Never Missing, Never Found (14 page)

Her words are slurred. I try to wiggle away, but she drapes an arm, slick and damp and fuzzy as sealskin, around me and pulls me in close. Her breath stinks of beer. “It’s so, so, so good to see you. I’m so happy you came. You’re a good friend.”

“Um, okay.” I wiggle again, trying to extricate myself, but her grip is a vise. I take a gulp from my cup. If I were drunk, this wouldn’t be nearly as painful. At least, I hope not. Only one way to know for sure!

“Monica was a good friend too,” Cady says. I recoil from her breath; it smells the way being hit feels. “But I think Monica is probably dead. I want you to be my friend now, okay?”

“Okay,” I say. “Maybe you should sit down.”

She laughs and leans in closer. Her forehead rubs against mine. “Let’s sit down,” she says. “Let’s sit down on the hay. There’s so much hay everywhere. I hate hay. There’s so much hay.”

“Okay.” I duck under her arm and spin away before she can latch on again, all without spilling even a drop of my drink. Then I sigh. The fire shines before me like a beacon, but I can’t leave Cady here, crying by herself. “Come on.” I move back into her orbit and let her grab my arm again. She leaves enough space for me to snag the drink from her hand and inconspicuously spill it into the nearest bale of hay; some splashes onto Cady’s shorts, but she doesn’t seem to notice. “Let’s go sit.”

By some miracle, we manage to push our way through the crowd and find an empty bale without Cady accosting anyone else or falling over. I sit her down and look around. I’m certainly not going to shove her and Connor together more than necessary, but I don’t know who else she’s friends with. “Do you have any good friends here?” I ask.

Her eyes fill with tears and overflow. “Monica was my good friend.” The tears make rivers down her cheeks. “And Connor was my boyfriend, but he dumped me. He doesn’t love me anymore. Scarlett, why doesn’t he love me? I still love
him.
” She shakes her head, and when she speaks again, her voice is low and determined. “It’s just a break, right? We’re still best friends. He’ll come around. That’s what M-Monica would say. We’ll get back together.”

And I’m certainly not getting into
that
with her. “Okay, okay.” It’s either sit here with her myself and listen to her talk about Connor or find someone to take care of her. Cynthia, maybe? Except Cynthia didn’t look much more sober than Cady does. I sit down with a sigh that echoes the rush of the hay settling beneath me. “Let’s just sit and take deep breaths.”

Cady sniffles. “I miss Monica,” she says. “I met her on my first day at Adventure World. We worked in headquarters together. Nobody had taught us how to use the cash register, but we didn’t tell them, and somehow everything came out right at the end of the day.” She lets out a laugh that sounds more like a sob. It might be a sob. “We called ourselves the Register Mafia.”

“I’m sorry.”

“We got promoted on the same day. She didn’t have a boyfriend, but she would come hang out with me and C-Connor anyway. She called herself the third wheel, and I always told her, ‘You’re never a third wheel. Connor is the third wheel.’ And she would laugh, but Connor wouldn’t laugh. He didn’t think it was funny.” She rests her head on my shoulder. My arm twitches as her tears soak into my dress. “I miss Monica. I miss my boyfriend.”

“I know. You already said that.” There’s a tender spot, somewhere deep inside me under all the caked-on annoyance and frustration, that twinges when her tears touch my skin.

“Cade?” Someone pulls Cady off my shoulder. It’s warm outside, verging on sticky hot, but the air feels chill where she was. “What’s going on? Is she okay?”

I turn. I recognize the speaker vaguely as a girl from Adventure World, but her name escapes me without the aid of her name tag. Mina, maybe, or Nina. Tina? Yeah, Tina. “I think she just had too much to drink,” I say. “She’ll live.”

Tina heaves a sigh. “Oh, Cade,” she says. “What to do with you.” She looks over at me. “Thanks for taking care of her. I got it now.”

She doesn’t need to tell me twice. The sweat and tears are beginning to dry on my skin. “Okay,” I say, but hesitate. “I hope you feel better, Cady.”

Cady’s face is already buried in Tina’s shoulder. I’m clearly not needed anymore, but I still can’t help hesitating again before plunging back into the crowd.

By now my drink is lukewarm, and the buzz in my head is amplified by the buzz of the crowd. I wave hello to a few people I may or may not know, neatly duck under outstretched arms and around groups of girls taking selfies, and set my eyes on an empty bale of hay on the other side of the fire. It’s not as crowded over there, perhaps because of the area’s proximity to the dark woods. But here people would hear me if I screamed. I fight my way through and collapse onto the empty bale with a huff; there’s finally space for me to breathe.

The fire crackles so loudly, spitting sparks like fireflies into the air, that I can hardly hear the other people whooping and laughing and talking. I stare deep into the flames, looking for the molten blue center. I can’t see it, but I know it has to be there. This fire can’t be missing a center.

A log crashes into the fire, spitting up more sparks and making me gasp a lungful of smoke. I’m so busy coughing I barely notice when somebody crunches onto the hay bale next to me. The smoke irritates my eyes, but I don’t want to rub them and smear the makeup that I so painstakingly applied. By the time I’m done blinking the smoke away, my chin tilted up at the stars so that tears won’t overflow and smear that stupid eyeliner, Connor’s already been there for a few minutes, so close I could fall over and land in his lap.

“Hello to you too,” I say.

“I was wondering how long it would take you to notice me,” he says. His smile is crooked, like one of his front teeth, and the sheen of sweat on his face makes his freckles look like glitter. “What are you thinking?”

“That your freckles look like glitter,” I say without thinking, and glare down at my drink. Stupid alcohol. “I can’t believe I just said that. This is so embarrassing.” And I can’t believe I just said
that
. They should really raise the drinking age. To, like, eighty. Not that that would’ve stopped us tonight.

“They’re not freckles,” Connor says seriously, but his eyes are dancing, or maybe that’s just the reflection of the flames. “They’re angel kisses.”

“Angel kisses?” As if of their own accord, my fingers drift over and trace the constellations of pigment on his right cheek. I feel his breath catch in his throat. “You’re telling me this many angels were willing to put their lips on your face?” I say to lighten the mood.

“That’s what my mom says.” He doesn’t move. He doesn’t breathe. I realize I’m not breathing either.

My shoulder, where Cady rested earlier, suddenly begins to itch like it’s caught fire. I jerk my hand away and draw in a great gulp of air. “Did you see Cady?” I say, swinging back toward the fire. Through the flames and the billowing clouds of smoke, the other partygoers are nothing more than shadows. “She had too much to drink and she was crying. She thinks you’re going to get back together.”

“We’re not getting back together. I told you, it’s over.” Still, he looks around for her; when his eyes land on her and Tina, he says, “And Tina’s taking care of her, anyway. She doesn’t need me. She’s fine.” He shifts closer; his drink sloshes over the rim of his cup, and a few drops splatter my bare foot. My muscles clench, but I don’t move. “Are you fine?”

“So fine.” I’m suddenly very aware of all the ways my body is working to keep me fine: the thud of my heart, the rush of blood through arteries and veins, the sloshing of acid in my stomach and intestines. “So where are the famous horses? I was promised horses.”

“I don’t remember promising you horses.”

I raise an eyebrow. “I promised myself horses.”

He raises an eyebrow right back. “I can show you the horses. If you want?”

His words trail off into the smoke. I know what he’s saying. If I go with him to see the horses, there’s no coming back.

Cady. Cady. Cady.
I try to drum up my mental image.
Cady is there crying her heart out over this guy.
It should be easy, considering she was just crying on my shoulder.
This is wrong. Cady will hate you, and so will everyone else. Think of Cady.

But Cady is far away, and the pleasant buzz of the fire in my brain is blocking all pictures other than the one of Connor sitting a few inches away. Heat floods me, heat that is decidedly not from the bonfire. “I would very much like to see the horses,” I say, lowering my voice, hoping it sounds sexy.

His face doesn’t change. “Really?”

“Yes,” I say. I don’t think about it. I don’t need to think. “Let’s go. Right now.”

We go.

This is the fourth choice. And it’s the choices we make that make us who we are. By making this choice, I know I’m removing the possibility that Cady and Connor will stumble back into a relationship. I’m not a girl who could be a bridesmaid at their potential future wedding. I am the girl who pulls Connor into the barn in hopes that any thought of that potential future wedding will poof into a cloud of smoke.

The barn is at the far end of the field, far away from the crowd of people. Connor and I race to the barn at the edge of the woods, tossing off laughs as we run, using the darkness as cover.

We burst into the barn gasping, still laughing, and Connor shuts the door behind us. Panic swells for a moment in the dark, but my eyes soon adjust, thanks to the stripes of light filtering through the uneven boards of the wall; there’s also a dim glow coming from the other end, where the snorts and creaks signify the presence of the horses. I inhale deeply and smell the sweetness of the hay and the warmth of the horses and the smoke clinging to Connor’s shirt. “The horses are over there,” Connor says. “Ernesto and Bessie.” He points, but his eyes don’t move from my face. He’s staring unabashedly, as if memorizing my eyes, my nose, my lips. I flex my fingers. Somewhere on the run I lost my drink.

“I don’t care about the horses,” I say, and somehow he’s got me in his arms, and somehow we’re up against the wall, nails digging into my back and probably giving me tetanus. He gazes into my eyes, hesitating, so I swoop in, and then my mouth is on his and it’s hot and tastes like sugar. A little noise, almost like a growl, escapes his throat and reverberates through all my bones. I press myself against him and feel him shudder. A breeze dances over my skin, standing all my little hairs on end.

He draws back for a moment, and I resist, pressing my face into his throat. His pulse throbs like there’s a moth fluttering under his skin. I kiss it, gently, to feel it flutter against my lips.

“You’re so beautiful,” he whispers, his voice rough.

“Well, duh,” I say, putting on my best imitation of Connor’s braggadocio, and we can’t help but laugh. One of his hands rests on my hip, pressing me into the wall; the other traces the line of my jaw, drawing a trail of fire so intense I have to close my eyes or I’ll burst into flame.

“You really are,” Connor says, and he kisses me again. This time his tongue eases its way into my mouth and touches all the little hidden crevices where food sometimes gets stuck. Fortunately, I flossed before I came. I’ve never felt so thankful for the dentist who terrified me into daily flossing with his slides of decaying gums.

No, Scarlett. Don’t think of decaying gums now.
There is a time and a place for decaying gums, and this time and place is so far from that place it might as well be on Jupiter. “You are too,” I murmur, and lick at his lips just as he pulls away. He laughs as he catches me with the tip of my tongue poking through.

“Sometimes the barn cat does that,” he says. “She’ll be licking herself and get distracted in the middle and just walk around with her tongue sticking out.”

I jab him in the ribs—on the side, obviously, because we’re still pressed together so tightly there isn’t space for so much as a nudge. His belt buckle is carving a permanent mark in my belly. “Are you calling me a barn cat?”

“Hey,” Connor says. “It’s about the cutest thing in the world.”

I breathe out through my nose, then tilt my head back for another kiss. When Connor doesn’t bite—literally or figuratively—I bury my face back in his neck and nibble, feeling almost like a vampire. He sighs, and I pull back. “I shouldn’t be doing this right now,” he says. “It would break Cady’s heart all over again.”

My heart, previously so light, fills with dread and drops to my feet with a thunk. “She’s not your girlfriend anymore. Not your responsibility.”

The dim glow from the horses’ corner illuminates flyaway strands of his hair, turning them into molten copper. It flows into the darkness as he shakes his head. “That’s not true, though,” he says. “I still care about her a lot. She’s still one of my best friends. I don’t want to hurt her any more than she’s already hurting.”

His words are making my stomach hurt, but my not-so-sober state makes it easy enough to ignore them, and it. I stand on my tiptoes and press against him, and he leans back down, and I drink him in, his smell and his taste and his heat.

It’s somewhere in the middle of our sixth kiss, his hand beginning to trace circles of gold and glitter over my waist, when we realize something is different. I put it down to a shift in brain chemistry, or the amount of smoke and vodka I’ve inhaled. But it gets to the point where I can’t deny it anymore; the horses are stomping and snorting, and the wave of chatter outside has reached a fever pitch, and someone is screaming.

I pull away. “Do you hear that?”

He purses his lips, which have swelled and turned red with the force of my own. “What’s going on out there?”

There’s definitely screaming now, and crying. Someone is shrieking loud enough for us to hear it clear across the field and through the wooden walls of the barn.

He eases back reluctantly. His hands don’t slip from my waist. “We should see what’s going—”

The door slams against the wall. Connor leaps back like my skin’s turned into a hot stove, and I gasp a mouthful of hay pollen. Somewhere in the middle of all the coughing and choking, I realize the small, squat figure standing silhouetted in the doorway is Rob. He spares a cursory look at me, one that fills my belly with shame because I know I’ve done wrong by Cady and now he knows too, but he focuses on Connor and his words melt everything else away.