3:AM Kisses

  “See?” She balks into me. “Just pinch it back. It practically glides down on its own. The sisters are waiting. If you don’t do this, you can’t get in.”

  I give the small cap a squeeze, and the concoction jumps down my throat as promised. I swallow hard, and it all goes down in one smooth lump.

  “I did it,” I marvel. And, it didn’t taste like anything, so I don’t really feel like I went back on my word not to inebriate myself at random. “So I guess we’re done,” I say, eyeing the dirt road from where I came, and the bridge splices in two for a moment. My arms and legs feel like they weigh a million pounds, and I’m suddenly exhausted beyond belief.

  “I’d better go.” She touches her pearls as if petting a kitten. “Say, you didn’t happen to mention any of this to that hot boy-toy of yours, did you?”

  “No.” My tongue feels thick in my mouth—dry as cotton. “Bryson…” I start to say something then lose my train of thought.

  “Yes, Bryson.” She twists her lips “Want in on a little secret?” Aubree leans in, and her face expands and retracts as if I were looking in a funhouse mirror. “He gave me my first and last rejection ever.” She wrinkles her nose. “Asshole, that one.”

  Excuse me? I meant to say it out loud, but my lips don’t cooperate.

  “I asked him to be my prom date way back when. Me asking him.” She shakes her head and laughs. “Can you imagine? You’d think he’d be honored since he was just a measly little junior but, no, he was too far gone with that little brat Stephanie Jones. And she was about as annoying as you are. Anyhoo, I took care of that little bitch just like I’m about to take care of you.”

  She gives a firm shove into my chest and sends me backward into the icy cold stream.

  My body seizes. My limbs refuse to move as the water washes over my face.

  Can’t breathe.

  So cold.

  So quiet.

  The world fades to darkness.

  Bryson

  Holt and I watch, pissed as hell, while Jeanie Waters dances like a seasoned stripper on the slick granite of the bar.

  “You know if she breaks her neck, she’s going to fuck us sideways in court,” I tell my brother. “Get her down.”

  The Black Bear is hopping tonight with every good little goul dressed for fornicating successes.

  I keep scanning the place for signs of Baya. I’ve texted her twice, but she hasn’t responded. Laney said she borrowed her car to do a quick change and come right back. I should have kicked Jeanie out as soon I heard she threw a drink in Baya’s face.

  Laney comes over looking visibly shaken.

  “What’s up?” I lean into her. “You get stiffed again?” It can be pretty tough sometimes to squeeze a tip from a drunken co-ed.

  “No, it’s not that.” She snaps off her rabbit ears and stares down at them. “It’s almost two-thirty. Baya left hours ago.”

  “I was thinking the same thing.” My heart starts ticking like a bomb. “I’m going to take off and see if I can’t find her.”

  “Wait,” Laney calls after me. “She didn’t go home to change.”

  “What?” Every muscle in my body goes numb.

  “She’s with Aubree at the bridge.”

  Holt pops up and swings a towel over his shoulder. “Who’s with Aubree at the bridge?”

  “Baya,” I shout, rushing out the door. I jump in the truck, and Laney joins me.

  A thousand thoughts swirl through my mind. Aubree said she’d let her rush. I bet that’s what’s happening. Maybe Baya got in a wreck on the way over? Maybe she hit her head, and she’s passed out somewhere. Whatever the hell happened, it doesn’t feel right. Something is definitely off. I can feel it in my bones.

  “Text Holt and tell him to check out Alpha Chi,” I bark into Laney.

  I honk my way through a traffic light and bullet my way past the mansions where Alpha Chi nestles itself in the center of the opulent row.

  I speed past a group of girls who just crossed the street as I head up to the main thoroughfare that leads to the bridge.

  “I’m coming, baby,” I whisper as I speed up the dark winding roads. I hope to God the only thing I find is Baya and a bunch of girls from Alpha Chi singing in a circle.

  Somehow I doubt that.

  I race us over to Pike’s Peak where the bridge is located. I’m shaking with frustration and pissed to hell just praying Baya is safe.

  “That’s it,” I say as I spot Laney’s sedan parked in front of the boulder where Baya and I have taken our bikes these past few weeks. The Witch’s Cauldron sits just beyond it, and the bridge is a good ways up ahead. I jump out and am half way up the trail before I hear the door slam again.

  “Baya!” I scream, navigating my way through the brush. I hit the bridge and jump onto it, giving it a mean sway, but there’s nobody up here. “Shit.” I dig my fingers into my hair. Baya is here somewhere. “I’m going to find you.” I start making my way across the bridge and glance back to see if Laney has caught up yet, but a pale branch in the stream catches my attention, and I freeze in my tracks. That’s no fucking tree limb. That’s a leg.

  Without thinking, I jump in.

  “Baya!” I shout as I traverse a downed birch trunk to get to her, but she doesn’t flinch. “Fuck.” I make my way over and pluck a dried shrub off her chest. Her head is perched on a rock close to shore, and her body is hugging a boulder preventing her from drifting downstream. I pick her up and place her lips to my cheek and feel a warm breeze expel as she breathes over me. “Baya.” I pull her close as I climb us out of the rocky crag.

  Laney comes up on us and lets out a viral scream.

  “We got to get her to the hospital, now,” I pant, racing back to the truck. “Baya,” I whisper her name as I place her in the backseat with her head on Laney’s lap.

  I drive so fast that the road blurs through my tears. There’s something startlingly familiar about this entire scene. It’s all playing out like it did years ago on that fateful night that Stephanie died—getting a call just before dawn that Steph was in the hospital—finding out she hurt herself—that it was all because of me.

  The hospital comes up on the right, and I barrel us into the lot. I park at the base of the E.R. and jump out, scooping Baya into my arms. Her lips are blue, her skin pale as chalk.

  “Baby, wake up.” I press my lips to hers as I hustle her to the front of the emergency room.

  A woman with squatty features and square glasses points behind me. “Excuse me sir, there’s a long line ahead of you.”

  “My girlfriend needs helps.” A knot the size of a shoe lodges in my throat, and I can’t get anything else out. “She’s unconscious—she was in the stream,” I muscle it out through the pain.

  “I’ll buzz you in.”

  I jet over to the entrance just as the door opens and lie Baya on the first gurney I see. A swarm of doctors and nurses rush at her and wheel her across the way, closing a curtain around her.

  “Bryson.” Laney pulls me into a hug and rains hot tears over my shoulder.

  “She’s going to be fine,” I whisper. “She has to be.”

  “Bry!” Holt shouts from down the hall as he runs over.

  “Where the hell is Aubree?” Laney clutches at her throat.

  “I don’t know,” Holt pants out of breath. “But I found this.”

  He holds out a blue binder, and I snatch it from him. Written across the top in neat squared off handwriting is my name. “What the…” I open it up and find countless pictures of myself. Me in front of the Black Bear, the Sky Lab, my face in a newspaper clipping from my high school graduation. I flip the page and see my picture from the yearbook with my face X-ed out—devil horns drawn onto my head with fangs dripping from my lips. “Shit.” I turn the page and freeze.

  It’s a newspaper clipping of Stephanie’s obituary.

  “Oh my, God,” it stilts out of me in less than a whisper. It’s all happening again, only now I’m wondering if Aubree had her fo
ot in both disasters. She was Steph’s best friend. She told me herself she hated seeing us together.

  Fuck.

  Hours drift by while an entire team of medical professionals work on Baya before they finally call us back. Cole joins Laney and me as we head in to see her.

  There she is. Baya lies helpless with tubes and wires coming out at every angle—her beautiful face scratched along one side with a giant red welt.

  “She okay?” I ask the doctor, staggering toward her.

  “She’s fine. Just a few scrapes and bruises on the outside.” He sighs as if the worst is yet to come. “She has a small contusion to the back of her head. We pumped her stomach. There was a high dose of benzodiazepine in her system. It’s similar to an extreme dose of valium.”

  “That’s a fucking roofie.” Cole’s eyes are on fire.

  The doctor nods and proceeds to tell us she’ll be fine in the morning, but they’ll need to keep an eye on her and might ask her some questions when she comes to.

  “It was Aubree,” Laney seethes as the doctor leaves the room. “That stupid bitch.” She lets out a frustrated breath. “I knew—I knew I should have gone with her, but Aubree made her promise to go alone, and she was too afraid to risk it.”

  “That’s Baya for you.” Cole takes a step into his sister and gingerly picks up her hand. He leans in to kiss her and stains her yellow gown with tears. “She’s used to doing what she’s told.”

  I run my fingers through my hair as I go over and press a kiss to her cheek. “Baya.”

  “You think someone slipped it to her at the bar?” Cole looks over at me as if it were a possibility.

  “No.” An entire wall of words demand to break loose from my throat. I tell him about the notebook Holt found in Aubree’s room, about her seemingly innocent obsession with me since high school.

  “We need to call the police,” Laney’s voice shakes as she says it.

  Cole holds up his phone. “Already did.”

  In the morning, I rouse to a kick in the face by way of Cole’s shoe. We slept head to toe on a crappy cot the hospital provided, even though we promised the staff only one of us would stick around last night.

  “Dude.” I nudge him away before leaping to my feet to see how Baya is doing. The cops let Aubree go last night because there was no evidence she slipped Baya anything. They said she could have gotten the roofie from the bar. I tried shoving the notebook up their ass, but they said Aubree was a third-rate stalker at best.

  Baya is still asleep. They’ve already removed her breathing tubes, and the welt on her face has significantly gone down. The doctor said she was lucky she didn’t slice her head open when she fell. The rocks in the stream are sharp as razors.

  “Someone was looking after you, that’s for sure.” I touch my lips to her cheek. I’d like to think it was her father or Steph. That Steph really didn’t hate me. That she cared about the people I loved and wanted them safe, too.

  Her lids flutter.

  “Baya,” I pick up her hand as her eyes struggle to open.

  Cole pops up beside me and shakes her shoulder. “Baya, wake up.”

  “Enough.” I flick him off. “Give her some space.”

  “Bry,” she whispers. Her lips curve into a smile. Baya takes in a deep breath, and her eyes spring open. “Cole.” She looks right at him, and her eyes swell with tears.

  “Baya,” Cole leans in and kisses her forehead. “You’re okay.”

  “What happened?” She glances around, startled. “Where am I?”

  “You’re at the hospital.” Cole glances at me for support.

  “You were with Aubree, last night,” I say. “Do you remember anything?”

  “That’s right.” She squeezes her eyes shut. “The bridge—the Jell-O.”

  “Jell-O?” I look to Cole a second. “Was it a Jell-O shot?”

  Baya nods. “She said there wasn’t anything in it but water.” She shakes her head while struggling to sit up. “Obviously I can’t hold my liquor.”

  “Why would you take anything from her?” Cole leans in as if he’s about to reprimand her.

  “She said I would get in if I drank it. She said all the sisters did it.” Baya pushes out a breath. “I’m so stupid.”

  “I don’t think you’re stupid, Baya.” I warm her arm with my hand. “Aubree has a way of making people do things they normally wouldn’t do.”

  Baya looks up at me, the expression melting from her face. “So you know?” She nods as if I should acknowledge this. “You know what she did to Stephanie?” Her forehead creases with concern.

  “What who did to Stephanie?” My heart thumps in my chest because it knows the hatchet is about to fall.

  “Wait.” Baya winces as she sits up. “I’m confused. I don’t want to say anything. I probably imagined the entire conversation.” She drills those emerald eyes into mine. “Bryson, what happened to Stephanie, and who was she?”

  I take a breath and dart a quick glance over to Cole. I told him everything during a beer bender one night and have regretted it ever since. Steph was a wound I preferred to keep buried in the past—until now.

  “She was a good friend of mine—my best friend. Once our hormones kicked in, we thought we’d give dating a shot, and that didn’t work out so well. We tried to keep it together through our sophomore and junior years of high school.” I swallow hard because I hate the next part of the story. “We were in the process of breaking up when she”—I take a breath and blow it through my cheeks—“she fell from a cliff.” The tears come without warning, and I try to sniff them back. “The note they found said I was to blame.”

  Cole steps over and slaps my shoulder. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Then why do I feel like shit?” I wipe my eyes with the back of my arm. “We had already broke it off about six different times. We were just kids. We were always fighting. I honestly thought we were about to get back together when she said she was coming to see me. Only, she never made it.”

  “Did Aubree know her?” Baya looks from me to Cole for answers.

  “She was her ‘big sister,’ some program they ran through school. Aubree was always getting in our business. Why? What did she say?”

  Baya’s eyes widen as she fixes her gaze on some unknown horizon. “She said, I took care of that little bitch just like I’m about to take care of you—then she gave me a push.”

  The world freezes. The air in the room stops up, strong as death. Steph and Aubree used to go to the cliff to hang out. Steph said it was peaceful, that it helped center her.

  “Shit.” It bellows from my lungs so loud the walls shake with the echo.

  It all happens in a blur—the cops coming in—Baya’s mother storming the room once her plane touched down. Baya gives a firm account of what happened to her at the bridge last night, and the cops agree to call Aubree into questioning again.

  They’re reopening Stephanie’s case.

  Reopening the wound.

  Hopefully, this time, we’ll get some real closure out of it.

  10

  Eternal Love

  Baya

  The sky above the Hollow Brook cemetery is washed a creamy butter yellow. Bryson leads us over the polished granite stones as we tread carefully across people long since deceased in our warm wool coats, our winter boots.

  It’s been two full weeks since the incident, and I’ve got all my strength back. Aubree is being held on suspicion of manslaughter. Her parent’s have already bailed her out, and rumor has it her father hired the best defense attorney that money can buy.

  “Sorry”—Bryson apologizes as we skip over endless grave markers—“it’s been years. At first I tried to come all the time, but her mom asked me not to. She wanted me to remember the happy times, and all this place ever did was depress the hell out of me.”

  I give his hand a firm squeeze because sometimes there are no words.

  “Right here.” Bryson nods into a large black slab of granite that read
s Stephanie Nicole Jones, Loving daughter and sister. Gone too soon.

  I hand him the bouquet of flowers we picked up on the way over—a fall arrangement with miniature pumpkins and fat orange leaves woven throughout a dozen yellow roses. Bryson said that yellow was a symbol of friendship—that they were never too serious, just best friends who tried to cross the line.

  He lays the flowers over the stone before pulling a piece of paper from his pocket.

  “I never thought you wrote this,” he whispers it to the soil as if she could hear.

  “Can I ask what it is?” I kneel down next to him as the iced breeze licks my ankles.

  “A copy of her supposed suicide note. Both her Mom and brother tried to tell me it wasn’t her handwriting, but I believed every damn word.”

  “Aubree did it.” The handwriting analyst hired by the state already confirmed this. “Why bring a copy down here? I don’t get it.”

  Bryson pulls out a lighter. “So I can do this.” He sets the tip on fire, and it dissolves within seconds under the supervision of the flames. “Rest in peace, Steph. I knew in my heart you would never do it—never say those things. I’m sorry, girl. You were a good friend. You’ll always have a piece of me. I hope you don’t mind I brought along someone special today. Baya stole my heart.” He glances up at me with his eyes glittering with moisture. “I’m in forever if she’ll have me that long.”

  I lean in with hot tears rolling down my cheeks. “I’ll love you for all eternity, Bryson Edwards. Nothing will ever change that.”

  Bryson smiles through his sadness just like he did that first day we met, but this time his smile expands, and I can see the downright joy in his eyes. He pulls me up, and we walk back to the truck. He wraps his arms around me and kisses the side of my cheek. I pause to soak in the beauty and the heartache of this afternoon.

  “I’m proud of you,” I whisper. “You’re finally free of all that pain. You’re a good person—you deserve to be happy.”