Page 43 of Worse Than Wicked
Colt’s expression doesn’t change. I read men well, but I can’t read him. Not anymore. He’s changed, and not just his face. He glares at Baron, his eyes filled with nothing but cold loathing.
“He’s not doing well,” I say. “We just want to understand why, what might have happened that last semester that he hasn’t told us. You were here. We weren’t. We don’t know unless someone tells us, and he won’t talk about it.”
“You’re right,” Colt says, his gaze moving to me. “You weren’t here.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, because I know what it’s like to be left at their mercy. I left Colt just like my mother left me. I failed him like they all failed me.
He must be thinking the same, but his eyes soften at last.
“I’m glad you weren’t,” he says, and then he turns his attention back to Baron. “I told you, I don’t owe you anything. Not even answers. Now I’m going to do something I should have done the first time you came knocking.”
Before we can answer, he swings the door closed in our faces. I hear the lock engage, and then I’m left standing on one side with Baron, and Colt’s on the other with our family.
His family.
I may not have been officially disowned, but I chose a side, and it wasn’t the Darlings’.
twelve
Duke Dolce
I turn over and check my phone. It’s 2 AM but I still haven’t fallen asleep. I keep thinking about them going over to Colt’s house, and how I didn’t go. I couldn’t. Not after what Baron said.
But he was there.
They said so when they got home. They saw him.
I couldn’t ask how he looked, how he was. It would have made Baron wonder why I asked, why I cared.
I don’t care.
I have his sister right here. The girl I love. The girl I always loved. The girl who loves me, as far as she’s able. I have the life we dreamed about for two years, that I never thought I’d have. Now I do. I have the life, the girl. The one who was supposed to make everything good again.
So why can’t I be fucking happy?
I flop back on the pillows. Mabel and Baron are sleeping. She’s nestled into his arms, both of them fitting together like halves of a whole.
That’s my place, but she took it, and now I don’t fit.
I don’t fit anywhere. Not with them, not with Royal and Harper.
I sit up and swing my legs off the side of the bed, then check over my shoulder. Without his glasses, Baron looks just like me. Another version, the mirror image, the one who fits. We should fit together. We’re the two halves of the whole, after all. Literally one person divided in two.
We used to be. Mabel was the third wheel then, the outsider. It was me and Baron, Baron and me. We worked together to destroy her, laughing all the way. When we did, it was my victory too. When we realized we needed her, it was my epiphany too. When we decided to wait until graduation and then go get her, it was my plan too.
But Baron didn’t wait.
He left, and I was here, and everything changed, and I don’t know if it will ever be good again. He broke the whole, and it doesn’t fit back together the way it used to.
That’s the midnight thought, the 2AM thought, that keeps me awake. Not the dawning realization that everything is not good, not the frustration that it should be but it’s not. It’s the gnawing sense that it never will be.
I grab my glasses and slip out of the room, pad down the hall, down the creaking old wooden staircase. In the kitchen, before I hit the light, I see something hanging from the ceiling, swaying slowly in the dim light from the window—a body. I choke back a startled sound, not wanting to squeal like a pussy. I hit the light, and it bathes the kitchen. My heart is hammering erratically. It was just the light fixture.
I go to the fridge, take out a beer, and tip it back, downing the bottle in long, slow pulls. When the last of the cold bitterness gurgles down the neck of the bottle, down my throat, I toss it and get another one. Maybe they’ll help me sleep. At the very least, they’ll keep the ghosts at bay.
The ghosts are always with me now, even when I’m not high. The only difference is, when I’m high, they don’t always disappear when I look directly at them. Sometimes they stay, whisper to me like my demon, tell me what to do.
I thought being here would help. That Mabel wasn’t the thing that was missing after all. If I was here without her, I wasn’t happy. And when I was somewhere else with her I wasn’thappy. So it made sense to put the two things together. The last time I was happy, I was here with Mabel and Baron, and we were all together, and there were no ghosts.
