I also wouldn’t be surprised if Dawn did it just because Dawn’s a bitch and would go behind her friend’s back. That’s the type of flake Meegan surrounds herself with.
I rip from room to room, no longer unsteady on my feet. A wick’s been set, rapidly burning through my beer buzz until it reaches a powder keg. I’m far past the point any breathing would help. Under my skin, muscles flex and coil and ripple in anticipation, adrenaline surging with nowhere to release. No choice but to build, build, build.
She’s in the living room, sitting on some asshole’s lap. He sticks his tongue in her ear. My teeth ache under the pressure of my jaw. And she spots me over his head. Tilts her head. Glides her tongue over her upper lip, the way she knows drives me crazy. Because it reminds me of all the times she’d done it for me.
My vision blurs at the edges. I move. Focus on him. Her. His hands. One on her thigh, the other on her ass. How she presses into him.
He doesn’t see me coming. Not until I grab handfuls of his shirt in my fists and drag him off the couch. Meegan falls off his lap with a yell. I push him against the wall. Ram my knuckles into his cheek. He tries to get a hit in. I knee him in the groin before taking another shot to the head.
People scream. Meegan screams. She shouts what an asshole I am. A menace. A fucking dumb brute. Her insults ring in my head. I punch harder.
Arms pull me off my victim. Howell tells the guy to get out. He scrambles to his feet and leaves.
“You okay?” Howell asks.
I pinch my forehead in one hand, nodding. Breathing comes back to me, now that the other guy’s out of my sight and I can focus on taming down the fire coursing through me.
“You,” Howell points at Meegan. “You’re out, too.”
“The hell I am,” she starts.
I whirl on her. “Take your bullshit and get the fuck out, Meegan.”
“Maybe I’ll take it to your friend,” she says. She whips a dark strand of hair over her shoulder. Curls her lips in a vicious smile. “He sure seemed to like the last time. How about it? A Levi Hart sex tape, part two.”
I get up in her face, voice hard and unflinching. “This is between us.”
Because Hart doesn’t need to get mixed up with her again. The last time, he’d missed half a season of football due to conduct probation. He’s just started a new relationship. He’s found happiness with Stone, even as he watches his mom battle cancer, and I won’t have her fucking him over or involving him in our business.
One of Howell’s roommates—not the one who invited me into the closet with her—steps forward, pulling Meegan away. Meegan tears her arm away, and with one last disgusted sneer at me, she heads for the door. Dawn, at the edge of the crowd, follows her.
The party resumes. Fatigue rolls over me, my previous adrenaline spike falling to make leeway for the heady effects of alcohol. I step back, head spinning, then drop onto the couch.
Howell squats on the ground in front of me. He snaps his fingers, and I realize my eyes drifted shut. “Need me to call Morris?”
Fuck no. I don’t want to deal with Morris right now. I fumble for my phone, arm weighed down like a sack of bricks as I half wrestle the device out of my pocket. It’s no use. I lay my head back on the couch, eyes closing again. So before I pass out completely, I tell him who to call instead.
7
Kennedy
My sister Brigid’s face lights up my phone screen Friday morning, her cheesy smile stretching across the screen. It makes me pause in the middle of the paragraph I’m typing up for an essay due next week, smiling as I stare at my phone.
I love pictures. Love the memories, the stories, contained beyond their surfaces.
Such as this particular one, from last New Year’s. Brigid had fallen asleep before midnight, so her girlfriend Charlotte doodled on her face. When she woke up, just as our parents’ television showed the ball dropping in Times Square, Brigid had chased Charlotte around the house with a marker until my sister trapped her in our dad’s basement man cave and scribbled all over her face in return.
After, Brigid had wanted a photo of the two of them, because—and I quote— “I want a reminder of how crazy in love this woman makes me.”
So it doesn’t surprise me when I answer and the first thing out of Brigid’s mouth is, “I’M GETTING MARRIED!!!”
I can hear the extra exclamation marks, she’s that loud. Holding my phone away from my ear, I laugh.
“Congratulations!” I tell her. “When did Charlie propose?”
“How do you—did she tell you?”
“She showed me the ring at Christmas,” I confess. It’s gorgeous, a stunning emerald set in white gold and sparkling diamonds.
Brigid tells me everything about the proposal, how on their winter vacation to Peru, Charlie signed them up for bungee jumping. Right before their leap, she’d turned to my sister and asked if Brigid would jump into forever with her. I sigh wistfully. Because it’s so romantic and so like Charlotte and so like Brigid. Right down to the point where Brigid tells me she’d actually made Charlie repeat the question, since she hadn’t heard the first time, she’d been trying not to pee herself standing on a suspended platform over a steep drop.
At twenty-five, Brigid is the closest of my sisters to me in age, but we couldn’t be any more different. Brigid goes for things. She doesn’t worry about pros and cons. When her last partner broke up with her, she didn’t sit inside for months pondering why. She went to a bar, hit on the first beautiful woman she met, and now they’re engaged.
When she rushes into wedding details, I’m reminded that she
