He said it quickly, and everyone scowled at him.
In sheer mortification, I swallowed hard, blinking.
“Oh my God.”
“Sanders,” Dillon growled.
“What?”
“We don’t talk about it,” Mackenzie snapped, standing up for us. “I’m sure they can hear us, too.”
“Oh, we can,” Tanner mumbled.
This time, Mackenzie blushed. “See? We just pretend it isn’t happening because all of us will have to deal with it at one point. Sorry.”
I shook my head, knowing that I shouldn’t be embarrassed. I might be bright red at the moment, but I still raised my chin.
“You know what, if I’m old enough to have sex, I’m old enough to deal with the fact that others might be able to hear me enjoying it. Sorry.”
“No worries, sounded like you had fun,” Sanders said and ducked Tanner’s fist though he wasn’t fast enough to avoid Mackenzie’s elbow.
I cringed but mumbled my thanks as Pacey handed Dillon and me two travel mugs.
“Here’s your coffee. We’ve got you. And we won’t discuss this again,” Pacey said softly.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
“We might be discussing this again,” Dillon grumbled to Sanders but led me out the back door anyway.
“Sorry about that,” Dillon said.
I shook my head and got into the truck with him. “I should have realized, but I didn’t factor in how loud I would be. Louder than usual.”
This time, Dillon’s smug look made me roll my eyes. “Glad I could make you forget.”
“Jerk,” I mumbled.
“You’re a jerk,” he said, and I leaned back into the seat and smiled.
“Yes, my jerk.”
I was happy. I was trying to find my balance. Maybe I was floundering in some ways, but I was making it work.
I had my friends, I had Dillon, his friends, and maybe I’d be able to work things out with my family. I had to hope so. We just needed some time to breathe, and we’d make it work.
Things were finally starting to work for me, and I would let them.
“Let me walk you in,” Dillon said.
“Dillon, I’m fine.”
“But I want to kiss you on your doorstep. Let me.”
I blushed. “Okay, I’ll let you.”
I smiled again and then opened the front door, only to have the world shatter around me.
“Corinne?” I asked. There was no response.
My best friend lay on the floor, her white pajama top strewn about her as the cup next to her lay shattered, coffee spilled around her.
Her eyes were open, vacant, and I screamed.
Chapter 17
Dillon
I usually had words for any occasion. I was the guy others could lean on if things were heavy or too much. I’d learned to be that way when I moved to Denver and my family had gone through hell. I’d thought I could handle anything. Watching Elise break down, albeit silently, told me I’d been wrong.
So wrong.
I barely remembered my mother’s funeral—not that we’d had one for her. It had only been Cameron and me, as none of her so-called friends had shown. We hadn’t had a graveside service, just a small moment in time when we gathered around the coroner and identified the body. I wasn’t sure if that counted as a funeral or just a goodbye that never made sense. But it was what we had done.
And now I was here at a time of true mourning, a funeral with shattered hopes and dreams and one that was breaking my family and friends.
When we had walked into the girls’ house, everything had changed. Elise had started screaming, and then it finally hit me what we were seeing.
Corinne had only been twenty years old. Healthy, vivacious, and full of life.
And a brain aneurysm that nobody had noticed had taken her life. A brain aneurysm that doctors might not have even been able to see even if they had run scans out of the blue for no reason whatsoever.
Corinne Prince was dead. At twenty years old. And I still couldn’t quite believe it.
I knew Elise didn’t believe it at all. She wasn’t allowing herself to grieve or even think about what had happened.
I wasn’t sure if she could.
As soon as we had seen Corinne, I had tossed my phone to Elise and told her to call 911. Corinne had been home alone, as the rest of the girls had already been out at their classes. No one had been there with her when she died.
I had taken CPR training and had tried to see if there was anything I could do, but she’d had no pulse, no breath escaping her lungs.
But I still tried. If I hadn’t, I wasn’t sure that Elise could have forgiven me. It’d been futile, though. Confirmed when the paramedics said that there was nothing they or anyone could do.
And then they had taken her away. Pronounced her DOA.
Dead on arrival.
She was gone, and it was the most heartbreaking thing I’d ever witnessed. I would never forget the sound of Elise’s scream.
Everything moved at a different pace after. As if waiting for death passed in a blink of an eye when it was proven that life could be shattered in those precious moments. But the paperwork and notifications and process of death took its sweet time.
I wasn’t sure if everybody agreed with me on that, nor should they. After all, nobody had signed up for this, yet here we were, at the funeral of a young girl I was getting to know. One that Elise had loved and had had in her life since they were five years old.
Corinne’s parents stood off to the side, watching the workers lower their baby girl into the ground. I stood with Elise, the rest of my roommates and hers around us as we wondered what we were supposed to do now. You weren’t supposed to die when you were our age. You were supposed to have a life and a future and wonder what choices to make for your next path. You weren’t supposed to watch someone your age die. You weren’t supposed to get there too late to stop it.
But we had. The
