No one ever accused Night of the Living Dog of being normal.
Sunday night, a thunderstorm rumbles in the not-so-distant sky, and Night paws frantically at the door—international dog lingo for Walk me or you’ll live to regret it.
I put on Jayla’s Broncos hoodie and hook up the leash, let him trot me out to the woods behind the house. “Colorado is a top-ten state for death by lightning. Know that, dude?”
Night ignores me, snuffles along the trail to his favorite tree just as the first raindrops plink onto the leaves. This is his spot—our spot—quiet, far enough from the surrounding houses that we’re almost always alone. Despite the rain, I’m grateful for the escape.
Jayla’s been pretty mellow all weekend, a forced smile that I shared tonight as we made a gourmet meal out of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia, hot fudge, and crumbled pretzels. Pictures of her pep rally altercation with Asher leaked to CelebStyle, and even though it was all an act, and Asher was thrilled to go along with it, yesterday’s headlines tell a different story.
JAY-HEART LOVES HER FANS, AS LONG AS THEY’RE “ABLE” TO LOVE HER BACK; ALTERCATION AT HOMETOWN HIGH SCHOOL REVEALS CELEB’S TRUE COLORS.
Since the story broke, she’s been ignoring her phone, deleting nasty messages from her fan page.
After orbiting different suns for years, my sister and I suddenly have a lot in common.
I unhook Night’s leash to let him explore, and beneath a canopy of aspen and ponderosa, I climb up on my favorite boulder, perfect for contemplating. As Night slops around in the mud, my thoughts drift from Jayla and Ash to Ms. Zeff, from Ellie and Griff to Olivia, but inside the brain of Lucy, all roads lead to Cole. Cole’s sad-face text messages. Cole’s drum solo. Cole’s kiss . . .
When I open my eyes, he’s walking toward me with Spike. It’s like I’ve pulled him out of my daydreams, and he smiles when our eyes meet, rain darkening the shoulders of his blue-gray hoodie.
“Saw you walking this way,” he says, unclipping Spike’s leash. The Dachshund bolts down the path in search of his canine bestie.
I hop off the boulder, wipe my hands on my cutoff camos.
“You okay?” he asks. “I was worried. You took off at the pep rally, and . . . shit. Am I turning into stalker guy?” He goes all dad-voice, pounds his fist in his hand. “Dammit, Lucy, you haven’t answered my calls or texts.”
I laugh. “Maybe a little stalkery. Mostly angry dad, though.”
“Okay, how about this?” With a huskier voice, he says, “You and Margolis seem to be getting close.”
“Still kind of angry dad,” I say.
“Help me out here, Luce.” Cole’s voice is back to normal, but a little nervous. “I’m totally jealous. Not a good look for me.” He breaks into a grin, and I’m like, Jealousy? Dude. Totally a good look for you. But I update him on the investigation anyway, reassure him there’s nothing going on with Franklin.
Which is so surreal that I stop midexplanation and shake my head. “Cole, this thing . . . What are we doing? We haven’t even figured out who posted the pictures. And Ellie’s a mess, and it’s so—”
“Crazy. Straight up, mad-ass crazy.” Cole steps forward, so close I can smell the rain in his hair, so close even Asher’s surveillance drones would know, thousands of feet up, that there’s nothing even remotely just friends about this.
“It wasn’t just some random thing,” he says, and I know he means the kiss. “Not to me.”
“We were drinking.”
“You think a few beers is why I kissed you?”
Maybe, maybe not. I couldn’t trust my thoughts on prom night; the moment he showed up in my driveway in a tux, pinned me with a tea rose corsage, my logic board was fried.
Still is.
“Halloween,” he says. “Sophomore year. You were dressed like one of those special infected things from your zombie game. Right?”
“The witch.” I’m shocked that he recognized it then, that he remembers it now. “She kills you with her claws. One strike, you’re incapped. Maybe dead.”
“Yeah, the witch.”
“But not, like, a real witch. The special infected are amped-up—”
“I wanted to kiss you,” he says. His breath is powder soft against my cheeks. “That night. But I was with Ellie. And I loved her—really. I took a cold shower and convinced myself I was freaking out.”
The rain pelts our heads, our feet, soaking into the dirt.
“For two more years,” he says. “I thought it would pass, like, cold feet—that’s what John said. I put everything I had into Ellie. It was pretty good for a while too.”
He told John about me? Back then?
“But it wasn’t great,” he continues. “Love and friendship? Yeah. I mean, you know—Ellie’s awesome. But sparks?” He presses a hand to his heart and I know exactly what he’s saying, because I feel it too. Now. At prom. Every time he’s near, every time my name passes between his lips.
“Ellie and I both felt it,” he says. “Knew it was missing. Why do you think we broke up?”
Night howls in the distance, and seconds later, he and Spike return, caked with mud and trouble, still chasing each other in hyper circles at our feet. Cole crouches down to wrestle with Night, to give him a big, wet-dog hug, and I think of Ellie, her too-cute status updates, the posed Facebook pics, the confident assurances that with Cole, all was happy and well.
For so long she was hiding doubts, dark and secret things she kept from even her best friend.
Just as I kept my own dark and secret things from her.
I see her face, her smile, her tears. She is simultaneously a soul mate and a stranger.
“I didn’t plan it, Lucy,” Cole says. He stands, unfazed by the mud on his clothes, and I know he’s talking about the kiss again. “Every time I see you in those boots, I lose a few brain cells. Then all of a sudden we’re under the stars, and I’m thinking about the crazy shit we’ve done, the laughs . . . We’re all alone out there, and I’m like, this is it, dude. If you let her go now, she’s gone.”
I wasn’t. I’m not. The forest is green and alive in the rain, the dogs curled up and panting at the base of the boulder, everything lush and beautiful as if it were painted just for us, just for this moment.
My eyes are on the dirt when I say, “You don’t regret it?”
“On the deck?” he says. “I only stopped . . . I was worried I freaked you out. Like, maybe I was wrong when I thought you liked me too.” He sighs, the rain tapping a gentle rhythm on the leaves above. “Maybe I’m still wrong.”
My heart is thunderous, a raging storm that drowns out the warnings and the shouldn’ts and the can’ts, and I meet his gaze, hold it, look for the stars in his eyes.
I find them, glittery and infinite.
“You’re not.” The space between us is gone.
“God,” he whispers, “I’m in so much trouble with you.”
My skin is electrified by his touch, slick and muddy and cool. The rain dampens our faces, leaves trembling overhead as his body shudders against mine, a moan soft and breathy in my ear, and I give in.
Just this once.
I make the silent promise and give in to four years of wanting. Four years under the sheets with the lights off, eyes closed in the dark hours of the dawn, thinking only of him, his hands, his mouth, his breath, all of it on me, covering me, enveloping me.
Just this once. Just this once. Just this once.
Love. Devours. Heart.
• • •
“Isn’t there anything you can do?” Jayla’s saying into her phone. She leaning against the kitchen counter, her back to me, shoulders high and tight. “Are you sure they won’t reconsider? No. I know. It’s just . . . Yeah. I’m sorry too.” With a defeated sigh, she drops the phone on the counter.
“Jay?”
She whirls around, presses a hand to her heart. Her eyes are red, charcoal eyeliner smudged beneath them. “You scared me to death!”
“Are you crying?” I nod toward her phone. “Who was that?”
“No one.” She swipes at her eyes, tired and crestfallen. “Just my useless agent. I’m thinking of letting him go, but it’s so hard to find a good one.” She slides a bottle of red wine from the rack on the counter, reads the label, puts it back, selects another. This one she uncorks. When she looks at me again, her eyes narrow suspiciously. “What happened to you? Why are you shaking? Where’s Night?”
“Had to hose him off. He’s drying in the garage.” I tug off the hoodie and try to walk past her to the laundry room, but she stops me.
“Is that my hoodie?”
“Is it?” I look at the muddy blue-and-orange ball in my hands. “Sorry. Didn’t know you were a Broncos fan all of a sudden.”
Jayla reaches toward me, pulls a twig from my hair. She inspects it with great interest. “Explain to me, little sister, how one goes on a simple walk with her dog and comes back hours later with mud on her face and sticks in her hair and muddy handprints all over her shorts. Boy handprints.”
“Oh . . . I ran into Cole.” I comb my fingers through my hair, realizing what a bad criminal I’d make. A wet leaf falls to the kitchen floor.
With feigned indifference, I announce, “It’s pretty muddy out there, Jayla.”
Her eyebrows shoot up. “You and Cole were mud wrestling?”
“What? I fell! Night was running and I slipped and landed in this . . . um . . .”
“Creek bed?”
“Cole’s bed whut?”
“Jayla!”
“Lucy!”
My hand flies to my mouth, covers it instinctively. His kiss lingers, invisible evidence hot on my lips. I’m sure she can see it beneath the mud, read it as if the story’s written in tabloid headlines all over my face.
She pours a generous glass of wine and hands it over. “Drinksies?”
I shake my head, and she takes a long swig instead.
“A bath, then.” She tops off her glass from the bottle. “I’ll run it. Drop those clothes in the washer and prepare to tell me your dirty little secrets. All of them.”
• • •
Comfortably perched on the closed toilet, Jayla scrutinizes me over her wineglass as I recap the events of prom: Ellie’s bird flu fake out, the dance, the party, the kiss on the deck, the argument. All the pictures, tagged and uploaded.
There’s a hot washcloth over my eyes, the rest of me submerged in Jayla’s luxurious imported lemon-ginger bubble bath, but I still feel her gaze.
“Lucy.” There’s a swallow of wine, then a sigh. “You so lie. There’s way more to this story and it’s eating you up inside. A mother knows these things. Spill it, sister.”
“Wait, are you a mother or a sister?”
“You think I’m judgy, right? That’s it.” More sipping. Sighing. “Luce. My whole life is one long tabloid joke.” Her voice cracks on the last word. “I’m the last person to judge anyone. I just want you to trust me again. We’re sisters.”
The room is silent now except for the water—water dripping from my hair, water dripping from the faucet, water lapping the sides of the tub as the bubbles fizzle. I poke my toes out of the bath, wriggle them in the cool air above.
“Cole and I . . .” I say. “The pictures . . . It’s not exactly how it looked. But . . .” Behind the washcloth, darkness is anonymity; in it I find the courage, for the first time, to confess. “There was more than one kiss on prom night. Um, kind of a lot more.”
For the record, if you ever got sick, I would totally hold your hair back. . . .
Cole’s voice was low and my heart was racing and I turned, just a little, and he pulled me the rest of the way. We were facing each other, so close I could taste him, but still I held back. We didn’t kiss, didn’t speak, barely breathed, and finally, despite the pounding in my chest and the buzzing in my head, I drifted off.
An hour? Maybe two? I’m not sure how long I was out, but when I opened my eyes again, tangled up in Cole’s arms, pale lavender light illuminated the room. In the sliver between night and day, the cabin was silent, the stars fading, the moment full of dangerous possibility.
One last chance before the spell breaks. Before the sun laces her fingers through the sky, paints the shadows gold and sends us back to real life . . .
Cole’s eyes were closed, his lips parted, hair sticking up everywhere. He sighed in his sleep, and I drifted toward him, brushed my lips against his.
A second. Maybe three. His eyes stayed closed, but he stirred, his breath catching. My name was on his lips . . . Lucy . . . whispered into my mouth like smoke, like a ghost, and he pulled me to his chest, kissed me soft and forever.
I slipped beneath him in his bed that night, welcomed the weight of his body over mine, looked into his eyes as if the world were ending. Maybe it was. I wouldn’t have noticed.
We didn’t sleep after that. We held each other as the sun rose, said everything and nothing at all with one last kiss.
In all the stories about that night, the pictures that followed, the explanations and defenses, the recaps and apologies, the hints and fears and secret admissions, we never spoke of that moment. It was too intimate, too fragile. Too ours.
I know now that the pictures had already been taken by then, that they’d already started telling their story. A different one with all the wrong lines, all the wrong scenes.
It wasn’t like the pictures say.
Our story, soft and silent before the dawn, was so, so much more. And for days after—sometimes even still—I wondered if I’d dreamed it all along.
Still hidden by the washcloth, I tell Jayla my secrets, my truths, and by the time I get to the part about tonight, about the woods, I know that I’m a villain. That regardless of Cole and Ellie’s precise breakup timeline, I deserve the scandal, the bullying that comes with it. That everyone is right about me. Slut. Narc. Liar. Home wrecker. Best friend backstabber and all-around bad person. I earned the Juicy Lucy page, the posters on my locker, the judging smirks in the hallway.
Heartless, someone called me the other day. A heartless bitch.
But that’s where I get stuck.
If I’m so heartless, what’s this bruised thing in my chest, full of fire and hope, banging so loud I can’t sleep, can’t think? What is it that aches when he kisses me, aches when I walk away?
I slide the washcloth off my face and meet Jayla’s eyes, shame and confusion heating my cheeks.
“You’re in love with him,” she says. It’s kind and contemplative, not a question. “Seriously in love.”
I nod. “But it’s, like, tainted. Like I cheated to get him. And now I have to decide between my best friend and my heart. The girl I’m supposed to go away to college with and the guy who’s moving to the other side of the country in three months. A girl who might never forgive me and a guy who might not love me back, no matter what I decide.”
“What does Cole say?” she asks.
“He wants us to be together, but I can’t do that to Ellie.”
“You’re already doing it, and that’s not the point.” Jayla sips the last of her wine and sets down the empty glass, closes her eyes. I watch her and wait, steel myself for the jabs about how I’m becoming more like Angelica Darling every day, how it sounds like a made-for-TV movie, how all I need is a drink and a few credit cards to make it all go away.
They don’t come.
“What do I do?” I ask.
“Tell her.” When she opens her eyes, they’re clear and determined. “What happened, happened. All you have left is the truth. Ellie has to hear it eventually, even if she doesn’t want to. For chrissake, Lucy. You and Cole are in love. You can’t just walk away.”
“But everyone—”
“All the haters and scandals in the world can’t change your heart. You’re already on the battlefield, right? So fight for it.” Jayla picks up the glass and leans down to kiss my head, trailed as always by her pear perfume. “Fucking fight.”