Page 15 of Let Me
I see Riley look up, shock and hurt etched on her face.
Get up, I think.Get up and walk out of here.
But she doesn’t. Fine. If she doesn’t want to respect herself, why the hell should I?
I force myself to laugh. “I don’t need yoursloppy seconds.Why you tie yourself down to one piece of pussy that causes you all this grief is beyond me.” I look at her again, and she looks pissed now.
Good.
“Keep your fights down, okay? It’s embarrassing.” Then I slam the door and walk out, satisfied that Jack will be too pissed off with me to take it out on her now.
As I walk down the hall to the room I keep here, I can’t help but think about running up those stairs when the glass shattered. Thinking he had hurt her. Thinking that if he had, I would kill him for it.
I’m too old for this high school bullshit.
NINE
Present
I’M UP UNTIL DAWN, so I text Tyler.
You up?
I don’t expect him to reply. Tyler has been my best friend since grade school, but he’s in Vancouver now on an artist’s retreat, which means it’s like three in the morning there. But Tyler keeps weird hours. I think he sleeps as much as I do.
Which is to say, hardly at all.
What’s wrong?
I smile, despite the fact thateverythingis wrong. At first, I think to tell him about Adam. But Tyler has always hated Adam, and right now I don’t want him to tell me about how right he was about him.
Instead, I tell him the truth. About what’s really bothering me.
I saw Caden tonight.
For a moment, there’s those three dots, indicating he’s typing. I’m sprawled on the black leather sofa in the living room of the condo, watching the sun rise beyond the wall of glass, and my heart clenches at those three dots.
Are you okay? What did he do?
Tyler doesn’t know the real story. He knows I always had a crush on Caden, and he knows we had one night together. He knows, too, that Jack died, and he knows about the video. But he doesn’t know who is really in it. I lied to him. Because I had to. Because I’ve been lying to everyone about that video for three years, and only two people know the truth of it. Tyler isn’t one of them, and he probably never will be. He thinks Caden couldn’t take my ties to his brother, after his death. He thinks that’s why he stopped speaking to me. It might as well have been.
Nothing. He saved me in an alleyway.
Three more dots.
Still wanna fuck him?
I laugh out loud, because it’s such a Tyler thing to ask. He doesn’t ask how he saved me, or what I was doing, justthat.I don’t reply for a moment, even though the answer is easy enough.
If you do, Ry, you should do it. You’re only 21 once.
But even though I want to, I shouldn’t. And even though I’ve never been good at stopping myself from doing what I shouldn’t do, Caden hates me. He might not have wanted me to die in an alleyway, but that’s about all that he cares for me. Just like he probably would anyone else he saw getting cornered like that.
Caden is no angel.
But even he wouldn’t turn his head from someone getting trapped.
Besides, he told me to get out of this city. He doesn’t evenlivein this city. Just outside of it, but still, notinit. And it’s full of people. Four million of them.
