would your Mom say about that? What did she want for you when you grew up?”
Well, shit. I could really do without unleashing my mother on the inside of this car. To remember her is to give her life, and she’s just too big and overwhelming to deal with right now. Silver asked the question, though, and she looks like she’s expecting an answer. “She…she wanted me to make music. She wanted me to be an artist like Giacomo. She wanted me to be an arctic explorer. A deep-sea diver. She wanted me to be happy.”
Silver smiles softly, brushing the pad of her thumb along the line of my jaw, making my stubble rasp in the silent car. “She wanted you to be free…” she says in a hushed tone. “None of the things she envisioned for you involved office jobs, mortgages or regrets. You’re not made for that world, Alessandro. You were made for colorful ink and the rumble of an engine, and an open highway, full of possibilities and uncertainty. That’s what your life looks like after high school.”
The oxygen rushes out of my lungs in a winded, long exhale. “I’m not interested in a future that doesn’t feature you in it, Argento.”
“Who said anything about that? I’ve told you once already, I’m not going anywhere. We’ll weather whatever storms come our way together, I promise. We have so far, haven’t we?”
Man, when did I turn into such a little bitch? When did I start feeling this swollen ache in my chest any time Silver talks about the future? It feels like I’m holding something fragile in my hands, delicate beyond measure, and the slightest twitch will cause it to shatter. My whole life, I’ve had to be forceful and brash in order to make it from one day to the next. This entire thing with Silver requires finesse, though. It requires a gentle touch that I sure as shit wasn’t born with. As the bell rings inside the school, across the other side of the parking lot, I find myself praying that I can figure it all out before I end up permanently breaking something.
15
SILVER
Three Weeks Later
“I heard she got busted sucking Jake’s dick and the new kid lost his temper. What kind of psycho carries a gun around anyway? I’ve been saying there’s something off with that Moretti guy ever since he walked through the front door.”
“God, you are such a dipshit. If that was true, how did she end up in the hospital with broken ribs and a rope burn around her neck?”
“What the fuck, dude. How the hell am I supposed to have all the answers? What am I, a bad daytime TV detective? All I know is, Jake’s s’posed to come into some of his inheritance after his eighteenth birthday. Watch this space. That bitch is gonna be knocking on his door, holding out her unmanicured hand, looking for a payout. Seriously, have you seen her hands? They are gross. Her fingers are actually calloused like an old man’s.”
“Oh my god, Leah, you’re such a bitch!”
An eruption of laughter bounces off the tiled walls of the changing room—a pack of hyenas cackling over a fresh kill. I roll my eyes, marveling at how stupid the girls sound, tittering to one another on the other side of the lockers. The past three weeks have been fine. With both Kacey and Jake gone, no one’s bothered openly attacking me. What would be the point? There’s no one left to impress with their random acts of cruelty, and so I’m mostly ignored. Every once in a while, this kind of bullshit takes place, though. Tall tales and sharp words crafted to entertain at my expense. The girls know I’m here, which means their little gossip session’s being conducted with the specific purpose of fucking with me. Sucks for them that I’ve heard way worse. Nothing they or anyone else says can hurt me now. I’m literally fucking untouchable. Bored by the whole affair, I finish tying my chucks, straighten out my Raleigh sweatpants, and sit myself down on the bench next to me.