Chapter TEN
Chase was in a daze. A sleep-deprived, distracted daze. He had tossed and turned all night, obsessively checking his phone to see whether Ty had called or responded to his texts. U okay?
he’d written. Can we hang out again this week? No response. Just a call from Zach, which he’d screened.
And now he was on his way to a football meeting—a postseason wrap-up session at Coach Baldwin’s house—where he’d be expected to be on. Next year he would be captain of the team, the senior starting quarterback. It was no joke.
He tipped his head to one side, then the other, stretching his neck. He checked his phone again. Nothing. Okay. He vowed to leave his phone in the car and not check it again until after the meeting. He hoped it wouldn’t take more than an hour.
As soon as Chase stepped inside Coach Baldwin’s house—a sprawling ranch near Emily’s place—he sensed it: The vibe was all wrong.
“It’s the local charity case!” Carl Feder, a running back, shouted. Chase looked around to make sure Feder was talking
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to him. Some of the guys laughed, others averted their eyes.
“Yo, Singer,” Andy Barton said. “You need more money for manicures?”
Another voice, from across the room: “You begging for a winning senior season?”
“That’ll come naturally,” he answered with a smirk.
“Recruiters don’t like it when you beg, Singer.” This from Barton again, who sat in the corner with a plate of lasagna in his hands.
These barbs felt different from the team’s usual banter.
“What are you talking about?” Chase asked, addressing no one in particular.
Sean Wagner sauntered over and shoved his phone in Chase’s face. On it was a picture of Chase from last night. The night of the snow angels. Chase saw himself kneeling on the ground, fingers clasped, a pleading expression on his face. Ty must have been just outside the frame. Ty. He barely registered the embarrassment of having been caught in that position—Chase, who had built his entire life around not being humiliated. All he could think was her name. Ty. Ty. Ty. Like a chant, or a spell.
He shrugged, taking a second to collect his thoughts. Then he grinned. “You guys have nothing better to do than follow me around when I’m out with a hot girl?”
“She is pretty hot, Chase. Nice work,” Zach said, appearing from around the corner holding a plate piled high with salad and pasta. Chase nodded, knowing Zach had no idea who Chase had been out with. It was good to know Zach still had his back.
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“Hey, guys—Mrs. Baldwin wants me to tell you that there’s more of those breadsticks in the kitchen,” Zach announced. He smoothly scooped up a forkful of lasagna and winked at Chase as he walked by. “I tried to warn you,” Zach singsonged as he passed. “That’ll teach you not to screen my calls.”
Chase knew that fending off the barbs was Zach’s way of thanking Chase for keeping his mouth shut about what he’d seen yesterday. If any of the guys on the team found out about Zach and Em, it could easily get back to Gabby and ruin Zach’s game. Zach probably hoped the guys suspected something was going on, but was happy to keep them in the dark about the actual details, at least for now. At least until he could tell them on his terms. And that’s where Chase came in—keeping his secrets once again. This was how Zach worked: You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.
Chase shook his head, thankful that Coach Baldwin was calling the meeting to order.
As he moved to take a seat on the couch next to his coach, Barton whacked his arm.
“So, Singer, are you bringing this mystery hot chick to the Feast?”
Chase clasped his hands in front of his chest and pumped them in front of Barton’s face. “I’m begging you to shut the f*ck up,” he said, much to the others’ amusement.
But even still, his hand instinctively went to his right pocket to check his phone; he clenched his fist as he remembered that he’d left it in the car. What if Ty was calling right now, and he missed it? His breath caught in the back of his 120
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throat, the same way it did when his shirts weren’t steamed correctly, or when he left his playbook in his locker overnight.
He needed to fix this.
But Coach Baldwin was asking him something about the South Portland Red Riot defense, and he struggled to focus.
The team might think he was pathetic, but they still needed him as a leader. That’s how the next forty-five minutes went—
Chase would tune out, Coach would ask about this tackle or that passing play, and Chase would snap to, answer as best he could, picture himself on the field, running fast, running past the others.
The teasing stopped. They were talking about the Super Bowl, about the Patriots offense, and, when Coach went into the kitchen to refill his 7UP, about how Amy Cushman had taken off her shirt in Minster’s hot tub toward the tail end of the party. It all sounded like background noise to Chase. And then, when he thought he couldn’t stand it anymore, the meeting was over. He bolted. He didn’t even bother to say good-bye to the others—just threw a nod in Zach’s direction as he left.
He didn’t care that none of them went out of their way to say good-bye to him, either.
He ran to his car, fumbled with the keys to unlock the door. Sitting in the driver’s seat, hands shaking, he opened his phone. Nothing but the time blinked back at him. He threw his phone down in disgust.
He turned the key in the ignition and left the phone where it had fallen, on the floor on the passenger side. He didn’t care.
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Baldwin’s driveway, trying to distract himself by picturing York’s offensive lineup in his head, when he heard it.
Beep-beep-beep.
Chase practically crashed into the mailbox at the end of the driveway as he leaned down, his foot still on the gas, going backward, trying to grab the phone. He threw the car into park, picked up the phone, and then he couldn’t stop smiling. It was her.
He almost didn’t want to read the message; he could have stared at her name for the next hour.
Want to come over today? I need you!
Chase’s heart pounded. Not only would he get to see Ty but he’d get to see her house—he knew that was a great sign.
But he tried to play it cool. Yeah, that would be great.
She responded almost immediately. Okay. Come to 128 Silver Way.
Chase pulled into the gravel lot of the new mall, scanning the chicken-scratch directions he’d copied off his laptop, wishing he had a phone with GPS—or Internet at all. Wait. This is Silver Way? Like many old towns, Ascension had lots of tiny roads—
but still, this seemed weird.
The mall, only halfway completed, sat huge and hulking up ahead, monolithic and boxy with a gaping hole at the end where an “atrium” was planned. No wonder people—kids and local reporters alike—called the place the Behemoth. The air was dead quiet except for the distant hum of construction cranes and drills. The place was covered in tarps, so the workers could work in the cold.
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He must have missed a turn somewhere. This couldn’t be right.
But sure enough, there was Ty, emerging from behind a low concrete barrier, picking her way through the snow and gravel and around orange cones, wearing high heels and a tiny denim skirt. Her hair was tied back with some kind of little scarf, and the thin white streak in her hair glowed in the winter sunset. Chase got out of the car.
“Um, this is where you live?” He swallowed hard. He really didn’t know the first thing about this girl. What was she doing climbing around a construction site?
“Yeah, I live in that pipe,” she deadpanned, before breaking into her silvery laugh. “Of course I don’t live here, silly. Come on.”
She grabbed his hand and tugged him away from the car.
As usual, Chase felt a shock of electric recognition as soon as they touched. The day-old snow crunched beneath their feet as she led him behind the Behemoth, toward the woods that surrounded it. Chase could see a narrow path cut into the trees. They passed the landscape of gravel and concrete into the shadows of the snow-covered pines. The snow here was untouched, and Chase’s boots sank into it as they walked.
Night was starting to fall, and the path was barely marked, but Ty blazed confidently forward. Chase stumbled along behind her, trying to keep up. It seemed like she was skimming over the snow.
“So you don’t live in that pipe, but you do live in the Haunted Woods, huh?”
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“The Haunted Woods?” Ty slowed for a moment, looking at him over her shoulder.
“Yeah—everyone says these woods are haunted by ghosts . . . oooooooohhhhh,” Chase said with a shrug, trying to sound dismissive. “It’s just this dumb story people tell.”
“I’ve never heard that! Tell me about it—I love ghost stories.” Her eyes flashed and she sucked her bottom lip under her teeth. It made her cheekbones even more pronounced.
“It’s just some crazy stuff people say to make Ascension seem more interesting. If there are ghosts, they’re probably wasted from leftover beer and secondhand pot smoke—there’s a clearing to the west of here where kids like to hang out. No neighbors around to call the cops, you know. Some of the parties get pretty nuts.”
Ty turned and squinted, like she was trying to remember something. “I heard some story once about these weirdo sisters who used to live out here, like, hundreds of years ago. Do you think they’re the ones who stuck around?”
“I haven’t seen any ghosts around here yet,” Chase said.
“But if there are any, I’ll protect you.”
Ty smiled and kept walking.
“We’re almost there,” she said, squeezing his hand.
The nearly full moon illuminated a house around the next bend in the path.
“There it is.”
In front of the shingled house, which had big, dirty windows and a peaked roof with a stone chimney, there was a small patch of charred-looking grass. There didn’t seem to be a drive-124
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way, and Chase couldn’t see any other structures farther down the path.
Chase’s thoughts were like cards being shuffled in his brain. This was Ty’s old house? Did Ali and Meg still live here too? Maybe the house was foreclosed. Maybe her family had gone broke or could never sell it. She told him she had moved away. . . .
Suddenly, everything made total sense. No wonder they understood each other so well. Ty got it—they were both anom-alies among Ascension’s population of rich a*sholes.
“It’s not much, but—”
Chase cut her off. “It’s cool. Let’s go inside.” His brain kept up its mad shuffle, considering and reordering different scenarios, different explanations for Ty’s mysterious background.
Maybe when her family had left Ascension, they’d left in a hurry? Maybe her family was in some kind of trouble. Maybe her parents were in jail and she couldn’t go to college because she had to pay off some bills. Maybe her father was in the mob and they were on the run.
Maybe, maybe, maybe . . . The word drilled endlessly in his mind. He wanted to ask her these questions—to know everything about her. But he didn’t want to scare her off, either. He knew that just seeing her home was a huge step. He didn’t need to push things any further unless she offered. He could sense that, like him, she wasn’t a big fan of discussing the past.
Ty went into the house first, walking in the dim light over to a floor lamp that flickered on at her touch. The large, wood-paneled room was nearly empty. A few hard-backed chairs sat 125
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in the living room next to a blackened fireplace; a rickety table in the kitchen. The windows didn’t have curtains and there wasn’t one electronic device to be seen except for an old-school radio. A can of paint sat on the floor in what may have once been a dining room.
Chase took it all in, silently. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw something moving, slithering by, but when he whipped around to look, he saw nothing but a shadow in a bare corner. So they must have sold almost all their furniture. Okay.
It was creepy, but he tried to remember how nervous he got whenever anyone saw his pathetic trailer. How much it stung to be judged by what you owned instead of who you were.
“It’s creepy down here,” Ty said, as if reading his thoughts.
“Let’s go upstairs.”
On the second floor, in her bedroom with slanted ceilings and white wallpaper, the house seemed brighter. Her little room was littered with clothes and shoes and ripped-out pages from magazines, just like so many chicks’ rooms he had seen. He loosened up a bit, looked at the perfumes on her dresser and wondered which one, when uncapped, would fill the room with Ty’s scent.
Ty sat on her bed, watching him. She looked so calm—not worried at all about what he’d think of her. From beneath the skirt, her long legs stretched out in front of her and she lay back a bit, on her elbows. He’d never noticed how defined her arm muscles were.
Chase reached into his back pocket.
“I wrote something for you,” he said, heat flooding his face. “Here.”
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Ty reached up languidly to take the paper, the paper with Emily’s poem on it. While she read it, Chase went to the window, trying to calm his thumping pulse. He could feel his veins throbbing. It was quiet. In the distance, he could see the lights of the highway casting their glow upward, above the trees. The moon shone high and bright. He wondered how often Ty stood here, just staring out into the night, watching the snow.
“You wrote this?” She stood and came up behind him. The hairs on his neck and arms raised in response to her nearness, to her smell. “For me?”
“Yeah. It’s not much, you know,” he said, suddenly feeling kind of shitty about the fact that he hadn’t actually written it.
At least the sentiment had been there. “But I’ve been thinking about you.”
“It’s really beautiful,” Ty said. He turned to face her, to make sure she wasn’t just humoring him, and he felt her lips graze his cheek, just an inch from his mouth. “Thank you,” she whispered.
It was the closest they had ever been. Chase’s whole body throbbed. The smell of her skin, the slightest touch of her hair against his arm—it made his head spin. He turned his face fully to hers, hoping for a real kiss on her red, slightly parted lips. But she’d already backed away.
“I was wondering,” she said. “Will you help me with something?”
Chase raised his eyebrows. “Of course. What’s up?”
“Well . . .” She hesitated—and for a second she almost seemed embarrassed. “This place . . .” She laughed self-consciously and 127
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shrugged. “There’s no other way to say it. It’s pretty much a shit hole right now. I was wondering if you’d help me paint one of the rooms downstairs. I’ve been trying to fix things up around here.”
Instantly, he understood. She was ashamed of the house.
“You got it,” he said, grinning slowly.
She smiled and grabbed his hand. Once again, he had a creepy feeling as they descended the stairs to one of the dark, empty rooms below. Ty disappeared and came back a moment later with newspapers, which she spread over the floor in the room with the radio and paint can.
She opened the paint—a vivid red color. A bit of a strong choice, but Chase wasn’t exactly an interior decorator.
“I’ve got a roller and a brush,” she said, pointing to her supplies. “Which do you want?”
“I’ll take the roller,” he said. He felt good—helpful. She needed him. As he rolled up his sleeves—he really didn’t want to get paint all over himself—Ty clicked on the radio, tuning it to a fuzzy oldies station. She hummed as she readied her brush.
The first swath of red spread like blood out of a fresh wound, quick and bright. This was fun. He liked the way the bold color covered over the dingy white. And as he drew the roller back and forth, high and low, he knew his arms looked good. Strong.
“Have these walls always been white?” he asked offhand-edly, but he was dying for any speck of information she would give him.
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“As far as I know,” Ty said. “But red is my favorite color. I always wanted to be surrounded by red. What’s yours?”
“My favorite color?”
Ty nodded.
“I guess I’d have to go with maroon and gold,” Chase said.
“Team colors.”
“Close to my colors,” Ty said with a smile. “What about your favorite food?” She was over in the corner now, carefully brushing paint next to the window. It seemed like she was digging for more information too.
“Chinese, I guess,” Chase said, cursing silently as a few specks of red splattered onto his jeans. “I love crab rangoons.”
“Mmmmm,” Ty said, and he was so distracted by her licking her lips that he almost didn’t notice that she already had red paint all over her shirt. She caught him staring and looked down. “Oops. I’m a slob.” She laughed and flicked her brush in his direction. “Now we match,” she said, as a few splotches of red landed on his shirt.
He forced a laugh, a guffaw that sounded hollow in the empty room. “Good one,” he said dryly.
“Sorry,” Ty said, looking concerned. “Are you annoyed? Is that a good shirt?”
“What?” He looked down as though just seeing the spots for the first time. “Oh, whatever. No biggie.” He shrugged, and as he did, more paint dripped onto his pants leg and shoe.
He looked down and then at her with a bemused expression.
“See? No big deal.”
Ty’s sudden burst of laughter was almost worth knowing 129
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that he’d ruined a pair of pants—and certainly enough to make him abandon all hope of staying clean this evening. She took her brush, dipped it into the paint can so that it was really dripping, and drew it up her arm, along her neck, and into her hair.
The red of the paint clashed with the burnt maroon of her hair.
He laughed, too, this time for real. “Let’s finish this wall,”
Chase said, and they did, flicking paint at each other between brushstrokes. Chase tried to focus on how great it felt to be with Ty, rather than the fact that he’d need to throw away these clothes tomorrow. After a while, Ty stepped back to survey their work. It was dark outside, and the only light came from the bare bulb screwed into the ceiling. Still, the wall was practically pulsing with the vibrant red. She looked at him for his opinion and wrinkled her nose.
“You’re so cute. You’re covered in paint!” Ty said, coming a bit closer.
“No worries,” he said, hoping he sounded nonchalant.
“I have this miracle stain-remover stuff,” she said, pointing toward the kitchen. “It cleans everything. I could . . . We could use it to get the paint off?”
“That’s okay.” He really wanted to play it cool, but she was making it difficult, the way she kept inching closer. And then she was tugging at his collar, her warm fingers brushing against his neck.
“Really . . . Why don’t you take this off?” She said it playfully, pulling the little white scarf out of her ponytail as she spoke, so her hair flowed down around her shoulders. She tugged at both arms of his shirt. Then she tried a different tac-130
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tic, pulling his shirt up from the bottom. His stomach showed and he unconsciously flexed his abs.
Her hands were on his skin now.
Before either of them could have time to think twice, he bent down and kissed her, hard, on the lips. It felt . . . amazing. Like a wave had broken over his head. Like he was swimming in water so cold it pricked his flesh. He could feel her lips turned up in a smile as they kissed.
“So, can I wash your clothes?” She pulled away. “Come on. Don’t be shy,” she said, motioning for him to take them off.
Chase took a deep breath. He felt pulled by the same otherworldly connection that he’d felt that first night, after Minster’s party, and again at the club under Benson’s.
“I will if you will,” he said.
And then, just like that, she was taking her clothes off, right in front of him. She stepped out of her skirt and pulled her shirt gracefully over her head. Then she stepped first out of her right shoe, then the left, then no bra, then no underwear. Chase had seen girls naked before, but this was new. This was not the fumbling, dim-lit hookups he was used to, full of tangled bra straps and annoying button flies. There was no self-consciousness.
There was no strategic posing to cover the things that girls worry about covering. No trying too hard. There was just . . . Ty.
Morphing from clothed to unclothed like a swimmer emerging from underwater—smoothly, sleekly, as though it was the most natural thing in the world. Happy. And despite the obvious sexiness of her body, her confidence, her hair falling just so over her shoulders and onto her chest, the action felt somehow 131
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not sexy. Ty took her clothes off the same way some people put theirs on. The way Chase put his on, like they were a costume, or a shield against the outside world—the physical representa-tion of the confident, smart, talented man he wanted to be.
Thunderous waves pounded in Chase’s skull, cold and salty.
He took his shoes off, and then his socks. His shirt came off next and he stood there, bare-chested, not sure whether to take the next step. Ty came forward and gave him a fleeting kiss.
“Now your jeans,” she said, running her fingers lightly along his waistband. He felt shivers race along his spine.
“Ty . . .” He trailed off, not knowing what to say. He unzipped his jeans and stepped out of them.
Ty looked him up and down slowly. At least he knew he looked good.
“There’s a little bit of paint on your boxers,” she said. “Did you know that?”
He really hadn’t seen it. “Um, no, it’s fine,” he stammered.
“I put it there on purpose,” Ty said with a wicked smirk.
She was standing so close he could feel her breath on his shoulder.
Well, what the hell. He’d gone this far. Chase took off his boxers and stood as defiantly as he could, stark naked, in Ty’s red room.
“You are so hot,” she breathed into his ear. And with that she was out of the room, holding all his clothes, shouting, “This’ll only take a second,” from the other room. Chase shifted from one cold foot to the other as he waited. His heart was pounding. He wanted her so badly.
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When Ty returned to the room, she had something in her hand, but it wasn’t his clothes. “They’ll need to soak for a few minutes,” she said, “and then we can throw them in the dryer in the basement. In the meantime . . .” She waved her hand in the air. It was holding a digital camera. “I want to remember this forever.”
Chase just stared. She wanted to take pictures of him? Like this?
“You . . . you have paint on your arm,” he said. It was all he could think of.
“So? It’ll look cool,” she said.
“I can’t even remember the last time I had my picture taken,” Chase said, “except for the yearbook, or at some random party.”
“Just a few?” She pushed out her lower lip slightly. It was the hottest pout he’d ever seen. He couldn’t go much longer without kissing her again.
As if she read his mind, Ty came forward again, nuzzling into his neck, kissing it once. “Okay,” he said with conviction.
What they were doing felt hotter, more intimate, than hooking up ever could. She started to snap photos, the lens moving like it had a mind of its own. He stood there shifting on his feet at first.
As she snapped, he felt himself becoming fixated on the f lash. It was like she was hypnotizing him. Words started pouring out of him suddenly. “I’m serious. There are almost no pictures of me in the world. There is, like, one photo of me and my dad from when I was a kid,” he told Ty, finding that 133
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the words just f lew out of his mouth, almost breathlessly.
Ty listened while she looked through the lens, her milky body glimmering in the moonlight from the window and the dim light from the bare bulb, reflecting off the red walls. “He wasn’t around much, you know. Even when he was there—
physically present, I mean—he wasn’t. And my mom . . . there are pictures of me and her, a few.” Chase was swimming; time was water and he was free-floating through it. He sat down on the floor, legs out in front of himself, almost forgetting he was naked. “But sometimes I feel like they’re supposed to be proof that she stuck around, you know? Not actual happy pictures but evidence that I even had a childhood.” His throat felt hot and sticky all of a sudden, so he stopped talking. Instead, as Ty came closer, he grabbed the camera to take a few shots of her. Her pale white breasts; her stomach, so smooth and soft looking. It was surreal, like he was taking pictures of a perfect statue in a museum. She stayed still while he snapped three pictures, then she leaned forward, taking the camera back from him gently.
“I know what you mean,” Ty said, and resumed taking pictures. “But here we are—making new memories. These are actual happy pics, right?”
“Yeah.” Chase cleared his throat and laid down on the bare floor, staring up at the speckled ceiling. The cold wood cooled his flushed skin. “It’s just so hard, you know? I’m all my mom has but—I can’t help resenting her sometimes. I just get so focused on my own shitty life, obsessing that I won’t be able to make it . . . to make it better. I am so scared of just being what my dad was. Of failing like that . . .” The words were getting 134
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tangled in his head, pouring out of him from some unknown place. He couldn’t believe he was saying all this stuff, in front of a very naked, insanely gorgeous girl.
“You’re too scared, Chase,” Ty said, crouching next to him to get a better angle. All of a sudden she wasn’t smiling anymore. Her face looked pale, her bright red hair splaying everywhere. “Fear is dangerous.”
He watched her as she stood up suddenly and sashayed over to the paint can. She bent over it, and as she did, he scanned the room. At his feet was the tiny white scarf her hair had been wrapped in earlier. He decided he would take it. Later, when his jeans were washed, he’d stuff it in his pockets. He wanted to remember this day, too.
When she stood up again, Ty’s hands were dripping with red paint. She’d just stuck them into the can. He looked to her for an explanation but part of him knew better at this point than to try to guess what was about to come out of Ty’s mouth.
Nothing did. Instead, without saying a word, she walked over and drew a blood-red line across Chase’s clavicle, from shoulder to shoulder. Then she laughed. She rubbed her whole hand down his left arm. “Now we match again,” she said.
She was out of her mind, there was no doubt about it. But he liked it—he more than liked it. Spontaneously, Chase went over to the can and thrust his own hands into the cold, thick paint. Then he turned her around and drew three parallel lines down her back, from the nape of her neck to the small of her back, just above her perfect round ass. Touching her was even better than photographing her. The slippery paint against her 135
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smooth skin was magical. Chase couldn’t stop, and he didn’t want to.
He grabbed the red paint and with his pinkie traced a tiny heart on her sternum. Then he took her hand, still dripping with the same red paint, and drew it to his own chest. There, he led her thumb in the shape of a heart. He stared into her green eyes and she looked at him, smoldering, too. Whatever Ty was doing to him, it was official: He was hers.
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