She hung on the side of the door, moving it back and forth. “Lost a lot of blood, but the bullet missed all the organs. Guess we have you to thank,” she said.
Ryan shook his head. “Kelsey got us out of there.”
“Right,” she said. She opened the door wider, and I heard her mumble, “But she also got him in there.”
The house was otherwise quiet, but I saw Jan’s car out front.
“Everyone’s sleeping,” Emma said, by way of explanation. “My dad flew home late last night, and they both spent the night at the hospital.”
I walked slowly through the downstairs, Ryan trailing behind me.
Jan’s house reminded me of a person I used to know. Rooms painted a new color, but the same creak in the floor at the kitchen entrance, which I had forgotten. Something comforting and familiar. Even if it was just a loose piece of wood. I used to share Emma’s room when I slept over, a sleeping bag on the plush carpeting upstairs, but I doubted that was the plan this time around.
“You can leave her stuff in the den,” Emma said.
The den had an old pull-out couch across from an ancient television. You had to step down from the kitchen, and there was a sliding door with vertical blinds leading to the backyard. I stared at that door now, at the windows. The only line of protection.
Ryan dropped my bag onto the couch, and I felt him standing behind me, his hands dropping onto my shoulders.
“Sure you can’t stay with me?” he whispered.
“Ha.”
He pushed the blinds aside so they cascaded against one another in their own makeshift alarm.
“How is Cole?” I called to Emma, but nobody was there.
We heard footsteps overhead, the floorboards creaking, an engine turning over down the street. There was safety in a crowd, in houses all clumped together, with eyewitnesses who could track you down.
Except. Except my mother was taken from a house like this, once upon a time. She was taken, and nobody saw. Before that, there had been years of abuse, and nobody came.
Ryan stood in the middle of the room, looking at the pictures on the shelves. “So you and Cole…,” he said.
“Me and Cole what?” Me and Cole hadn’t spoken in three years until he’d showed up at the hospital. But I remembered, as Ryan must have, the way I pressed my body close to his, whispered in his ear, trying to stop the blood.
“Were you and Cole ever…?”
“Three years ago. For a nanosecond. Before his mother told him to cut it out.” He had shrugged then, and I shrugged now. “Didn’t mean anything. I was just…there.”
I looked through the slats of the blinds. There was a brown split-wood fence encircling the yard, and a tire swing dangling from a tree. And on that tire swing was the place Cole first kissed me. And in this room was where I stood, hiding behind the wall, while Jan yelled at Cole in the kitchen, and where I waited for her to drive me home after. She never said anything to me about it—apparently, I was not capable of making decisions. I just went along with things. And the situation had been handled.
“You’re never just there,” Ryan said.
“I was a girl in his house all the time. That’s all.”
“He still cares.”
“He doesn’t. He’s pissed I disrupt his life. He wanted to hand me over.”
“He wouldn’t have showed up in the first place if he didn’t care. He was scared. He was bleeding, and he was scared.”
We were all scared. And the fear revealed things. About all of us—including me. Something I didn’t really want to know. I felt it down to my bones, clawing its way to the surface.
Ryan scrunched up his nose, and he looked younger, more vulnerable. “I don’t like the way he treats girls, and I really don’t like that he ever kissed you.”
I put a hand on my hip. “Are you going to give me a list of all the girls you’ve kissed?”
He grinned. Shook his head.
“That’s what I thought,” I said.
“Doesn’t change the fact that I hate that you’re staying with him,” he said.
“I’m staying with Jan, who has power of attorney over me and my mother. He just lives here. We have nothing to do with each other.”
He came closer, put his hands on top of his head, like he’d just run a race. “Okay, what I’m trying to say, and what I’m not doing a very good job of saying apparently, is that I want you to be mine.”
My eyes must’ve widened, or my face must’ve turned as red as it felt, because he grimaced, then tipped his head back. “Okay, wait, that sounded creepy. God, why is this so hard? What I mean is, I don’t want this to be a temporary thing. A thing that you’re doing because I was just there.”
I smiled, stepped closer. “You’re never just there,” I said, and he pulled me closer, erasing every memory I’d ever had in this house—
There was a squeak in the kitchen, and Emma stood there, mouth agape. “God, Kelsey, really? Do you have to take everything?”
“What?”
“Hey, hold on—” Ryan said.
But Emma was too riled up. There would be no holding on. I knew this version of her, whose emotions were too close to the surface, ready to tip over…“First my mother,” she said, “then my brother…and you just keep taking.”
“What are you talking about?” Ryan asked.
She pointed at me, her jaw set. “Our lives revolve around her and her mother. Sorry, Emma, we can’t go skiing, Mandy’s had a setback. Sorry, Emma, the job at the Lodge is for Kelsey, she needs it, for legal reasons. Sorry, Emma, drop everything and get to the hospital with Kelsey’s paperwork.” She finished with a hard k, and I backed up—never realizing the depth of her anger. “I thought it would end when I told Mom about you and Cole, but no. It only made it worse.”
“You did what?” I thought Emma and I had drifted apart because of Cole, but it was the other way around. She had been the instigator. She was the reason I had been banished back to my own house. And maybe she had good reason. I was currently standing in her house with a bag of clothes, and her brother was upstairs, injured because of me.
She put her hands on her hips. “And Ryan, I thought you liked Holly.”
He shook his head. “I never said that. I don’t even know Holly.”
“You know her fine. So, you were just stringing her along? Like some asshole?”
He took a step back, hands held up in proclaimed innocence. “I didn’t…I didn’t do anything to make her think that I liked her.”
“Well, you didn’t do anything to make her think that you didn’t like her, either.”
Her words cut, and I pictured Holly in Ryan’s room, in Ryan’s clothes, in Ryan’s bed.
Emma held up her hands, a mirror image of Ryan. “Never mind. Just. Never mind. Do whatever the hell you want, Kelsey. You always do.”
She backed out of the room.
“It’s not like that, Kelsey,” Ryan said, turning to face me. “I didn’t…we never…If I led her on, I didn’t mean to.”
I stared at him, trying to see him through a different filter. Through Emma. Through Holly. Through my mother.
“I think I should go,” Ryan said. “But Kelsey? Call me, okay?”
I watched him go, my arms faintly trembling, everything twisted in my heart. Everything.
I pulled open the bag, about to unpack into the drawers of the television stand. But everything smelled faintly of smoke.
—