Winter Break (Chasing Chase London #6)

eight

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“2 Become 1”—Spice Girls

There’s no sign of the guys the next day.

“Of course I decide to sleep with him and he disappears,” I grumble as we head back to the house in defeat after an evening walk on the misty lakeshore.

“He’s probably just got family shit,” Meghan says. “They’re staying with their uncle.”

“Or he found someone who’s not a total freak.”

“Trust me, if you’re just looking for a hookup, that does not matter. Even if you turned into a stage-five clinger, he’ll be across the ocean, which makes stalking a wee bit difficult. That’s why dudes like to hook up on vacation. No strings.”

“Right,” I mutter, my heart flip-flopping like a fish. “No strings.”

Could I really do that? It’s so not the kind of thing I do.

But then, that’s kinda the whole point, isn’t it?

Our last day at the lake is New Year’s Eve. My last chance—not that I have much chance. Mom is going out with the adults, which means I have to stay in and babysit Lily.

I don’t even care anymore. I’m too despondent to celebrate, so I haul the yearbooks up to the sunroom and sit there alone, staring into Dad’s smiling face and hating him for being happy. When I finally work up the anger to fuel me into looking, I find him in the section of senior portraits at the end of the yearbook, each student getting a full page where a large gold- framed portrait sits in the center of a black page, the school’s motto in Latin inlaid in the frame.

On the following page are more pictures of them, along with some dated clipart depicting what they were into—a guitar, a skateboard, a sheet of paper with an A+ at the top. There’s a picture of him with another kid that says it’s senior project, though I can’t tell what the project is, one where he’s holding a skateboard behind his head and grinning, and one of him in the music room with a guitar, his longish hair falling over his forehead, his face deep in concentration. With his hoodie and baggie jeans and Vans, it’s the most 90s thing I’ve ever seen. There’s another picture of him with the vaguely familiar guy, with the title above reading, “My personal motto is…” At the bottom, there’s a blank space where Dad scribbled in his messy, male handwriting, “Bros before ho’s.”

The guy towers over Dad in this one, his arm slung around Dad like he’s the big guy’s little buddy. At first glance, it looks like someone popular saw the yearbook photographer and was trying to get into the yearbook again by crowding into a smaller kid’s moment. But the longer I study it, the more genuine their friendship appears. The big guy isn’t clamping a hand around Dad’s shoulders to keep him in place, and Dad’s not standing stiffly in a picture he doesn’t want to be in. They’re both relaxed. The tall guy has his head tilted sideways toward Dad, like he’s trying not to look so much bigger. They both have those tough-guy expressions that middle class white guys do in pictures when they’re trying to look ‘hard,’ but I can see a glimmer of laughter in Dad’s hooded eyes, like he’s trying not to laugh. Combined with his motto, it’s all so cheesy and generic—everything Dad hated.

Was he faking it all to fit in, like he faked the World’s Best Dad routine? Like I fake it? I shiver and flip through on a whim, looking for Lindsey’s dad. I find a Justin Darling in the senior pages, but aside from the stark blue eyes and blond hair, he doesn’t resemble the man I’ve met at her house. He must be one of her uncles, maybe Colt’s dad. I study his page of candid shots and read his handwritten motto, “Family is forever.” Guess Dad’s not the only one with a cliché motto.

I flip back to his page one more time, that eerie feeling creeping back into me, like I’m looking at a stranger. It’s weird seeing him looking like someone’s sidekick. He was always the center of our lives. I slam the yearbook and shove it onto the shelf, not bothering to look through the others. There’s nothing more to learn. Dad didn’t fit in at Faulkner High, so he went to the private school. They had guitar lessons, and he loved music, so he took them. He was happy there. He had friends. Bros.

When did he stop being happy with Mom, with our family? With me?

Why weren’t we enough?

I lay on my back staring at the grey sky spitting rain down on the skylights overhead. I try to imagine Dad at my age, a misfit loner at FHS. And then a few years later, his whole life having turned around at a new school with new friends, the future an endless stretch of infinite possibility. And then in college, where he met Mom, fell in love, and got married. Holding his firstborn, looking down at me and marveling at this thing they’d made together. And then a montage of memories flashes through my mind—Christmas mornings at the lake, Mom surrounded by his family like she belonged; trips to the beach where he’d run after seagulls with Lily, like he believed as much as she did that they could catch one; his endless patience as he bandaged my knees and elbows and dried my tears before coaching me back onto the skateboard by doing a trick that looked so effortless when he did it.

Fake. Fake. Fake.

I want to hurl the yearbooks through the glass into the rain, let the pages soak and bleed, warp and mold until there’s nothing left of Dad in his place. I want to go home. I want to skate, but my board is at Meghan’s house, and I couldn’t skate on the soggy shoreline even if I had it.

When Uncle Seamus comes up to work on the blog, I’m relieved for the interruption. I escape downstairs and pick up my phone. I didn’t give Oliver my Snap or OnlyWords , so he can’t contact me. I have a message on both apps from Chase, but I don’t open them. I stalk Lindsey’s socials and find out they’re all going to some fancy, exclusive party for the town’s founders. She hasn’t messaged, but she’s probably just too polite to start up a conversation knowing that I’d want to hang out, and she’d have to tell me I’m not invited.

Is that how Dad felt, always shut out at FHS? I try not to let it sting—I was never as rich as Lindsey and Chase and Elaine, even in Connecticut where our lives were comfortable—but it still sucks to be left out when they go to events for the town’s elite. It’s just another reminder that I’m not good enough.

I shove the thought away and open a message from Todd.

DLine32: I’m sorry.

It doesn’t matter. He slept with Elaine while he was my boyfriend this time. I’m mad at him, but I’m mad at myself too. I let myself believe he cared, that he liked me enough to stay away from that vicious snake. She probably just did it because I said he wouldn’t. I think I want to sleep with someone to get even with her more than him.

The parents all leave embarrassingly early, around . Lily’s scared of the storm, so she crawls onto my bed to watch Barbie videos on her tablet while I settle in to work on a reading assignment for school. She starts crying when I try to put her to bed at nine, so I tuck her into a sleeping bag on my floor and go back to reading, since she sleeps like the dead. After another hour or so, Meghan sticks her head in the door and hisses at me. “What are you doing?”

“Being grounded,” I whisper, holding up my book.

She glances at Lily and then gestures for me to join her in the hall. I drag myself up from the comfort of my bed, already dreading the conversation we’re about to have. I know she’ll tell me I’m totally lame, but it’s not like I can leave Lily alone in the house and go out partying.

I balk when I step into the hall and see that Meghan’s not alone. Her guy is leaning on the door frame of her room with his rascally grin firmly in place. My heart trips over itself for a second when he looks at me. Oliver is standing behind him, rocking back on his heels, looking nervous and unsure.

“What are you ladies waiting for? The night is ours,” the Rogue says.

“I’m sorry,” I say, glancing between the three of them. “I have to babysit my little sister. Meghan didn’t tell you?”

She gives me a meaningful look, but I don’t know what she’s trying to convey.

“Ah, that’s a bummer,” he says, peering past me into my room, where my sister’s fast asleep in her nest on the floor.

“Go,” I say to Meghan. “Do your thing. Have fun. Don’t worry about me.”

“Are you sure?” she asks, chewing on the corner of her lip.

“I’m sure,” I tell her. “I don’t really feel like doing anything anyway.”

Oliver’s brother turns to him. “Why don’t you stay, Ollie? I’ll pop by and get you when I drop Megan off later. That way you won’t have to be alone.”

Oliver shifts on his feet and avoids my eyes. I kinda feel bad for the guy. At least Meghan didn’t point out I’m hanging out alone on New Year’s Eve in front of a couple hot guys and treat me like a charity case.

“You can hang out here,” I hear myself saying before I can think better of it.

“Are you sure? I can just go back to the flat,” Oliver says, doubt written all over his face. Now that he’s looking at me, I remember that I wanted to sleep with him, and I curse my sister. Maybe he can carry her back to her room without waking her.

“Yeah, whatever.” I cram my hands in the back pockets of my jeans and try to look cool, wishing I’d worn something cute but not wanting to be so obvious as to change into a dress. Not that I have a seductive dress with me, but still. It would be nice to look like the confident college girl he thinks I am.

“I brought whiskey,” Oliver says, pulling a small bottle from his back pocket and holding it out like an offering.

“Oh good,” Meghan says, giving me another look. “That’ll get the ball rolling.”

“We’re off, then,” her date says, wrapping an arm around her waist and pulling her in. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

He winks at us before they start away. Meghan turns back over her shoulder and mouths, “Good luck.” We watch them disappear down the stairs, and then the front door closes behind them as they head out into the rain.

I’m not sure drinking is the best idea with the parents coming home in a few hours, but I may not survive the awkwardness without a few shots in me. If I get plastered, I may even find the liquid courage to seduce Oliver as planned.

“Want to watch a movie or something?” I ask, thumbing back toward my room.

“Sure. How about one where the entire plot is to kill as many people as possible before the credits roll? Maybe with a few explosions thrown in for good measure.”

“I can see what’s streaming—oh, you’re kidding.”

“Yes,” he says, that ghost of a smile playing over his lips.

“Well, come in,” I say, stepping into the room. “Don’t worry about my sister, she could sleep through an actual shootout, and probably a bombing.”

He glances doubtfully at her, then nods and steps into the room, taking a seat on the edge of the bed furthest from my sister’s curled form. We could have gone to her room, but everything except the cartoon channels are blocked on her TV, and I don’t really want to get it on in a kid’s bed. Though it’s probably just as weird to do stuff with her sleeping ten feet away. Still, she’ll never know. It’s not like we’re hooking up in front of her. She couldn’t even see us on the bed if we were lying down.

“You drink?” I ask, handing the unopened bottle back to Oliver.

“Oh, yeah. I drink,” he says, twisting off the cap. “You smoke?”

The last thing I need is something to make me more jittery. “No. You?”

“I don’t smoke cigarettes,” he says, smiling with that adorable dimple. “Do you need a glass? Ice? Americans love their ice.”

Feeling daring, I take the bottle and drink straight from it. I’m rewarded with a smile that shows a flash of teeth, something I haven’t gotten from him before.

“A girl after my own heart,” he says, accepting the bottle from me.

I fight the urge to giggle over the cuteness of his accent, settling back on the pillows on one side of the bed while he does the same on the other.

We watch Pulp Fiction for a while in silence, passing the whiskey back and forth, the awkwardness having cleared like the fog over the lake in the mornings that burns away by midday. At first I’m paranoid that my parents will come back, in which case I would probably be murdered, or that Lily will wake up and later tell Mom, in which case I would still be murdered. But Lily doesn’t stir, and after a while I start to feel warm waves spreading the alcohol through my body.

Oliver sets the bottle on the bedside table eventually, when there’s barely an inch left in it. While he’s getting situated on the pillows again, I scoot over next to him and lay my head on his arm. He doesn’t move or stroke me like Chase did when I lay beside him, but he doesn’t pull away either, so I take that as a good sign. Time to gather my courage again. It takes a while.

I give myself the world’s longest pep talk. If I wrote it down, it would be legendary. Movies would be made. Coaches should take a page from teenage girls trying to make the first move when they motivate their players. Then again, maybe not.

When I’ve talked myself up at last and convinced myself to do it, I push up on my elbow. Oliver looks up at me with those clear eyes of the palest lavender, and then looks at my lips. It’s now or never. Too late to go back without looking like a coward.

So, I lean down and kiss him.

For a second, he doesn’t respond. I instantly start to panic. Am I doing something wrong? I’m drunk and I haven’t kissed more than two guys before, and they always made the first move. Was I supposed to wait for him to kiss me?

I’m about to pull away when he rolls toward me and kisses me gently. His arm goes around me, his palm pressed to my lower back, and he lays me on my back without breaking our kiss.

This is it, my mind shrieks in an absolute spiral of giddiness and terror.

At least he’s being gentle. Not that I have much of a basis for comparison, but no one has ever kissed me sweetly before. When I kiss Todd, he goes zero to sixty in about three seconds, cramming his tongue down my throat while I try to keep up or fight back his tongue as it invades my mouth. Eventually he wins, and I give up and hold on and wait for it to be over.

When I kissed Chase, it was reckless and passionate, filled with need and animal hunger. Every kiss is like being struck by lightning. My body becomes so alive it’s almost painful when he touches me, and instead of fighting him off my body is desperately trying to override my mind and claw its way closer, for more.

Oliver isn’t nothing like either of them. He’s slow and tender. He doesn’t use any tongue at all, just teases and caresses my lips with his, giving me plenty of time to relax and crave more. I open my lips for him, but he only nips at my lower lip, tugging it gently between his teeth before he goes back to kissing it.

After what feels like forever, his tongue pulses gently against my hungry lips. I nearly moan in relief, opening for him and sliding a hand behind his neck to drag him closer. He makes a soft sound into my mouth that electrifies me, and then his tongue moves against mine in a slow, sensual stroke.

“Whoa,” I say, breaking the kiss at last. “Do you have a tongue piercing?”

Then he says something that makes me absolutely expire. “Aye.”

“Oh,” I breathe, wondering how a perfect stranger can leave me speechless with a single word.

He looks down, his impossibly long lashes casting shadows on his cheeks in the near darkness of the room. I’ve never seen that look on a guy’s face before, and it takes me a minute to realize it’s embarrassment. All the guys I know are so completely confident all the time, I’d kind of figured only girls were capable of that particular emotion.

“My brother and I got it done one night when we’d been drinking a bit,” he says. “I can take it out if it bothers you. I sort of forget it’s there.” He sticks out his tongue out and starts to unfasten it, but I grab his wrist.

“No, it’s fine,” I say quickly. “I just didn’t expect it. I’ve never kissed anyone with a tongue ring.”

I press my hand to the back of his neck, drawing him down to me again. He settles beside me, and I roll onto my side, hooking my leg over his, letting the sweetness of his kiss slowly build excitement inside me again. His mouth tastes smoky like whiskey, and his body feels strong like protection, like safety and home and a dad who patches knees and a cousin who buries tea sets in the backyard with you. I hold onto him tighter, pulling him closer, shivering with memory and the sound of the rain beating on the roof overhead. His warm, solid body against mine soothes away the shivers, the memories, and pulls them all under, not burying them with dirt that lets them still haunt me when I try to close my eyes, but washing them away in the warm blue-purple tide of the ocean after sunset.

I lose myself in him, kissing him for so long I think I could go on forever and never need anything else except to kiss him. There is nothing else. Everything else melts away like seafoam—Dad and his stupid smiling yearbook photos; Mom and her ridiculous strictness; Meghan and her complete personality change around other people; Lindsey seeming to forget I exist when she’s off with her rich friends; Todd cheating; Chase never breaking up with Lindsey. It’s all gone.

When it threatens to come back, I pull up Oliver’s shirt and run my hand over his summer-hot skin and grip his hipbone, which makes my head spin for reasons beyond my comprehension. He answers by sliding his hand under the back of my shirt in the same place it was on top of my clothes and kissing me dizzy some more. When life threatens to creep in again, I start to undo the button on his jeans.

This time, he pulls my hand away. “Slow, love. There’s no hurry.”

His lips are red and swollen from how long we’ve been kissing. We are definitely not hurrying. But before I can argue, he links his fingers through mine and presses his lips to mine again, deep and slow, a current stealing me away from shore when I tried to escape. We kiss, holding hands, and I forget about wanting more. My body is all warm and sweet and melty like ice cream, and I’ll never get tired of it no matter how long it lasts. We’re not just making out, but lying together, our whole bodies kissing instead of just our mouths.

When my impatience gets the better of me again, I pull my hand from his, running it over his strong arm, his shoulder, down the flat planes of his back. I grip his hip again, pulling him against me, and he sighs with pleasure. Taking that as a good sign, I dip my hand between us and undo the button of his jeans. Before I can go further, he captures my hand and brings it up around his neck again. God, I’m about to explode.

Why isn’t he?

Why hasn’t he tried to put his hands under my clothes yet? In my limited experience with guys, that’s what they do when we kiss. Chase kissed me for about two minutes before he stuck his hand down my pants. Todd’s hand would try to creep up my shirt, I’d pull it back down, and then the same thing would repeat over and over the whole time we were kissing.

I’m getting impatient now that a guy isn’t trying to get in my pants. My body is ready and expectant, and time is passing, and the parents won’t be gone forever. I decide to take things into my own hands—literally.

I slide my hand down Oliver’s toned chest, his taut abs, and straight into his jeans. He grabs my wrist, but my fingers clench reflexively around him, my mind glitching with shock. I’ve never actually touched a guy before. It’s inconceivable that something so big is supposed to fit inside me.

Oliver pushes me backwards on the bed and jumps up, breathing hard. “What is wrong with you?” he whisper-shouts. “Your sister is right there .”

It all comes to a screeching halt like a record scratch, the dreamy translucent color of dusk after sunset replaced by the artificial blue light from the TV, the bundle of memories rudely dumped at my feet like a fishing net full of trash. My eyes well up with tears before I’ve fully comprehended what just happened. I was so absorbed in kissing him that I forgot all about Lily. I forgot everything.

I thought we were both there, both being swept away, but it was just me. That’s the worst part. Here this whole time I thought that guys always wanted to have sex, and it was my job to say no, and whenever I was ready, all I had to do was stop saying no. Here I am throwing myself at a guy, and it turns out he doesn’t even want me.

“Oh, don’t cry now,” he says, his face immediately softening with regret. He sinks back onto the edge of the bed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”

I turn my face away but it’s too late. As if I’m not humiliated enough, now I’m crying.

I’m never drinking again.

I hide my face in my arm. I can’t bear to look at him, and I don’t want him to look at me, either. He must think I’m a total freak.

“It’s not you,” he says, stroking my shoulder. “You’re lovely.”

Not lovely enough for him to sleep with, but I’m not quite petty enough to say that aloud.

“Really, you’re breathtaking,” he coaxes, clearly trying to console me.

I hiccup into my arm in response. He’s clearly just realized he got stuck with the psycho while his brother got the fun one, but he’s too nice to leave when I’m crying.

“I promise you, it’s me,” he assures me.

Even a weirdo who’s never had a boyfriend knows when a guy says, “It’s not you, it’s me,” it’s always you.

“I’m sorry,” I mumble, drying my tears in an attempt to salvage whatever microscopic speck of dignity that remains in my possession. Then again, I literally cried like a baby who got her favorite toy taken away from her when he wouldn’t let me play with his dick, so forget a microscope. It would take a magician to find my dignity at this point. Or maybe a time-traveler who could go back to a few hours ago, before we downed a fifth of whiskey.