Broken Pretty Things by Amber Faye
Chapter 11
Speaking of which,I head to the old baseball field now that the day is over. Worst case scenario, Gunnar tries to kill me. Best case scenario, maybe he offers some kind of truce. I almost stop walking. That worst case scenario really doesn’t sound worth the best.
But I’m me, and my curiosity gets the better of me. And a small, stupid, beaten down part of me is still somehow excited to see my best friend. Especially after the day I’ve had.
He would have held me, before. Let me rest my cheek against his neck, smell his soapy scent. He would have told me he’d kill anyone who upset me. Those were the things he said when people would giggle at me in the hallway, though. If someone dumped blood on me back when I was friends with Gunnar and Cole, there would have been all kinds of hell to pay.
They complemented each other so well. The kind, protective light. The whip-smart, charismatic dark.
Gunnar always loved a good revenge story. Now, without Cole to counterbalance him, keep his head straight, he’s headed off the rails.
I reach the fields, the old bleachers that they haven’t torn down yet. We used to hang out here when we could sneak away without being seen. This was where Gunnar supposedly beat that kid half to death, and that meant nobody else really came down here when we were here. The power of rumors.
I can see a figure in black leaning against the chainlink side of the old, peeling bleachers. His hood is up, hands deep in his pockets, and I can’t see his face. This area is pretty open, so I would know if anyone else was around. I hope. It looks like it’s just the two of us.
Even with everything going on between us, my stomach flips as I walk through the overgrown grass to the bleachers.
* * *
Three days before Logan’s party…
I sitknee to knee with Cole, huddled up close on the old bleachers. My head is on his shoulder, his arm around my shoulders. I love these brief moments of peace away from everybody else. When I’m with Cole, I don’t have to talk.
But this time, I want to.
“I think maybe it’s time we …”
He nods. I feel the stubble on his chin against my hair. “It’s Gunnar, isn’t it?”
Emotion swells my throat. Cole isn’t interested in me, and he never will be, but it feels like a kind of betrayal to tell him I have feelings for somebody else. ‘Feelings’ feels like too weak a word to describe it. It’s like as soon as my capacity to feel came back, it came back so hard and fast I was knocked completely off balance by it. By him.
“It’s OK.” He grabs my hand and squeezes it, our fingers threading together. “If you think you’re ready.”
I pull away from his grip and swipe away a tear. “Maybe. It just feels wrong to keep lying.”
“It’s not a lie,” Cole reminds me. “They don’t need to know what we do and don’t do in our relationship. It’s still a relationship even if we aren’t … you know.”
“Right. You’re right.” He always makes me feel better. It’s good to know that he’s OK with this. “So we tell everyone we had an amicable breakup?” My heart is pounding. “Are we actually doing this? Are you going to be OK?”
He laughs. “I’ll be fine. We graduate in a year, right? I don’t ever have to speak to my parents again once I turn 18. And no matter what happens, you will always have us around you. For as long as you want me, I’m here.” Cole kisses my forehead. “Promise.”
It’s so intimate, anyone passing by would think what they have always thought: We’re a couple. We stopped correcting people a long time ago, especially when it made every other part of life so much easier. He’s easily the biggest guy in school. Boys don’t give me trouble if they think I’m Cole’s.
“That’s good, because I’m not done needing you,” I say. “You need to wingman me, for a start. What the hell do I say?”
He lets out a laugh, tightening his grip around me. “To Gunnar? Aw, man. I don’t know. Just tell him how you feel. You know he loves real, deep conversations.” I squint over at him. Sometimes it feels like everything Gunnar says is a dumb joke, so it’s likely Cole is being sarcastic. “If that doesn’t work, show him your tits.” I shove him. “There’s no way it could go wrong, Andie,” he laughs. “You’re you. How could he not like you back?”
* * *
Now
“Hey,”I say, mostly because it’s too weird to leave a silence lingering once I reach Gunnar at the bleachers. There’s something almost comedic about my light, casual tone in the circumstances, but he doesn’t laugh. He was always laughing. Now he’s so different. It’s like he’s gone. Like we didn’t just lose Cole that day.
“Andie,” he says. Cool, clipped. I can’t quite make out his face under his dark hood with his chin tilted down.
“Did you want to talk to me?” I press, folding my arms. He doesn’t say anything, and I feel myself getting more and more irritated. “Maybe apologize?”
That elicits a response. He snorts, lifts his head, and pulls his hands out of his pockets. The sudden appearance of his bare hands, twitching like he wants to curl them into fists, threatens to send me into a panic, but I wrestle myself under control. He isn’t going to hit me. He isn’t going to do anything to me, really. He’s already stained my clothes, humiliated me. There isn’t that much more he can do without getting violent with me.
“I’m not apologizing for shit,” he says. “I brought you out here to talk.” He is still flexing his fingers, though. Now he’s looking at me, and I can see his face. His golden-brown eyes are hard, serious. His jaw is clenched. He looks furious, disgusted, and everything in between. He also looks gorgeous, and just like himself, and looking at him makes me feel so awful I can barely keep it together.
“So talk,” I say, hoarse. I feel suddenly exhausted, and when I move closer to lean on the chainlink fence beside him, he flinches away like I’m contagious.
“Why did you come back here?”
His voice is soft enough that I dare to look back into his eyes, and I regret it. They’re still filled with hate. “Because my mom came back here, and she’s weirdly set on keeping me,” I say, running my hands through my hair and wincing when they get caught on sticky tangles. “I don’t know what you want from me. I just want to keep my head down and survive this year.”
His nostrils flare at the words, but I’m not sorry for them.
“I miss him so fucking much,” I add in a rush. My voice is twisted by the lump in my throat, but I don’t care. Gunnar is the only person I would ever want to talk to, for real, about something like this. And I feel so betrayed by the fact that he isn’t here for me right now. I scrub under my eyes and take a deep breath.
“Nobody here ever wanted to deal with seeing you again,” is all he says. It’s still quiet, controlled. “You need to understand that it’s harder for us than for you.”
“How?” I ask, appalled.
“Well.” He runs his hand down his face. “For one, none of us made the decisions that you did. To hurt him like that. But we all still have to live with it. At least you got something out of it. A second of … pleasure. Whatever.” He turns away, disgusted by his own words. I can’t believe what I’m hearing.
“I didn’t. I didn’t do anything,” I say. “I wasn’t having some kind of torrid affair. I never did anything. With anyone.”
“Shut the fuck up, Andie,” he says, and I hear a tremor in his voice. Some kind of emotion in him, finally. “How fucking stupid do I look? I defended you for years.”
“Because I didn’t do anything,” I half-interrupt. My volume is raising and his jaw is clenching so tight he must be grinding his teeth to dust. We’re building to something. Something bad. But at least we’re talking. “And while we’re on the subject, I wanted to talk about the … his—”
“What?”
“I don’t think Cole killed himself at all,” I say, forcing myself not to shake when Gunnar’s eyes fly wide open.
“Are you crazy?” he asks. It’s such a genuine question it almost makes me laugh.
“You don’t know what I know, Gunnar.”
“Then tell me.”
I think about Barkley’s desperate texts, and frustration tears through me. I suck in a deep breath. “Can’t you trust me?”
“I’m done trusting you, listening to you, protecting you. I want to be done thinking about you in general, but that can’t happen until you leave and stay gone.” His tone increases in intensity with every word, and by the time he reaches his final word, he slaps the palm of his hand against the fence beside my head, trapping me. “Do whatever you can to get out of this town, Andie. We all really need that.”
“I can’t,” I say. I wish I could.
“Then I can’t control anything that happens to you,” he says, and takes a deep breath, leaning back onto his heels.
He rummages in his deep hoodie pocket for a moment, and then pulls out something long and beige. My brows scrunch in confusion, and I don’t react quickly enough. Gunnar leans in close enough for me to smell the spicy, masculine scent of his neck, his chest against my chest. His fingers are around my wrists, and then above my head, and I suck in a breath so quick and shallow it catches in my throat.
“What are you doing?”
He trails his fingertips down my arms, above my head, through my stained hair, and over my damp cheeks. He brushes his thumb over my lower lip and a desperate flood of heat rushes to my skin. I pull on my arms, but they don’t move. I struggle, and nothing happens.
He tied me to the fence.
“Don’t leave me,” I whisper the moment I realize what’s happening here. “The clouds are coming in. Nobody ever comes back here.” He rocks on his feet, stuck between walking away and leaning closer. “Ever.”
“Tell me anything that could absolve you,” he says. “Tell me the truth. Did he walk in on you fucking Chris Barkley?” His face is so close to my face, his knuckles on my cheekbone, and I wonder if he can feel my panicked heartbeat against his chest. I wonder if he likes it.
Maybe he has always been a complete fucking psychopath and I just couldn’t see it.
“I …”
“Say anything but the truth, and I walk away.”
Fuck. My breaths are coming in short, shallow gasps. I’d be stuck out here all night, at least. At most, it could be days. Only my friends come out here. It’s definitely looking a lot like a storm is coming. And not just the energy crackling behind Gunnar’s calm, dark eyes.
“I wouldn’t have been with anyone else because I was in love,” I say finally, aware that my voice is strangled, whimpery, with fear.
His face twitches while he wrestles himself under control. “That’s nothing. That’s completely meaningless. You never loved him at all. I know y—”
“I was in love with you,” I interrupt in a rush.
Gunnar recoils like I spat in his face.
I struggle, and it does nothing but hurt my wrists. “Cole knew.”
“Andie,” he says finally, twisting his lean body and resting his hands on the top of his head. His eyes are wide, wild. Whatever energy is inside him, has been inside him somewhere all along, rolls off him in electrical waves and it suffocates me. “You know what you sound like?” Feeling my eyes well up with tears, my lip wobbling, I shake my head. “You sound like someone who would say anything to get me to untie her right now.” Again I start to breathe fast, feeling my heartbeat in my ears.
“Don’t leave me here.”
He pauses, then steps forward again. He runs his finger over the ropes that bind my wrists, and I try to calm down, squeezing my eyes shut and getting my breathing back under control. I wait for them to loosen, but they don’t.
I feel his strong fingers on my face, cupping my chin, thumb and forefinger on my cheeks. He squeezes hard enough for it to hurt, and tilts my chin up to look at him. “You’re sticking with that?” he asks, and in this moment he looks absolutely feral. I try to nod, but he has my face in a vise. “Fucking liar.”
Gunnar brings my chin up and leans down, running his fingertips loudly down the metal of the chainlink fence until it rings in my ear. He squeezes the muscles in my jaw and I relax them, parting my lips to ask him to stop, please, but he moves forward faster than my eyes can track. He bruises my lips with his and stops my words by thrusting his tongue into my mouth.
It’s not a kiss, it’s an act of violence. Invading me, taunting me, testing my limits.
Tears spill quick and heavy down my cheeks, over his fingers, as he tastes my mouth like he wants to prove something to me, to himself. His tongue licks deeper, his teeth scrape my lips. I take in a shuddering breath, and something deep inside me rises to the surface. Some part of the person I should be if none of the awful things had ever happened to me.
And I warp his twisted display of dominance into something consensual. I meet his tongue with mine, lap against his lower lip, catch it between my teeth and tug. I kiss him the way I have in my every fantasy, but deeper, harder. I kiss him like my life depends on it, and move my head forward to catch his lips when he starts to pull away.
For a second, shock flashes in his eyes when he sees the look in mine. Then he grabs the fence to either side of my head, threading his fingers through the gaps. He pushes his hips into mine, hard and defiant, daring me to tell him to stop. I gasp into his mouth when I feel something thick and hard and unmistakable push into my lower stomach.
I kiss him like he’s everything, because he used to be. I taste him, nip him, breathe him in like I have always wanted to, because I have.
He pulls back, steps away, and there’s nothing I can do to stop him. He takes a second to take me in. Wet, shining cheeks. Tied and bound. Struggling.
“Leave town,” he rasps, fingertips to his lips. I don’t know if I bit him too hard, or if I did something else to him. Something that, from the way he looks at me right now, he really wasn’t expecting.
He turns around and walks away. I scream his name. Again and again. But he disappears across the field, and nobody comes for me.
Cole is dead, and Gunnar has lost his mind. Nobody is coming to save me ever again.
The heavens open, and rain starts to fall in thick, cold sheets. “Oh, come on!” I yell, thrashing against the fence. At least I’m getting that shower.