THE DEBT BOX SET, page 11
“Pest,” Tommy said, but the dog—Pest, I guess—didn’t listen. She licked my hand instead.
“Are you sure this is a dog?” I asked.
“Simon and me thought she was a cat.”
I blinked at the casual mention of Simon, and I bit back a thousand questions I had and instead, feeling small and awful, muttered, “Get off me,” and shoved the dog away. She whimpered as if wounded by my rejection, and she climbed and flopped back into the front seat.
Comfort had no appeal for me.
The silence was thick and awful, and I wanted to snarl at him. I wanted to sharpen my claws and draw blood. The anxious feeling was growing worse, and it had nothing to do with Beth or not having my phone or even wondering where the hell he was going to take me.
The feeling that my body didn’t fit me anymore—it came from the pills and the needles. Or rather it came from not having them.
“Beth?” he said.
“The name’s Jada.” Beth doesn’t live here anymore.
“Jada. You all right?”
I wiped a hand over my face, and it came away sweaty. I was beginning to sweat through my shirt. But I was cold.
“Just fine,” I said, giving him nothing. Not even my pain.
11
Jada
There’d been a time, those heady art-room days, my hands learning the shape of his body through his clothes, that I’d thought I’d recognize Tommy MacNeill anywhere. In the dark, even, by smell.
I would know him by the sound of his breath shuddering in his lungs at the touch of my hand against the bare skin of his waist the few times I’d been brave enough to slip my fingers under his shirt.
There’d been a time I’d thought it impossible not to recognize him. Every sense knew him. My body. My heart.
But I saw nothing of the Tommy I’d known, with his shy smile and bright eyes, in this giant man in the front seat.
And if you’d asked me seven years ago if I thought Tommy was capable of something like this, I would have laughed in your face. The kid with the graham crackers was not the adult in this car.
“What have you been doing since St. Jokes,” I asked, trying to make my chattering teeth stop chattering. We were climbing a hill, and my ears popped painfully. Everything hurt. This had to be the first stages of withdrawal. Which meant there were going to be more glorious stages. “I mean, is this your first kidnapping, or do you have a little business going?”
He glanced at me, real fast in the rearview mirror, and then back at the road.
And he didn’t say a word.
“It’s not a hard question,” I said. “Unless… if you tell me, you’d have to kill me?” I gasped. “Are you a government agent, Tommy?”
He shook his head.
“Is that a yes?”
“No.”
Again more silence.
“Really? The silent treatment? We’re not sixteen anymore, Tommy.”
“What’s talking going to do?” he asked.
I blinked, surprised. At St. Joke’s we used to talk all the time. Once I started talking, anyway. But maybe I remembered it wrong. Maybe…maybe all those feelings had just been on my side. Maybe I’d changed things over the years, recast what happened to give me some comfort.
Whatever.
“Keep you awake,” I finally said. “Distract me.”
“I’m awake.”
“Jeez, you turned into an asshole.”
I saw his jaw clench, the muscle bulging in his neck. “There’s no point, Jada,” he said. “I’m dropping you off and driving away.”
“Fuck you,” I snapped, because the anger felt good and he was being a dick. “Are you honestly going to pretend like you didn’t think of me?’
His silence was a brick wall.
“You didn’t imagine what I was doing? Where I’d gone? You’re not curious?” I cocked my head waiting for him to say something. His silence egged me on. Infuriated me. “I thought of you all the time. I thought of the art room—”
“Stop.”
“You didn’t?”
He shook his head, once, a hard shake, like he was trying to dislodge me.
My body lost interest in the withdrawal, the surge of lust in my system distracting it from its cravings for a drug to take the edge off. And oh, did my body find relief in the distraction. I shifted against the seat until my back was against the passenger-side door. At my movement he looked at me over his shoulder, and I was ready for him. My lips parted, my eyebrow cocked. My shirt slipped over my shoulder, and it didn’t go unnoticed by him. Not. At. All.
“I remember the time you put your hand up my skirt—”
“Jada—”
“Remember. You pushed me up against the wall and you held my hand down on the counter—”
“Stop.”
“Was that the same time or two different times?” I knew, of course I knew; it was two separate and amazing times. I was just trying to get under his skin. “I can’t remember. I’ve made up so many fucking fantasies about that art room. I’ve come thinking about—”
“Stop.”
No way. “You held my hand down because I kept reaching for you. Putting my hand under your shirt, and you didn’t want me to. You didn’t like it. And you slipped your hand up under my skirt, remember? And I was so embarrassed by how wet I was. I thought I was gross. That there was something wrong with me. But you…do you remember?”
I could see the blush on his neck and up his face. Across his cheeks. His ears were so red. He didn’t nod or shake his head, but he remembered. Oh, he fucking remembered.
I was picking up from exactly where our bodies left off when we were teenagers.
“What you said?” I asked, leaning forward. “No?” I all but cooed at his silence.
“You liked it,” I said. I could feel my body getting hot again as I pulled apart the memory. I pulled it apart and sucked down the marrow, feeding myself with it. “You said I was beautiful. You said—”
“I know what I said,” he snapped.
“That I was juicy. That you wanted to taste me.”
“Jada—”
“I came, remember. You made me come. My first orgasm.”
I laughed in my throat and took out my ponytail, only to put it back in, over and over again, to give my hands something to do.
So I didn’t touch him.
Because this kidnapping had taken a turn.
“Do you think about it?” I asked. “Do you remember? The room smelled like turpentine. And the papers on the bulletin board crinkled against my back and I thought you were the most beautiful—”
“I don’t want to talk about this,” he said, and he turned the radio up so loud I couldn’t talk over it.
He’d tried forgetting me but it hadn’t seemed to work.
So now he had to pretend. Well, I wished him luck with that. I was the master of pretending. The queen of make-believe. I’d created a whole world for us in the last seven years. A dream.
That wish kids like us never got to have.
Part of me almost felt bad for him.
Except, you know, he was kidnapping me.
“Can you turn on the radio?” I asked when the silence and my own thoughts got to be too much for me.
He flipped it on, turning the dial until he found a station that wasn’t all static. A pop station out of Las Vegas.
“This okay?” he asked
“Fine.”
I knew it was only a matter of time before one of my songs came on and lo and behold, fifteen minutes later the first few chords of Making Waves came through the speakers. I was about to ask him to change it when he made a kind of laughing, huffing noise.
Here we go, I thought.
“That’s you!”
“That’s me.”
“I can’t believe… holy shit,” he breathed and turned it up just a little more. “This song is everywhere.”
I nodded.
“I can’t believe I didn’t realize it was you. Your voice. I mean…that’s your voice.”
I could feel him looking at me in the rearview mirror and suddenly the radio was turned down. “You must be sick of it,” he said, all that huffy amazement gone.
His understanding was surprising, the song turned down a relief. “I am. A little.”
“How did this happen?”
“I thought you didn’t want to talk,” I shot back and his silence gave me room to decide whether I wanted to talk or not. He wouldn’t – oh, no, not Tommy. No answers from that guy. But I could jabber away. It was so familiar it was almost gross. But I wasn’t Beth. If he wasn’t going to talk, neither was I.
But then, a few minutes later I was blurting; “I don’t know, really. I don’t know how it happened.”
“No?” he said, without scoffing. With in fact a tremendous amount of the old Tommy empathy. I’d been a sucker for the old Tommy empathy.
“A year ago I got a job on the make-up team for Katy Perry. I was…well, I guess I still am, a body painter and make up artist. I went on tour with her and did some music videos and it was a really amazing job for me. I got to do art and be apart of the music world and it paid really well and it was awesome.”
“It sounds awesome.”
“At night, I’d do makeup on myself, really wild stuff and I’d sing cover songs and I’d film it on my computer and upload it onto YouTube. I’d been doing it forever. I’d dress up like a Pheonix and sing an Arcade Fire song. Or a Zombie-nun and I’d sing Like A Virgin. Silly stuff. I got a little following. Nothing huge. Mostly fun. But then I did this mermaid make up and I decided to sing an original song. I uploaded Making Waves at like midnight on a Friday night and I woke up in the morning and it had like seven million views. Two days later I sang on Ellen in the full make-up, a day after that Sherman my manager called me to talk about representation and…well, the rest is history I guess.”
“How long ago was this?”
“I uploaded that video seven months ago.”
“Holy shit,” he breathed. “That’s crazy.”
“Try living it,” I said with a weary laugh. “I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining.” Because there was nothing worse than someone living a dream life and complaining about it.
“Do you like it?” he asked.
“What’s not to like? I get all the finest kidnappings.”
“But are you happy-?”
“You know, turn up the radio, I don’t want to talk anymore.”
By the time we skirted Flagstaff, caught in the traffic of a city waking up and going to work, I was really sick. I couldn’t pretend anymore. I was sweating and shaking, my eyes closed in a wince against the daylight. He didn’t say anything, didn’t bother asking me if I was all right anymore—because it was pretty obvious I wasn’t.
He just turned on the heat, blasting the vents into the backseat, but it did little good.
“We’re almost there,” he said like that was supposed to make me feel better. Give me hope. The other end of this trip promised me nothing.
“Now…you want to talk.” I opened my eyes and turned my face to look at him in the rearview mirror, this strange reflective place where our eyes met and then looked away. The distance and the angles made it all feel… safer.
“Who are you dropping me off with?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“What if…what if you’re dropping me off to people who are really going to kidnap me,” I swallowed. “Like hold me ransom and shit.”
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said.
My laughter had claws that raked at my bones.
“Handing me over to someone who will hurt me…that’s hurting me, Tommy. Hate to break it to you.”
“No one is going to hurt you.”
“You don’t know that, do you?” I asked. “Like no one even said that to you. You’re just hoping it’s true.”
I watched his hands squeeze the steering wheel, and I tried not to let it hurt. That I meant so little to him that promising not to give me to someone who would hurt me was a hard thing.
“I won’t hand you over to anyone who will hurt you.”
“Promise,” I said, sharp and fast. Because I was sick. And I was vulnerable. And somehow it was him, here. Tommy. Who’d protected me at my weakest. Who’d charged into that office—a skinny, underfed boy. “Promise me you won’t let anyone hurt me. Promise me like you’re still the boy who gave me those graham crackers. Promise me like that.”
“I promise,” he said, but he didn’t look at me.
12
Tommy
The way she smiled at me when she realized who I was…it was the same way she’d smiled at me when she looked up and saw me walking into the computer lab that day a million years ago.
Like the sight of me made her so happy.
It kicked me in the fucking gut, that smile. Just like it had then.
I still couldn’t breathe right.
And all that shit she was talking about those lunch hours in the art room.
She’d thought about it. She’d made herself come thinking about it.
I mean…what was I supposed to do with that knowledge? How was I supposed to sit up here and drive and not lose my shit?
And how could she think for one minute that I didn’t like her touch on my skin. That I had been in any way repulsed by her?
She’d been beauty personified.
Her hand under my shirt when we were in the art room… If I concentrated, I could pull it up so clearly. Like it was real. Like it was happening now. I’d liked it so much I’d almost come in my pants. I’d been so hard, it had taken every bit of my strength not to lean up against her. Not to grind into her.
God. The things I’d thought… the things I’d wanted.
Still wanted.
Fuck.
It took everything I had not to pull the car over onto the side of the road and just…stare at her. Just take her in. Catalog the changes.
She was beautiful. She was more beautiful than I could have ever imagined. All that beauty combined with something so wild. So artistic and unique.
Beth had turned into something I lacked the imagination to even describe. That inky hair with all its colors and her eyes so bright and cutting. And she was a woman now, with a woman’s body. All that promise realized.
She was tourmaline and I was fucking concrete. But she always had been. And I’d always known it.
My shoulder still burned where she’d bitten me. I reached back to touch it, in the guise of rubbing a sore muscle. But I could still feel the imprint of her teeth. The small divots. My shirt was damp from her mouth.
Part of me, exhausted and perverse, wished she’d made me bleed.
Blood pounded in my dick and I hated it. Hated myself.
My shoulder would burn for days. Just as my body had burned for years after St. Joke’s. The dreams I’d had about her were matches under a fire that never went out.
The clock said 7:50 and I pushed the gas pedal to the floor, sweat crawling down my spine. I had the heat blasting into the backseat, trying to warm up the woman shivering there. I’d never felt so keenly my lack of a jacket. I had nothing to put over her except Pest, and she’d soundly rejected that body heat.
The high-performance engine responded in a nanosecond, and we hurtled around a semi and a slow-moving pickup truck.
Beth—no, Jada—was going into withdrawal. How bad the withdrawal was going to depend on what she’d been taking and for how long.
I pushed the gas to the floor.
Because I needed her out of this car. And out of my life.
Because she was bringing back all the memories. The fucking feelings.
Of us. All of us. Carissa and Rosa and Simon. Memories of me. The kid I’d been. Starving and so fucking sure I could take care of everyone.
The fucking wishes I’d wished for us. All of them dust now. Mud and shit and nothing.
“Jeez, Tommy, is this some kind of kidnapping race?”
I understood what she was doing. Being a smart-ass because I was scaring her, because she was freaking out.
We all needed armor in this world, and I was glad to see she had hers.
Jada was excellent armor.
It’s none of your business, I told myself. Who she is or what she’s become. It has nothing to do with you. You’re going to drop her and walk away.
And not look back.
That was fucking key. I wasn’t going to spend the next seven years building a life for her in my imagination. I wasn’t going to make small talk and get to know her. I wasn’t going to exchange numbers with her and text her in a few days. I wasn’t going to imagine her underneath those clothes. The changes the years had made.
I would drop her off, and I would forget her.
I would.
Promise me you won’t let anyone hurt me. Promise me like you’re still the boy who gave me those graham crackers. Promise me like that.
I had no reason to believe whoever was on the other end of this drop-off would be there to hurt her.
But there was no reason to believe they wouldn’t, either.
There were ten minutes left on the clock, and according to my phone we were still twenty-five miles away.
I took the exit off the highway and followed smaller roads up into the foothills of the San Francisco Peaks.
“I think I’m dying,” she said. The first words she’d spoken in a while.
“It’s the drugs.”
“I know it’s the drugs,” she snapped. “I just feel like they’re making me die.”
“Do you know what you were taking?” I asked her.
“Downers after shows so I could sleep. Uppers so I could wake up and perform. There were other prescription things too. The injection was a serious sleeping…thing.”
“Sleeping?” I said before I could stop myself. Concern flaring up before I could stop it. She’d always had so much trouble sleeping.
“Yeah, it’s still a problem.”
