Abby hops up onto the high bed, sits in the middle with her back toward me, sweeps her hair over her shoulder, then tugs at her tank top to reveal the bandage. I set the bag of food on the dresser and head over to join her. Don’t miss that I’m about to get into a bed with Abby.
I take the bandage from her and begin the process of peeling the old one off. “You’re doing this to scare me off, but it won’t work.”
“Just need help, Logan. I’m not nearly as manipulative as you think.”
Bet she’s more. “You have a trained nurse downstairs who could do this better. You’re trying to prove being around you is dangerous.”
“It is,” she says simply.
I focus on trying not to hurt her when removing the bandage, but the fastest and most human way is a quick rip. Abby sucks in a breath as she straightens and my fingers lightly massage her skin. The wound is smaller than I would have expected. Raw, light red, and the skin surrounding it is bruised.
Memories of the first few months of diabetes shots and how sore I was causes me to lean forward and kiss her soft skin an inch above where she hurts. Abby’s breathing hitches again, but this time, it’s not from pain.
Over a week ago, Abby and I kissed and we were supposed to kiss more later that night. It all feels like lifetimes ago.
“Paying me back for the reverse striptease?” she asks.
More like giving in to temptation. I press the new bandage on then place both of my hands on her shoulders. My hands look huge against her body and my heart skips a beat with how smooth and hot she is under the pads of my fingers.
“What are you doing?” Abby asks in a hushed voice.
“Touching you.” My fingers dig into her skin, not too rough, but enough that it penetrates her tight muscles and Abby’s shoulders roll forward with the massage. A low moan also escapes from her lips and the sweet sound causes my longing for her to intensify.
“That feels good,” she whispers.
Having my hands on her also feels good. Too good. Too right. I continue to push my fingers into her muscles and she continues to relax under my touch. With each stroke though, the flame flickering within me grows and begins to slowly burn my blood.
Abby kissing me the other night was hotter than anything I’ve ever experienced and I crave the sensation of her lips against mine again. My fingers brush her hairline and Abby leans into me. Her back against my chest. Both of our breaths coming out faster and shorter.
My blood throbs with the need, the desire...kiss her...kiss her...kiss her.
I skim my nose down her neck and my mouth opens—a kiss behind her ear and Abby’s hand reaches back and squeezes my thigh.
A huge adrenaline rush and I’m off the bed before I follow my urges and ruin the plan Isaiah and I had created. I retrieve the bag of food as Abby gazes at me with lust-glazed eyes from over her shoulder. Damn she’s beautiful and I’ve got to get my head in the game.
“Let’s eat.”
Abby’s eyes sparkle as she stands to join me. Being unpredictable, she sits cross-legged on the hardwood floor. Abby’s a dream in a pair of slim-fitting drawstring pants, that tank, and wet hair. With soft curves and a spark of attitude in her eyes, Abby’s the type of vision every guy imagines falling asleep and waking up next to for the rest of his life.
I sit across from her and offer her two tacos and chips with queso. When I pull out a grilled chicken sandwich, but take the chicken off the bun, Abby raises her eyebrows. “For real? I’m eating crunchy goodness from heaven and you’re eating that?”
My glucose levels were close to being normal earlier today, which means I have a chance of not feeling like shit for a few minutes so yeah, I’m going with pure protein. Gotta admit though, it’s moments like this that make having diabetes complicated—when my healthy choices seem more insane than drag racing cars.
I do what I do best, ignore the question, start eating, and let the silence build. Learned a long time ago that trying to come up with explanations for my parent’s divorce, for my Dad’s choice to work third shift, Mom’s fascination with crazy crap, for anything related to my diabetes was fruitless. Lying sucks, made-up explanations only cause people to ask more, and often the truth seems like a lie. Silence kills anyone’s curiosity.
One of the things I like about Abby, she takes my nonanswering in stride. Eats one taco after another like she hasn’t seen food in months, then digs into the queso.
There’s no TV in her room. No speakers for an iPod. No computer or laptop. Besides the old television in the living room, can’t remember seeing much in the way of electronics at all in the house.
Like the rest of her home, this room seems frozen in time, belonging to a small child, not the methodical girl I know. Streams of pink fabric are strung from the tips of the massive four-poster bed. The peeling wallpaper is also pink with white and green flowers. Large and small stuffed animals are scattered along the bed, on the dresser, and in an organized pile in the corner—each of their smiling faces sticking out.
On the bed is a quilt and each square contains a little girl with a bonnet on her head. Her clothing different colors, but they all face the same way, except for one rebel at the end. She’s facing toward us. My eyes narrow in on that square as I eat my last bite of salad.
“Grams made the quilt for me,” Abby says. “She did the last girl on purpose. To remind me to be different.”
“It worked.”
Abby bitterly smiles. “Maybe a little too well.” Then the smile dissolves. “Or maybe it didn’t work well enough. My dad was a drug dealer.”
“Isaiah told me about him the night you were shot.”
She doesn’t seem surprised that Isaiah spilled and she shouldn’t be. Turns out Isaiah’s speech was a directive from Abby. If anything like the night in the alley happened, she asked Isaiah to scare me away.
“He’s in prison,” she offers like razor blades on a tray. “For murder. Life sentence and all. I can give you his last name if you want so you can look it up on Google. It all happened right as Grams started forgetting things—like when to eat.”
My eyes flash to hers. “You don’t share the same last name?”
“No. He never had custody of me. Grams did and then when the Alzheimer’s set in, we switched it over to Mac.”
“Who is Mac to you?” I itch with how far past the veiled curtain I’ve wandered. Mac owns the auto shop Isaiah used to work at while he was in high school. It’s the place where Abby and I met.
“My great-uncle. Grams’s way younger brother. Grams is ninety now. Mac obviously isn’t.”
The question seems so obvious that I feel stupid asking it. “Why is this your burden then? Why isn’t Mac taking care of all of this?”
Abby’s face scrunches in a have-you-lost-your-mind expression. “He’s a drunk. He can barely drink his way out of the paper bag his bottles come in. He’s a good drunk though. Reads the Bible, but his shit? Not together. Dad taught me how to take care of myself and I can. And I saw enough of what the system is capable of through Isaiah and Noah. No thank you to that solution.”
I don’t know much about what Isaiah and Noah went through in foster care, but I heard a few of their stories, saw the dark shadows in their eyes. That shit is more telling than any words they could have said.
Abby dusts the crumbs off her tank and cleans up our mess by shoving it all back in the bag and placing it on her dresser.
“What about your mom?” I ask, holding my breath. That fear I hate trickles into my mouth.
“Heroin junkie.” Abby’s too casual and it causes me to be on edge. “My dad was her dealer. She gave him sex when she couldn’t pay. She then dropped off the face of the planet for a bit. Dad thought she’d died. Happened with what he sold so he didn’t think much of it.”
I can’t help the slight wideni
ng of my eyes and Abby notices. She’s trying to shock me with the truth and it’s hard as hell to not react, especially when I hear the tone she uses each time she says “Dad.” It’s like a hug and a kiss from a two-year-old and the hero worship is plain on her face, but how do you love a heroin dealer? How do you love a man who treated your mom like a prostitute and didn’t care if she died? How do you love a man locked up for murder?
Abby pauses. Maybe giving me a chance to run out of the room. Maybe giving me a chance to open my mouth and condemn myself. I do neither and she presses forward.
“Mom popped back up three years later, searching for a hit.” Abby smacks her arm where a junkie would inject the needle. “And when Mom entered a bar high to the sky and with me in tow his life changed. He said we were both covered in filth and that my hair was matted like a dog’s. I didn’t talk, didn’t smile, so scrawny he assumed I never ate, but he knew the moment I looked up at him that I was his kid so he took me.”
“What do you mean he took you?” The words rush out before I can think them through and Abby’s lips slightly tilt up. Me losing my shit? That’s what she wants and I stand to get ahold of myself.
Abby walks over to me and touches my face. It’s an erotic touch, it’s a knowing touch, and it’s one she’s using to play her game. “She offered me as payment for her drugs and my father accepted.”
Abby
I turn away from Logan and my face automatically falls. I’ve never told anyone this. Nobody, not even Isaiah. If Logan won’t leave because of something I manufactured, then he’ll leave because I’m telling the truth. I’m the product of the sludge of humanity. I’m what happens when the devil is let loose to play.
My hands tremble as I try to open the antibiotics and I curse under my breath when the first few attempts don’t work. Logan moves to beside me, takes the bottle from my hands, and in one easy motion, screws off the lid.
“Sometimes I really do hate you.” Most of the time, I like him way too much.
Logan reads the bottle and shakes out one pill into my palm. Thankfully, on my own, I open the water bottle, and wash down the pill.
“Are you going to take the painkiller?” he asks.
Seriously? “Have you heard nothing I’ve said? I’ve got an uncle who’s a drunk and my mother was a junkie. The addiction genetics don’t look too pretty here.”
Because I can’t handle Logan being close, I sit on my bed and tuck a pillow to my stomach. Logan leans against my dresser and I take mental snapshots. Filing away in my memory databank how beautiful the boy is—all shoulders and muscles. Strands of his black hair hang over his forehead and those chocolate-brown eyes are studying me like I’m a problem that can be solved.
Logan’s one of the good guys and I’ve dragged him too far into my dark life.
“Your dad just took you?” Logan asks. “That sounds...”
“Illegal?” I finish for him with a fake smile. “Yeah, Dad was okay with that. Not sure how it all happened, but a few phone calls and Grams was the owner of a brand-new non-potty-trained three-year old, complete with a birth certificate and social security number. I’m like an American Girl doll on crack. Did you know that my paperwork says I’m adopted from overseas?”
Logan cracks a grin because what else do you do to this? “Where from?”
“China,” I answer, and he laughs.
“I’m lying on the overseas adoption part, but not on the rest of it.” It feels strange to distinguish for people the truth from the lies. “It’s all crazy, but the messed-up part? It’s weird to not know who I am. Like what my real name is or see my real birth certificate, assuming I had either of those. Sort of sucks to think that no one gave a crap that a three-year-old disappeared off the face of the planet.”
Logan shifts from one foot to another, his hands shoved into the front pockets of his jeans. It’s happening. He’s pulling away and that creates an ache deep in my chest that hurts worse than my shoulder or head.
“How do you know he’s really your dad?”
“I don’t, but you have to admit this...” I motion to the pink room with stuffed animals “...is a lot better than what I could have grown up with. Bathing and eating, as it turns out, are seriously cool.”
Logan nods as he scans the room. “What happened to your mom?”
“Don’t know, and I can honestly say, I don’t care.” Dad took a picture of me and my mother from that day to remind me of where I came from in case I ever got the silly notion to search for my birth mother.
Dad wasn’t lying about our condition, wasn’t lying about how I was dirty from head to toe, had absolutely no meat on my bones, and had hair that may have never been washed or brushed.
Logan’s trying to swallow everything I’ve said and he’s choking on it. There’s a reason why I lie so often. People can easily accept a lie over the truth, especially when the truth deals with things they just don’t want to acknowledge. Like drugs or poverty or abandonment or me.
Lies can be pretty and sparkly. The truth is often disgustingly raw.
People turn away and tune out what is raw and real, they turn away from the truth.
Sitting on the bed so exposed to Logan isn’t quite working for me anymore so I lie back on the bed and throw an arm over my eyes. If I lie here long enough, I can try to believe the lies I tell myself. Like I’m okay. Like Grams is okay. That someday, I’ll have normal.
“Do you mind turning off the lights when you leave? And I’d also appreciate it if you could keep all of this to yourself. My father worked hard to keep my grandmother a secret and so have I. You don’t have to think of it as doing it for me. Do it for her.”
Logan
I do what Abby asks, flipping off the light, and then do something she doesn’t expect. I slip onto the bed next to her, on my side, and watch her in the glow of the streetlight seeping in from the curtains. Her arm remains over her face, and her chest rises as if she’s sucking in deep breaths. Over a week ago, I would have said that Abby wasn’t capable of pain, wasn’t capable of tears. Now? I have no idea how Abby’s capable of a smile.
“Go,” Abby says quietly.
But I don’t. I stay.
“It’s nowhere near the same.” I pause, intending to tell her about the diabetes, but then change my mind. The diabetes scares people and the last thing Abby needs is scared. “But when my parents separated I was seven, I didn’t see my mom for three months. Both Mom and Dad play it off now, but I knew then it’s because...for a time...she didn’t want me.”
Abby’s arm falls from her face to the bed and her head flops in my direction. “You have never talked about their divorce.”
I shrug and think back to when Abby realized at the bar that I don’t talk much at all.
She rolls to her side, mirroring my position. “Do they hate each other? Do you see her? What’s your dad like?”
I scratch my head, feeling like I’m drowning under the questions. “They get along now. Took Dad a few years though. Mom left him for someone else and Dad was still in love with her. It’s not something he got over easy.” It’s not something he got over.
“Is she still with the other guy? And what changed her mind about you? And—”
“Why are you pushing me away?”
She blinks at the change of subject. “Because around me, you’re in danger.”
I waggle my eyebrows at her. “I thrive on danger.”
“This isn’t a game. It’s time for me to stop pretending that I’m a normal girl who has a normal life with normal friends.”
“We’re normal? Our group? That would be a first for any of us.”
She pushes my chest with enough force it nearly rocks me. “I’m not playing! What do I have to do to make you realize we can’t be around each other anymore? Do you think I like hurting you? Do yo
u think this is fun for me?”
I snatch her wrist when she goes to nudge me again and the seriousness in my voice startles even me. “No, I don’t.”
A strand of her hair sticks to her cheek, and I lift it off, to behind her shoulder, then permit my fingers to skim along her arm. Abby edges closer, almost like she wants me to touch her as much as I crave the contact.
The instinct is to gather Abby near, and I don’t claim to understand it. I’ve dated other girls, kissed more than my fair share, but I’ve never been drawn to any of them like I am to her. As always, there’s a push and a pull between us. The need to devour her, yet run away.
Her hazel eyes look up at me and there’s a ton going on there. Confusion, pain, and as my fingers continue to caress her arm, a hint of lust. The lust I understand, but I don’t claim to be very good at any other emotion. Problem—neither is Abby. We’re both in uncharted territory.
“I can’t be your friend, Logan. I can’t be Isaiah’s friend or Rachel’s friend or West’s friend. You could have been killed and I’m not okay with that.”
“You could die.”
“That’s my choice. This little convo between us changes nothing. So if it makes you all feel better, I like all of you, but we’re no longer friends. Nonnegotiable. So, see ya.”
“According to you, I’m in danger because I saw who shot you. How is walking away from me helping my situation?”
“I made a deal with Linus. He’s claiming he saw the shooter and that you never entered the alley. Congrats, you are officially out of danger.”
Abby does the motion like she’s cleaning her hands and then shows me her palms, like we’re done, but I’m not done. “What was your end of the deal?”
“Not your problem.”
“It is my problem.”
Abby gives that dismissive smile—that one that crawls under my skin. The one that suggests she knows it all and the rest of the world understands nothing. “Explain to me how exactly my problems are your problems? We met through a mutual friend. We flirt. We play. Nowhere along the way did my problems become your problems.”