The End of the World (25 page)

Who knew?

“Shaye, are you okay?”

But I’m still coughing and unable to speak when his hand cups my back, still wiping my eyes and unable to see when his fingers frame my face, still gasping and unable to breathe when he pulls me into his bare chest and whispers into my ear with an urgency I can’t decipher. It’s too hard to hear over the sound of my own panic attack.

“I’m so sorry. So, so sorry. I shouldn’t have done that. Are you okay?”

But I’m not, and it takes a minute to calm down enough to manage a nod, though my throat is still trying to expel the last of the water I stupidly swallowed. There are probably nasty lake amoebas wiggling in my system as we speak, frantically looking for the quickest way to kill me. So I let Cameron hold me a little more, telling myself it will only be long enough for the thought of tiny microorganisms wreaking havoc on my system to fade a bit. But then they fade completely and I stop coughing and stay against his chest anyway. I like his arms around me.

“I’m okay,” I say into his skin. “Jerk.”

His soft laughter feathers my skin as his thumbs press into my neck muscles, and my head sinks deeper into him. My mouth rests just above the water, the thin line of its surface tickling my bottom lip. It’s only then that I hear him counting, one, two, three, four, in an effort to calm me down. Or maybe himself. His heart rate is firing as rapidly as mine.

“I didn’t mean to drown you. Especially not in this water.”

His thumbs continue to work and everything gives way. My muscles. My shoulders. My eyelids. My self-control.

My fingers find the curve of his lower back and settle there.

“But if we’d been in the pool, all drowning bets are off?”

I sound sleepy. Drugged.

He moves to my shoulders. I relax further into his collarbone, practically nuzzling his neck. This feels so good. Turns out he smells good after all.

“Not exactly, but at least there’s no reason to worry about disease in pool water.”

But he doesn’t sound worried. He sounds thick. Breathy. Turned on.

A tingling sensation works its way down my spine.

That makes two of us.

I haven’t forgotten that we’re both barely dressed. Or that we’re wet and it’s dark and the cover of nighttime often makes things hazy and hard to navigate.

I don’t mean for my lips to accidentally brush his neck, but it happens.

I don’t think he means for his fingers to dig into my shoulder blades like he’s taking control of me, but they do.

I don’t mean for my breaths to speed up and grow warm against his skin, but they do.

I don’t think he means to moan in the space between us, but it happens.

All of this is so familiar, because I’ve done this so many times. Yet all of this feels as foreign as being dropped off in Ethiopia with no bags or maps or clue how to communicate, because I’ve never done this with Cameron.

And that makes all of it different. This will change everything.

Our thighs keep bumping together and he’s so close and we’re balancing on a ledge without any idea of how hard or far we would fall if we decide to just let go. Either a few feet—the other side bringing to life an adrenaline rush that might result in a lifetime of experiencing something wonderful again and again.

Or we could fall a few miles. And we would die. Both of us. The end of Cameron and Shaye and any possibility of ever going back to the way things used to be. I can’t give up Cameron. I don’t know how.

But I’m still damaged.

I’m still used.

I’m still death. While Cameron is life.

And I love him. I love him I love him I love him.

So without giving myself a chance to reconsider, I push away from his chest.

“I’ll race you back to the dock.”

I’m working so hard to make my voice sound like it isn’t masking the fallout of a heart and a mind and a stomach that just imploded inside my body, crashing in on themselves, causing me more pain than I never knew it was possible to live through. And I’ve lived through pain. Until now, I thought I’d lived through the worst kind of it.

“Ready? This is one contest I’m not going to lose.”

Cameron just stares at me, so I force an ugly laugh from my throat. Sometimes there’s so much fakeness in the things we say. But sometimes it’s necessary, if only to buy oneself a few more minutes to piece ourselves together. At this point, there are so many cracks and crevices and glue stains on me that I’m pretty sure the naked eye could find them if anyone took the time to look close enough.

“Sure, I’m ready.” Cameron says. But he looks dazed. Confused. Blank.

He’s not trying to force anything.

It’s what we do. Because I’m lies and he’s honesty.

I swim away and he follows behind. And he catches up. And he passes me to come out the victor. Tonight is just another moment in a lifetime of this, because Cameron will always win.

Cameron

I
broke up
with Kara.

I told Shaye I broke up with her because I don’t love her…because I never will. And that’s true.

I just didn’t tell her the rest of it.

*

Shaye

He broke up
with Kara.

He told me it’s because he doesn’t love her, and I know he’s telling the truth.

I also know that isn’t the real reason.

But I still remember the look he gave me when I walked out of Carl’s spare room. A look laced with love. And regret. And disappointment.

It’s the reason I’ve gone on more dates in the past month than I’ve gone on in a lifetime. Cameron may be single, but that doesn’t mean I need to make myself available.

He deserves better than me. Down deep, he knows it as well as I do.

Cameron

T
wo months later
it finally happens.

I know it the second I walk in and find her inside the bathtub.

Fully dressed in gym shorts and an oversized tee, knees pulled up to her chest, no water in sight. It’s so familiar I have to check myself for the time, the date, the year, the location.

I guess a part of me knew it would happen eventually, because you can only go so long dating one lowlife after another before you finally find a worse seed than the rest—especially when you’re someone who believes she not only deserves the bad seed but also a whole bunch of thistles and thorns to go along with it. Isn’t that the point of the word Deja vu in the first place? If the past didn’t revisit itself once in a while, the term wouldn’t be necessary. Still, I hoped my hunch was wrong.

And it was.

If being wrong constitutes Shaye bruised so badly that the skin over one eye bulges to the point that her left blue iris is completely tucked away inside a mass of gray and purple rounded flesh. Or that her finger sits against her wrist at such an odd angle, as though she twisted and twisted and twisted the bone and then gave up when the pain turned into numbness, leaving it broken and forgotten and lying like curling ribbon on top of a smashed Christmas package—a mangled and flattened mess of something that used to be delicate and perfectly formed. Or that her bottom lip is split open like the first slit on a freshly baked loaf of bread, peeled away into two sections with no way to bring them back together, because a cut like that leaves a scar that lasts forever even after a fair amount of healing takes place. Even if you smear the surface with a thin coating of something sticky to camouflage it.

If none of that counts, then my hunch was wrong.

Except it does.

And it wasn’t.

She turns away when I enter the room, her battered face shifting toward the back wall, the initial pinkness in her cheeks fading to white as she realizes she’s been caught. Her head comes to rest on the opposite rim of the tub. She refuses to look at me because I’m unexpected. I’m inconvenient. I’m the spotlight on what was supposed to be a hidden situation, shining my light on the one area in her life she’s tried so hard to keep private. But I know. I’ve always known.

This isn’t the first time or the second time or the third time or the fourth that I’ve witnessed Shaye in this situation.

But if I have any say in the matter, it’s darn well going to be the last.

“Who did this to you?”

I’m not fifteen anymore and I don’t hold back. Uncertainty no longer keeps me from speaking up. Instead I’m crawling into the bathtub with her and tugging her by her good arm onto my lap, completely uncaring that in my haste I bump into the faucet and a small trail of liquid streams into the back of my sweater. I reach behind me and shut it off with my elbow.

And wait.

The question is a valid one, because the perpetrator could be anyone. She stopped dating Ty two months ago. Since then, she’s swapped boyfriends like someone who’s rediscovered their high school wardrobe, exchanging one shirt for another and another until finding one that still fits. Ty gave way to Vance and then Mike and then back—an endless cycle of leftovers that she reheated for another day, another night, another way to distract her from the one thing she’s been trying so hard to avoid.

Me.

She knows it. I know it. Just like I suddenly know who finally knocked the crap out of her and sent her searching for familiar refuge inside an empty bathtub. He hasn’t been around in over a year, but he promised to do it in the past, and no one is more honest than a drunk guy during confession, even if the confession takes place on an old sofa and the stand-in priest is a nineteen-year-old kid with an intense dislike for rude boyfriends.

“It was Kevin, wasn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t sleep with him, and he was drunk…”

“He was always drunk, but good for you.”

I wince when she whimpers. None of this is good for her. It was a careless thing to say.

“Something tells me I would still be in one piece if I had gone along with what he wanted.”

I hate her words, mainly because she believes them. “If you went along with what everyone wanted, you’d probably still be lying in Carl’s bed.”

There have been so many reasons for Shaye to cry in her life. So many things that could justifiably unleash a torrent of tears. But really, in all the years I’ve known her, I’ve only seen her cry a handful of times. The first time I saw her sitting on the dock. The night before she disappeared after I discovered her with Carl. The night I found her in the laundry room.

Even that first night in the bathtub when I found her sucking her thumb in the darkness, her eyes remained dry.

But this time.

This time.

The floodgates part as though the mere mention of Carl reopened an old crack in her well-repaired dam. I’ve never seen so much water or so much pain pour out of a person at once. There’s nothing I can do but watch helplessly and hold her from behind. It’s hard to listen as years and years of hurt and abuse, and self-hatred fall from her eyes and land on my lap, joining the dampness already on my back, soaking me with more evidence of just how much this girl means to me.

I’ll let the tub fill up, me in my clothes, me naked, me all the temperatures between boiling and hypothermia if she’ll just understand.

I need her to understand.

Glancing down, I spot a two-inch bruise on her shoulder I hadn’t seen before. I trace it with my finger, the ins and the outs and the jagged ragged corners. It’s in the middle of this darkening bruise that I find a sudden need for her to know my real feelings. But then I also need to punch something. Both emotions are playing a tug-of-war in my chest, equal sides threatening to take over my sanity right along with my usually halfway decent judgment.

“You’re perfect, Shaye.”

I tighten my hold on her shoulders and press my face into her hair, my thumb caressing that bruise while knowing the words sound ridiculous in light of her tears, but I mean them. For me, in every way that matters, she is perfect.

A small squeak escapes her throat, a laugh in the most pitiful form. She thinks I’m ridiculous, too.

“I’m not perfect. I’m so far from perfect, the word would laugh in my face if I ever tried to use it in a sentence.”

She tries to pull her head away, but I stop her with a thumb under her chin, forcing her to look at me.

“You’re perfect, Shaye. I know that Carl and Kevin and every man that came after them have done nothing but use you and take advantage of you and discard you like last week’s garbage. They might have you thinking otherwise. But you’re perfect. No matter what’s been done to you, you’re not ruined. Don’t think for a second that you’re ruined.”

I’m hitting a nerve. I’m hitting a thousand nerves with a sledgehammer by the way her tears multiply. They add themselves and divide those parts and run in rivers toward her chest. Her back shakes and my front shakes and I pull her further into me to absorb some of the vibrations. But I’m not done. I can’t be, because I’m one-hundred percent certain she still doesn’t understand me. Before I’m through, she’s going to understand.

“What about a million seconds?” she says. “Because I do think that every day—have thought that every day—for more years than I’ve known you.” Her words are choppy, broken up into half-syllables and staccato breaths as she tries to speak around crushing emotions. “Do you know how old I was the first time Carl came for me? The first time he…”