Page 16

16

A sound bubbles up from below. A laugh—a giggle. I stiffen, sitting up.

Footsteps clomp on the porch. I rise, the urge to run suffusing my body, but I freeze. There’s only one way out of here, and that’s down those stairs, in plain view of the front door.

The door wheezes, opening wider. The giggle turns into a voice—

“Give me five minutes.” It’s Trevor.

Olena answers. “I hope it’ll take longer than that,” she says. There’s no sign of the guilt that so tortured her the last time I heard her; she sounds giddy. I stay frozen in place, not daring to move, but the fear in my chest eases. No one knows I’m here—they’re not here for me.

There’s a thump, then noises of movement, of objects being set down. Then the rasp and hiss of a match being lit. I think of the circles of wax on the ground. Not some arcane ritual, of course—a romantic candlelit evening.

“Much better,” Trevor says. “Come here.”

Of course—Trevor is bunking with his mother. There’s no way he could sneak Olena in there, and there’s only so much ducking into rooms in the lodge they could get away with. They need a place to meet up, and what better location than the cabin that no one uses, that none of the family will even talk about?

Their voices drop to murmurs. My legs are starting to cramp up. I ease myself back toward the bed. I sit slowly, stilling when the bed frame creaks. Then Olena lets out a little sound of mute pleasure, and I relax.

It’s almost funny, really. Almost. My heart is still pounding and my hands are shaking, but it’s impossible for the pull of memory to drag me under while I’m trying desperately to block out the sounds below. People carrying on with their lives, completely unconcerned with mine.

“That’s right. Get on your knees for me,” Trevor says huskily. I try not to listen to the metallic sound of a belt buckle, Olena’s soft-voiced assent.

I was so confused the first time a boy asked me to put his dick in my mouth. And then entranced with how quickly it undid him, the way he sat there with his head tipped back and no words, just incoherent sounds of pleasure. I watched him the whole time, and when it was over, he looked at me with something like wonder and said my name, and I would have done anything for him.

Trevor tells Olena what to do. Where to be. Where to touch him, where he’s going to touch her, and she whimpers her obedient pleasure. I bite my lip and try not to pay attention as her moans grow louder. My cheeks are hot. I put my hands over my ears, trying to pretend I don’t hear, feeling like the worst kind of intruder.

Take your shirt off , that boy had whispered to me, his eyes gleaming. His name was Peter Frey. By then I was already sure I was in love with him. I carried a silver dollar his father had given to him with me everywhere, hidden in the heel of my shoe. When Beth visited with his mother and took me along, I crept into his room and ran my hands over the brim of his baseball cap, pulled on his catcher’s mitt, and imagined I could feel his warmth held inside it.

So I did what he asked. I did the next thing, too, and the next, so long as he looked at me like that, and I memorized the books on his shelf and the smell of his clothes. I never loved him, but I thought I did, and so I made all the same mistakes you make when you’re too deeply in love with someone who isn’t.

The muffled quiet I’ve created with my pressed palms turns to true silence, and the only sound is the whoosh of my blood in my ears, so I lower them. The breath and murmuring have a different quality now. There’s the bright tinkle of laughter from Olena.

“We could stay,” she says. Go , I will them, but it doesn’t take wishing. Trevor’s gotten what he wanted out of the encounter, after all.

“I’m afraid my absence will be noted if I stay out too long,” he says with a long-suffering sigh, unconvincing. I can’t see Olena’s pout, but I hear it in Trevor’s next words. “Oh, don’t do that. You know I’d stay all night if I could.”

Leave now, and don’t come back again. This place doesn’t belong to you , I think.

More sounds: rustling, steps. They’re both getting dressed again. I rise, cautious, and make my way to the door, three steps from the top of the stairs. It’s a risk, but it’s dark up here, and what reason do they have to look in the first place? I watch as they exit. Olena first, Trevor holding the door for her. She’s wearing a white wool cap, a bright red coat—the same color as mine, and for a foolish instant I have the conviction that she’s taken that from me, too, like she’s taken my solitude, intruding on this place. Then she disappears outside, Trevor a step behind her. He shuts the door and I listen to footsteps crunch in the snow.

The faint smell of smoke reaches my nose: the extinguished candles. I wait a full five minutes, counting seconds, before I make my way downstairs, wincing at the noise the steps make. Still in pure darkness, I cross quickly to the front door and let myself out onto the porch. I don’t see the bright spot in the darkness to my left until Trevor moves, straightening up from where he has been leaning against the wall.

I go still, like a deer not yet sure if it’s been spotted. The cigarette in his hand is the only light, a dull orange glow.

“Enjoy the show?” he asks, his voice a rasp. I hear his exhale, taste the smoke as it furls around me. I say nothing. “You following me, Theo?”

For a moment I don’t even process the name. It doesn’t feel like mine at all. “I was already here,” I say. “So, no. I wasn’t following you.”

He makes a sound like hm , skeptical, back of the throat. “What are you doing here?” he asks. “Snooping? I doubt there’s much to find. Place has been empty for years.”

“Why?” I ask. My voice is strained, my desperation too plain. It startles him; he shifts back, as if to get a better look at me. “Why leave it empty like this? I thought your dad died here, but your mother told me he was at the lodge when he fell.”

“Right,” he says softly. He takes a drag, and then he holds the cigarette out to me. I’m not quite sure why I take it. It’s only that I’ve always liked to touch things someone else has touched, taste what they’ve tasted. It’s a need to know.

I haven’t smoked in years, not since my boyfriend in freshman year, a boy with a patchy beard and soulful eyes. Yet at the first taste of the cigarette, memory rushes back—I’m nineteen again and staring up at Brandon while he talks to his bandmates, his arm around my shoulders and his attention anywhere but on me. Cigarettes and bad folk rock: the things I loved because I thought it was the same as loving him.

“My dad did something here. But dying wasn’t it,” Trevor tells me. I pass the cigarette back. He inhales, and the light of it spills across his face, illuminating the harsh planes of his features for hardly more than a second. “Connor hasn’t told you.”

“Told me what?”

“He has a rosy view of our father. Really got in that sweet spot where he was old enough to worship the guy but not old enough to see what he was really like. Me, I don’t even remember the fucker, so I don’t have any attachment to some perfect version of him,” Trevor says. “He was keeping a woman here. A fuck-buddy stashed away where he could visit her without anybody knowing about it.” Rage stabs through me—how dare he talk about her that way?—but I swallow it down.

“He had—there was a woman living here,” I say.

A woman in a red scarf— blue scarf —her face inches from mine. Hush.

“Kid, too. They were up here for months.” He’s trying to sound like he doesn’t care.

“A kid.”

“I mean, she wasn’t his kid,” Trevor clarifies, and I am glad the darkness hides my relief. “She was up here when he died, you know. So Mom has to deal with her husband being a cheating piece of shit and being dead, all at the same time. Bastard.”

This is confirmation. Proof that I’m not just imagining things, stringing together broken memories and fantasy. I was here. We were here.

“What was her name?” I ask. My voice cracks.

Trevor’s head tilts, shadow against shadow, his pause pregnant with curiosity. “I don’t know,” he says. “Does it matter?”

“Do you know what happened to her?” I ask.

“Why would I know that? She probably moved on and found some other rich guy to leech off,” Trevor says. “Don’t get me wrong. I don’t blame her. You’ve got to get what you can out of life, it’s not going to be handed to you.”

Says the boy with a trust fund. He offers me the cigarette again, but I don’t reach for it, and he shrugs. “Suit yourself.”

“Your mother will be missing you,” I remind him.

“Nah. She takes a pill. She’d sleep through an avalanche,” he says. “Connor’s a sound sleeper, too, right? We don’t need to be in any hurry. We could duck back in and…” His tone makes it clear what he’s suggesting.

“For fuck’s sake,” I say.

He laughs. “Just kidding. Or checking. Gotta make sure you’re not that kind of girl, you know?”

“Sure.” The kind of joke that’s only a joke until it isn’t. “That’s why you were spying on us? I saw your footprints under the window.”

“Don’t worry, I didn’t see anything R-rated,” he quips. He tilts his head back, releasing a thin stream of smoke. “He’s really crazy for you, you know,” he says, like this is pitiable. “Tracking you down like that. He’s never done anything like that before. You must be something special.”

“We met at a party,” I say.

“Yeah, but before that,” he says. I stare at him. He gestures, frustrated. “The photo? The art show? Alexis told me. About how he saw your portrait and he had to meet you and blah, blah, blah.”

I’d almost forgotten. Harper had a photography show, and she’d used a photo she took of me to round it out. She’d mentioned it to me in an offhand way, making sure I didn’t mind, and I didn’t. It would have scandalized anyone I grew up with, of course. I was topless, knees to my chest on a wooden chair, my spine a perfect curve, staring straight at the camera. One arm was bent, hand in my hair, showing off the bold lines of the dragonfly on my wrist.

It wasn’t a particularly remarkable photograph, but it was lovely and Harper insisted she had to have at least one “seminude hottie” to spice up the collection. I hadn’t been able to get out to the show, so I’d never seen it, hadn’t really thought about it after she got permission.

“Right,” I say. “Harper’s show.”

He reaches out. His palm catches my hip and he tugs me toward him. Startled, I come forward a step. “You’re not very pretty, are you?” he asks.

“Is this your attempt at flirting?” I ask. His eyes search mine, the pinprick of light reflected in them.

“There are millions of pretty girls. You’re something else,” he says. “People say pretty because they don’t have a word for it. It’s a lack of imagination. I thought it was ridiculous. Falling for you because of a photo. But I can see it now.”

There was a time when I would have easily toppled into the empty hole that is Trevor Dalton. All it took was that look—that look like someone saw me. What had Nick said? That Liam wanted people to worship him. If he was anything like me, that isn’t quite right. It’s the inescapable power of being seen.

Once upon a time, I would have made a study of Trevor Dalton, learned every inch of his interior, reflected it back at him. Because boys like him, they love nothing so much as staring into a mirror.

“Trevor,” I say softly. He shifts his weight, leaning in without leaning in, and I rise on my toes enough to put my face close to his. “Fuck off,” I say.

He laughs. And then, before I can react, he reaches out, grabs my hand, and jams the lit end of the cigarette into my palm. I let out a muffled cry of pain, but he’s already let go, stepped back. He flicks the cigarette into the snow and vanishes in the pure darkness of the porch.

“Have a nice night, Theo,” he bites out.

My hand throbs with pain. I grit my teeth, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of a whimper, an exclamation. I stumble off the porch, wrestling my flashlight from my pocket. Behind me I hear the rasp of a lighter as he starts in on a new cigarette, but I refuse to turn around, even as tears well in my eyes.

I don’t slow down until I reach White Pine.