Damage - A. M. Jenkins [42]
When you finish, her eyes are dry. She still won’t let you touch her, just rolls out of your reach and scoops up her clothes and says she has to go to the bathroom and she’ll be right back. You don’t tell her that your back stings where her fingernails left marks.
What you’d really like to do now is go home and get in your own bed and go to sleep, but that seems kind of out of the question at the moment. So you continue to lie there alone and naked on Heather’s bed, and you’re suddenly very, very tired.
When she comes back in the room, she’s fully dressed. “I’m going to give you a test,” she says cheerfully, pulling the door shut behind her. “We’ll see how well you know me.”
The springs creak as she comes to sit beside you on the bed. She shuts her eyes.
“Don’t look—what color are my eyes?”
“Blue,” you tell her without much interest. Something’s not quite right; you missed a moment somewhere back down the line and now everything seems a little off, a little skewed.
“Really blue, or do you think I wear contacts?”
“I think they’re really blue.”
“That’s right.” She opens her eyes, gives you a smile. “Contacts won’t give you this color—you’re either born with it, or you’re not. And don’t think I’m being conceited, because I’m not,” she adds. “It’s just the truth.”
The crumpled note lies on the floor where she dropped it. She gets up, walks over to the note, picks it up, smooths it out. Puts it back in the wooden box. Places the lid on the box, and the box back in the drawer.
As she shuts the drawer, she glances at you. “You’re okay now, aren’t you? Everything’s okay again?”
Your problem is that you dwell on things nobody else would care about. You can’t seem to filter out all the silly things nobody else even notices. What’s one little missed moment, when the most beautiful girl in town can’t get along without you?
So you make yourself agree, from the depths of the bed. “Yes,” you say, as if saying it will make it true. “Everything’s perfect.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Late the next afternoon you enter the field house with fingers that feel like they’ve gone numb, like you’re going to be playing with blocks of wood, not hands, tonight. You’ve become disconnected from your own body, you feel like you’re slipping away, even though you know you’re right there in plain sight.
You crept home from Heather’s house between two and three in the morning. You must have spent hours holding her and listening to her talk and talk, mostly about nothing. All you can remember now is one sentence: her voice, low and muffled, claiming that staying alive isn’t hard.
That’s where you screwed up; that’s when you should have stopped her. You should have told her that you Austin Reid, can understand why her father didn’t stick around, and that it didn’t have anything to do with her. I he was like you, he was just tired of fighting. He was trying to erase a heaviness he couldn’t get out from under.
In the field house you pass right by Brett Stargill, who stands in front of his locker with his back to You’ve known Brett since sixth grade, and you’re close enough to toss out a hi or give him a friendly shove—as you pass by you have the feeling that you’re not anymore. That Brett wouldn’t hear you, if you did speak. That your arm would go right through if you reached touch him.
So you don’t say a word. Just go to your locker and start getting ready.
You don’t talk to anybody; you perform a solitary of getting dressed, tucking pads into pockets snapping them into place as if you’re building the wide receiver in the history of the world, and doing from scratch. The routine is all that’s left to glue you this game. The Pride of the Panthers has obligations fulfill; everyone’s counting on that guy from the