Faster We Burn

chapter Ten

Stryker

As the day wore on, the relatives departed, including Grampa Jack who gave me a hearty handshake, another wink, and a bit of advice.

“Treat that girl right, you hear?”

“Yes, sir.” He wheezed all the way down the steps as Katie’s Aunt Carol helped him into the backseat of the car.

Mrs. Hallman was still shooting me disapproving looks whenever she could, and I had about had it. Yes, there were those people who were into body modification that got mad when people stared at them, but I wasn’t one of them. People stared. Get over it. If you didn’t like it, don’t go out, or don’t get modified.

I’d told Zan that people judged you and put you in a box when they first met you. Mrs. Hallman had seen me, and put me in the “troublemakers who shouldn’t be allowed near my precious daughter” box. It was both scary and disconcerting that she hadn’t put Zack in that box.

I’d put my violin away, and Katie and Kayla were catching up while Adam listened, when I saw my chance. Mrs. Hallman was cleaning the kitchen, again, and Mr. Hallman had manufactured some excuse to leave the house. Smart man.

“Mrs. Hallman?” I wasn’t going to buy her telling me I could call her Regina. “Could I talk to you for a moment?” She paused as she wiped the counter with a sponge, her back to me. I probably shouldn’t have snuck up on her. Bad idea.

She stiffened, as if what I was asking was a huge inconvenience. I wasn’t going to beg, so I waited.

“Fine.” She put the sponge in the sink and faced me, crossing her arms.

“You don’t like me, and I get that, but I just wanted to thank you for opening up your home to me and letting me stay. You could have shut the door in my face. I know you wanted to.”

She tried to hide her shock, but it still took over her face for a few seconds.

“I know you judge me by the way I look, and the funny thing is that you’re wrong. You let that monster, Zack, near your daughter and the first time I saw him, I knew what he was. That night that she went to see him, I told her not to go. She probably didn’t tell you that, but I knew. I knew he would do this to her.” Her face went white and then red with the speed of a traffic signal.

“How dare you? How dare you accuse me of putting my daughter in danger? I’m only letting you be here to keep the peace with Katie, but I’m not so sure I want you spending the night in my home. I would appreciate if you would just leave.” She crossed her arms, standing her ground.

This had been a mistake. A huge mistake.

“How dare you?” I hadn’t heard Katie come up behind me. “Mom, seriously? Just give it a rest.”

I jumped in before they could lunge at each other’s throats. I’d done enough damage already. “No, it’s fine. Thank you for the lovely meal, Mrs. Hallman.” I went to the living room and grabbed my violin and then to the guest room to pick up my coat where Katie had left it earlier.

“You’re not leaving, are you?” Katie followed me.

“I shouldn’t be here. I’m just causing problems for you, and I don’t want that. You shouldn’t have asked me to come. I don’t want to be the guy who makes you fight with your mom, so I’m going to go.”

“You’re just going to leave because my mom doesn’t like you? I don’t care what she thinks.”

She sat down on the bed, and tried to take my coat from me.

“Yeah, I think you do. She’s your mom, Katie. Even if you have a fight, you know she’ll always love you and always be on your side. My mom tried to sell me for drugs once.”

“Stryker.” Her wide brown eyes begged me and I wanted so much to give in and stay. Oh, I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I didn’t belong here.

“Just let me go, Katie,” I said, yanking the coat away from her and put it on. She wasn’t going to make this easy on me. I was going to have to go into dick mode. “Leave me the f*ck alone. Don’t call me for sex anymore, because I can’t do it. I’m not your slave, and I’m not a guy to bring home just to piss your parents off. Just leave me the f*ck alone.” I slammed the door open and stomped through the house and out the front door. Katie tried to catch me, but I was peeling away from the house before she even got down the porch. I’d done a quick getaway more times than she could imagine.

As I accelerated down the street, I turned on my radio and found the loudest, most obnoxious music I could, which turned out to be some weird punk version of a popular song. I hit the gas even though the speed limit was 25. I was probably going to get a speeding ticket, but I didn’t give a shit. I realized too late that I’d driven the wrong way from Katie’s house, but I wasn’t going to turn around so I just kept driving.

My GPS was yelling at me, but I ripped it off the dashboard and threw it in the back. I’d find my way back. My phone started blowing up, so I grabbed that, turned it off and tossed it in the back as well.

I hadn’t been this pissed in a long time. I hadn’t f*cking cared this much in a long time, if I was being honest.

Realizing how much I cared caused me to blow a stop sign and get an angry honk from another driver. I saw a sign for the highway and turned. I had no f*cking clue where I was.

I followed the signs and got onto the highway going in the right direction to get back to school. I pushed the accelerator and got in the passing lane.

“Get f*ck out of my way,” I growled at everyone who wasn’t driving at least seventy-five miles an hour.

The faster I drove, the more I realized how much I wanted to go back and apologize and tell her we could work it out. That we’d find a way. That we could go back to just being f*ck buddies, if nothing else.

But I couldn’t, because I wanted more, even though it would never, ever work.

I was a guy who she’d fool around with in college before meeting someone better and then she’d tell her own daughter stories about me when she was doing the same thing. I was the cautionary tale.

I wasn’t husband material. I wasn’t boyfriend material. I wasn’t forever love material. I was ‘guy you f*ck’ material.

It wasn’t until I realized that I was nearly out of gas that I pulled into a gas station and stopped. I had a moment of weakness and found my phone in the backseat and turned it back on. Yep, I had a million texts and messages from Katie. I couldn’t read them, because I knew they would pull me back.

“You f*cking idiot!” I said, banging my hand on the hood of my car. That earned me a nasty look from a mother walking by with her two young children. She hurried to get them into the car as if I was going to come over and try to kidnap them, or sell them drugs.

“Yup, that’s right. I was totally going to steal your obnoxious kids and do really bad things to them,” I said to myself.

The pump clicked off and I screwed the cap back on my gas tank. I knew what awaited me back at my apartment. Nothing. No one. Trish was with Lottie, Zan had gone home to his parents and everyone else was with their families.

I was fine with being alone.

I threw my phone in the backseat, but something caught my attention, so I picked it up. It was one of Katie’s pink pearl drop earrings. Her dad had gotten them for her birthday, and I knew how much she loved them.

The earring glinted under the fluorescent light of the gas station. The pearl was perfectly round and unblemished. I shoved it in my pocket and got back in my car.



Katie



I sat on the porch after Stryker left me, wondering what to do. Half of me wanted to get in my car and go after him and beg him to come back, and the other half wanted to find him and beat him senseless.

As the two different instincts wrestled, I called his phone. It went straight to voicemail.

“Look, I’m super pissed at you right now, and that was a dick move leaving like that so would you please come back so I can yell at you and then we can be friends again?” I paused, unsure of what to say that would make him reconsider. “It would suck if we weren’t friends anymore. It’s not just about the sex. I’d miss you.”

I hung up before I said anything else. I also texted him a few times for good measure. I was freezing my ass off, but I didn’t want to go inside because I knew they were all talking about me and Stryker. The front door opened and I turned my head to make sure it wasn’t Mom. I couldn’t talk to her right now without saying something I would regret later.

“Hey, Katiebug,” Kayla said, throwing a blanket over my shoulders. “You wanna talk?”

“Nope,” I said popping my lips on the ‘p.’

“I figured. I know everyone’s been giving you advice and I know how much that pisses you off, so I’m not going to give you advice.”

“Good.”

She sat down next to me and I held out the blanket so we could share it.

“You know, the first time I met Adam, I was trying to hook up with his friend?”

“Really?”

She laughed and shook her head. “Yeah. It was the night before we were leaving on our plane and we all decided to go out. I was totally crushing on his friend Robbie, but he didn’t seem to be into me. Then I just started talking to Adam because he was standing right next to him. He seemed so cocky that I was totally turned off at first, but then a few hours later I couldn’t get him into bed fast enough.”

I really didn’t need that part of the story. “Ugh, too much information.”

She continued. “So anyway, I thought I didn’t like him. I kept telling myself that I didn’t like him, that I just liked how I felt when we hooked up. It took me an entire week to realize that the feeling I had when we hooked up was no different than the feeling I had when he made me laugh, or said my name, or even when he was in the same room. It was love. Yes, it started out as lust, but that changed pretty fast.”

“You said you weren’t going to give me any advice,” I said, moving closer to her. My fingers were numb and any moment, my teeth were going to start chattering.

Her eyes went wide an innocent. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I was just telling you about the first time I met Adam.”

I rolled my eyes and wrapped the blanket tighter.

“We should go inside. My ass is officially frozen,” Kayla said, getting up. “Come on. You can hide downstairs with me and Adam. We could play Hot Lava.”

Mom’s furniture obsession had started before she had us, so when we were kids we assumed everyone else had a basement full of furniture they couldn’t use. We often spent rainy afternoons hopping from chairs to dressers to get from one side of the room to the other, pretending the floor was lava.

“I think we’re both a little too big for that. I’m not sure Mom’s new table, oh excuse me, sideboard, could take us standing on it.”

“I think she has a problem,” Kayla said as we walked slowly back into the house. The blast of warm air was so shocking compared to the air outside that it almost hurt. I flexed my red fingers to try to get some feeling back into them.

The living room was quiet except for Adam humming to himself while reading a book that I knew didn’t come from my house.

“Where’s Mom and Dad?” Kayla said, rubbing her arms.

“They went to their room. A little chilly out there?” He closed the book and took Kayla into his arms.

“I’m going to my room,” I said. I wanted to try Stryker again, but I didn’t want an audience.

“I’ll bring you some tea or something,” Kayla said.

“Thanks.”

I heard Mom and Dad talking softly in their room as I went upstairs. I shut the door and called Stryker again, sitting back on my now-bare bed. Nearly all of my pillows were on my bed at school.

“Hey, it’s me again. I just wish you would come back. Or I could come to you. Did you go back to school? I really wish you’d answer your phone. I really wish you were here. I really wish things could have been different. I wish we could back to when you dared me to eat the pie. You still owe me a date, by the way. So just…call me back. Even if it’s to tell me to leave you the f*ck alone. I just don’t want it to end like this. It can’t end like this.”

I ended the call and looked around my room. Stryker was always asking me why I was obsessed with pink.

Yeah, I had to stop thinking about him. I grabbed my phone again and called Lottie.

“Hey, roomie! Are you in a turkey coma yet?” Her Thanksgiving had obviously been better than mine.

“Well, it kind of blew up in my face and Stryker stormed out.”

“He did what? What happened?” I heard Trish talking behind her, asking if she was talking to me because Stryker hadn’t called her back.

“Trish, seriously. I can’t hear her when you’re yelling in my ear,” Lottie said, and moved away from the noise.

“Okay, I’m alone now. So what happened?”

“It was so stupid. My mom was completely unprepared for him, and I knew she was going to freak out, but I hoped she wouldn’t and then she did, and then I tried to fix it and we ended up fighting and he got pissed and left. I’ve called him a million times, but he’s gone. I’m such an idiot.”

“What did your mom say?”

“Oh, she didn’t really say anything specific. She just treated him like he’d just gotten out of prison, and wouldn’t stop glaring at him. Honestly, I don’t blame him for leaving. He wanted this perfect Thanksgiving and it got ruined.”

“That’s not your fault.”

“Yeah, it kind of is. I shouldn’t have let him come in the first place. I knew Mom would react like that. I should have told her, but what then? She wouldn’t have let him come, so then I would have told him he couldn’t come, and I couldn’t do that. Lottie, what am I going to do?”

“I’ll get Trish to call him and see where he is. He’ll probably answer for her. Let me tell her the situation and I’ll call you back, okay? Don’t worry, this is fixable.”

I said goodbye to Lottie and stared at the pictures of my high school friends and me that were plastered all over my wall. I took a shit ton of pictures, I realized. I got up and looked at them. God, there were a bunch with Zack in them. I pulled one after the other off the walls, scattering them on the floor like leaves ripped from the branches of a tree.

I looked at my face in picture form, grinning back at me. I didn’t know that girl. The girl who smiled at Zack like he’d found the world and handed it to her. F*ck. Him.

I tore down the rest of the pictures until my walls were mostly bare.

My phone rang, interrupting my redecorating.

“Hey, so Trish can’t get a hold of him either. He’s gone off the grid,” Lottie said, a little out of breath.

“Shit,” I said, letting my back slide down my bare wall until I was sitting on the floor. “He’s probably on his way back to his place. I should go apologize.”

Someone knocked on my door.

“Yeah?” I said, putting my hand over the phone. Kayla poked her head in the door, only glancing at the pictures that littered the floor.

“Brought you some tea.” She held a mug out and I took it, setting it next to me.

“Thanks.”

“You should come talk to Mom. She’s really upset.”

Yeah, I bet she was.

“I’ll be there in a second.” Kayla nodded and waited in the doorway.

Lottie had been waiting patiently, but I could hear her talking to Trish as well. I banged the back of my head against the wall.

“I don’t know what to do, Lot.”

“Just fix things with your mom and deal with him tomorrow. He just needs some time to cool off. Okay, Trish, you can talk to her. Here’s Trish.”

The phone was passed as Kayla gave me a look that said she was waiting for me to come with her.

“Look, he does this. He runs and then he feels bad about it and comes back the next day. Trust me, he’ll be back. This is his thing. The best way to deal with it is to let him have his time. You don’t want to chase after him, because he’ll just run away again. But he always comes back if you let him. Like a boomerang.”

“If you say so,” I said.

“I do say so.”

“Trish, I’m sorry.”

She scoffed. “Why are you apologizing to me? Save it for him. Not that he’ll let you. He hates apologies.”

“Great.”

“I’m telling you, this is not a big deal. He’s done worse. Many times. Be glad he’s not still going through his binge drinking phase. That was a great time.”

“You don’t think he would do anything stupid?” I said softly.

“Over this? No way. This is nothing. Relax, girl. He just needs a breather.”

“Okay.”

“Okie dokie, here’s Lottie. Don’t worry, bye.”

Lottie came back on and I told her that I had to deal with my mom so she agreed to give me updates if Stryker contacted Trish back.

I grabbed my tea and walked into the kitchen where Mom was sitting at the dining table, her eyes blotched from crying.

“I’m sorry, Katie.”

That made two of us.