Broken Pretty Things by Amber Faye

Chapter 30

Junior year…

“She’s so drunk. She never gets this drunk.” Larissa is giggling so hard she’s snorting, giving away the fact that she’s had almost as much as Andie, whose head is lolling to one side. One arm is around Larissa, the other arm around my shoulders. I take her full weight, digging one arm under her knees, and she falls into me, a dead weight.

When I lift her up I’m surprised by her weight. Her frame has always been willowy, angular, but since she started doing dance a couple times a week, she’s been getting toned. Curvier. Her hair, several shades of blonde darker than Larissa’s and highlighted, has fallen in front of her face in a wavy curtain.

“Rayne, don’t take advantage,” some football bro hollers at me from across the party. Music thumps, and I jostle Andie to see if she’ll respond to it. She loves this song. “Even if she does fucking love it. Waller’s around here somewhere.”

“Thanks for the heads up,” I say, feeling every muscle in my arms start to shake with the urge to knock him out. If I never hear another fucking rape joke about one of my friends, it’ll still be too soon.

But I can’t let everyone in here see me crack.

So I grin instead, and take her into one of the unoccupied bedrooms. Whoever the fuck is hosting this party was very clear that the bedrooms were a no-go, but I’ve found in my life that it’s much easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.

When the door is shut, I sit her up on the bed and brush the hair from her face, from her lipstick, and tuck it behind her ears. Her eyes crack open and she sees me and smiles. “I’ll get you water,” I say.

“Stay,” she mumbles, and wraps her arms around me. For a second I enjoy the contact. The way she clings to me like I’m a life raft, digging in for dear life. I run my fingers through her hair and she nuzzles into my chest.

The door cracks open and when Cole sticks his head inside, I push Andie away at arm’s length, resting her floppy body against the headboard instead of my body. “Hey,” I say quickly. “She’s, uh …”

But he’s laughing, pointing to the way her head is sliding. I right her again, then one more time. She opens her eyes again. “Cole,” she says, happy to see him. My stomach sinks. “Did you see me dance?”

“Sure, baby, of course I did. You’re amazing.” He takes a sip of his drink, showing white teeth.

“Waller!” someone cries from the party outside. Cole looks over his shoulder, grins, then turns to look back at me, eyebrows raising. Everybody loves Cole. “Hey, I’m gonna go say hi. Are you OK to stay with her for just a minute? I’ll take her home.”

“I can stay with her for as long as you want,” I say, so fast that my eyes widen. “Not that … I mean, I don’t mind. She’s my friend. It’s whatever.”

Cole looks me up and down. For just a second, though I’ve had some drinks and my imagination might be on overdrive, I feel like he looks sad. Then it’s gone. The sounds of the party come rushing back. “Shit, dude, who put Bieber on the playlist?” he says, and laughs. “I’ll take care of it.” With faux seriousness, he strides out of the room. My friends love to tease me about how seriously I take music. I’m sure they’ll miss me when they’re at college parties with nothing on the playlist but pop.

I turn back to Andie. Her eyes are open again, and she smiles up at me. “Hey there,” I say. She gives me a slow, drunk laugh in return.

“Hi.” She bites her red lower lip, and I feel the slow, deliberate movement as a jolt right in my dick. I shift my weight and bring up my knee, wondering what the hell that was all about. I spend time alone with Andie a lot … we touch a lot. Sure, it was mostly before she became semi-official with Cole. But still. I hang out with Aurelia a lot, sometimes half-cuddling on the couch, and it’s never really hit me like this. I blame the alcohol.

“You good?”

“Mmhmm,” she says, and leans her head on my shoulder. She’s always smelled so good, but tonight there’s an extra element to it. Sweet, fruity. Watermelon, maybe. My hard-on isn’t going away.

“Can I tell you something I have never told anyone?” she murmurs, her breath against my neck, and I am suddenly so aware that anyone could walk in through the door that my heart starts to pound. I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m not doing anything at all.

“Of course.”

“Then can you tell me something in return?”

I laugh, not liking the way the tone of her voice right now is curling through my stomach. “Sure.”

Her hand roams across my thigh. There is nothing inherently sexual about the way she is touching me, but I can’t stop thinking about how long it’s been since we were alone together. I can’t stop wondering why it feels different. It has to be because she’s drunk. She never gets drunk. Neither of us does, not really. After what happened to my mom, drink and drugs never really felt as glamorous as they would have.

“You won’t like it.” Her voice drops to a whisper. “Because it’s creepy.” That makes me laugh. Her fingertips are kind of close to my crotch now, to my still semi-hard dick, and I rock my hips away from her so her heavy hand falls to the bed instead.

“You know me. I’ll like it even more if it’s creepy.” I whisper the last word, blowing a strand of her hair with the ‘p’. She smiles up at me, a lazy, sexy smile. She isn’t doing it on purpose. She has no idea what she’s doing. It isn’t her fault that at some point in the last year she went from being a cute, grumpy tomboy into a fucking knockout. I can’t pinpoint exactly what happened, or when, but her straight up-and-down figure became an hourglass, her ass filled out, she got expensive highlights done.

Oh yeah, and she learned how to dance.

Now, when she frowns over at me, she doesn’t realize she’s doing a supermodel pout. When she dances ‘like an idiot’, she doesn’t realize that her hips sway just right. She hasn’t caught up with herself yet. People still treat her like a slut, so she still wears baggy clothes and ties back her hair and gives them the finger.

I’m lucky I’m not into Andie like that, because if I was, it would be pretty bad. She looks at me like a safe haven. Like right now, with her cheek against my neck. I like being that for her. More than anything, I just like being around her.

I don’t want to complicate that by thinking about fucking her. So whenever the image tries to make its way into my mind, like it is right now, I push it away. We’re alone, drunk, touching. Always touching. I would never stop touching her if I had the choice.

Fuck. I wonder what her lipstick tastes like.

No. This is stupid. If I wanted to mess around with a friend, I have plenty of other female friends to go to before I’d ever go to Andie. How would we sit around and listen to music if we’d fucked? How would she ever be able to justify hanging out with me, alone, in my bed, if we’d fucked? It would ruin everything.

“I was afraid of sex,” she says, her hand back on my leg. Her voice is muffled, slurring, so I almost ask her to repeat it, but then I hear it.

“Oh, yeah?” I ask, hating how deep and throaty my voice sounds right now. “Uh. Why?” I know why. Dom McMahon.

“Lots of things,” she says, cryptically, and I want to probe, but I don’t want to push her. “I don’t like the idea that men want it so bad that they …” She hiccups. “They lose themselves for a minute. They hurt you.”

“Well …” I say. I’m about to tell her she’s wrong, but I don’t know. I know that was her experience, which means it’s true to her. And it’s not like I don’t kind of lose myself when I’m right about to come. Still, I don’t like hearing shit like this. Shit that makes it sound like someone has hurt her and gotten away with it. Something in me wants to tell her she’s wrong, just so I can believe she is.

“But then I saw something.” Her whisper has become singsong, which makes me chuckle. She walks her fingers from my thigh to my knee. “I saw you.”

“You saw me?” I repeat. I’m not expecting anything profound, but something inside me clenches, almost victoriously. She’s wasted, and she wants to talk about me.

“I saw you with a girl. Her head …” She rolls her head towards my crotch and I lift my knee again to obscure the hopefully-not-obvious outline in my jeans. “You had your fingers all in her hair.” She pulls in a tight breath through teeth. Fuck. Jesus. Is she saying what I think she’s saying? “The way you were, it didn’t prove me wrong.”

“Uhh …” The more those words, drunken truths, sink into me, the more they hurt. “You watched me— You watched someone—?”

“Saw, not watched.” She wags her finger at me. “But let me finish, OK? It made me think … maybe the right man, or maybe some man … maybe it doesn’t have to be so scary. To be with someone when they lose control. Over you.” She wraps her arms around me. I’m blinking, trying to figure out what she’s saying. “I just wanted to tell you that it helped me.” The last words are so muffled I’m not certain that’s what she said.

Something inside of me shifts.

“You saw someone blow me,” I say, very quietly. She nods once, and I feel it against my shoulder rather than see it. “And you liked it. Is that what you’re saying?” She lifts her head, all smudged makeup and a huge adorable smile.

“That’s not what I’m saying. You’re being weird.” She pushes my chest, some drunken facsimile of a playful shove. “You were … this is hard to word right. You lost control but you were still you. You got forceful but you got the right kind of forceful. I didn’t know there was a right kind. That’s all I’m saying. I guess.” She licks her red lips. Fuck.

Fuck.

My next breath shudders through me, and I pull away from her.

“Wait, you said you’d tell me something in return,” she says, lifting her arm with some effort and reaching out to me.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I say. It strikes me that she might be right. About men. And she might be wrong, about me. The only time I’ve ever felt like this before, like I could actually lose control of myself, I nearly killed the McMahon kid. And new realizations are crashing down on me one after the other. So hard, so fast, they’re making me dizzy. “I have to go home, Andie.”

I tell Cole there’s been an emergency. I say it’s my brother. I tell him to take care of his girl.

Before I do.

I’m realizing this is the real reason we don’t drink around each other.

This is why when we dance with each other, it’s stupid. Fake, silly, exaggerated movements. I give my best dance moves to Aurelia and Larissa without a second thought. Hell, I’ve been known to quickstep Logan around at a gala.

This is why we never kissed.

We don’t talk about sex.

We don’t drink together, don’t dance together, don’t tell our secrets. Don’t kiss. Don’t fuck. Don’t even touch anymore. We’re never alone. This is why, year after year, we’ve been pulling away from each other.

I get home, get into my bedroom and rip my clothes off, tripping tipsily into my ensuite bathroom and slamming the door shut behind me. I’ve never been so fucking hard in my life. She watched that girl blow me. She watched me guide her head up and down. Tangle my hands through her hair. She saw a glimpse of me at my worst, losing control. Did she see me push her down until she gagged? She saw it and she liked it.

But no, she wasn’t saying it turned her on, exactly. She was saying, what? Watching the way I fuck flipped some kind of a switch in her? That’s different from making her horny. That’s something fundamental.

She won’t remember telling me any of that.

I turn on the shower and step into it while it’s still too hot, feeling drunk and confused and a little like my life is over, and maybe in a very real way, a part of it is.

Because I think I’ve been in love with my best friend for pretty much my entire life.

And I realized it too late.

It’s too late.

But I’m not used to this. To wanting things; to losing things. The water reddens my skin and a thousand innocuous memories tear through me all at once, of her, of us, and I want to scream at myself for being so fucking stupid, so fucking jealous, so fucking oblivious.

By the time the water cools, my skin is steaming, and my shoulders are rising and falling. And I’ve come to another realization. My final one of the night.

The only thing that stands between me and what I’ve always wanted. Always, always wanted. The reason I’ve been so goddamn miserable, so alone, so sick. The one person who gets everything, is loved by everyone. And doesn’t even appreciate it.

Cole fucking Waller.