“Try me.”
Then her hand was on my thigh, and she was crawling up me like I was a tree, Nikki Drummond, drunk and hungry, straddling me, grinding me, tonguing my lips and tugging at my hair, saying something about how she hated it so short, then cutting off the thought by taking my fingers in her mouth and sucking, hard. Her breasts felt bigger than I remembered them, looser somehow, and there was a trickle of drool at her mouth.
“Get the fuck off.” I pushed her hard enough to hurt and hoped that it did.
“Come on, you know you want to.”
You know how they say desperation isn’t sexy? Bullshit. An ugly drunk without a shirt, wheezing rum and aiming herself at me like a torpedo of need? Pushing her away felt like kicking a puppy, and I got off on that, too.
“Maybe I’m fucking in love with you,” she said, doing that half-laugh, half-cry thing that middle-aged women do in bad movies. “Did you think of that?”
“Frankly? No.”
She sat back. “Why the fuck did you even show up, then?”
“I want to know what you want.”
“Was I not clear?”
“What you want to stay away from her.” I would have given it to her, Dex. Anything.
“You’re fucking kidding me. You want me to believe you came here to talk about Hannah?”
“Her name is Dex.”
“Uh-huh. Keep telling yourself that.” She laughed again. She’d amped up her acting skills since the last time we talked. She was nearly approximating human. “I get it, what you were doing. But we don’t need her anymore.”
“Since when is there a fucking we, Nikki?”
“You’re not serious.” She was touching me again, sweaty hands on hands. “What do you think your precious Dex would say if she actually knew you, Lacey? Is that what you really want, someone who can’t see you? Someone who thinks all your bullshit is for real?”
“Stop talking.”
“It’s almost a year,” she said.
“We don’t talk about that.”
“You don’t think about him? You don’t think about me?”
For a second, she almost had me. The stink of desperation, the sheen of moisture in her eyes, the pressure of her hands: She was so good at playing her part that, even knowing everything I knew, I almost bought it, that she missed me, that all this time she’d been secretly in love or lust, that she’d clawed her way into your life for the same reason I’d hung onto your father, that she didn’t hate me anymore for what we knew about each other, that the things we’d done to each other in the woods had meant something, hadn’t been a hateful joke. Maybe I did buy it, just long enough to tell her the truth, and tell it almost gently. “Not anymore.”
She let go.
“You came here for her,” she said, and there, in the flat affect, the vacuum of her expression, was the real Nikki. “To tell me to stay away from her.”
I nodded.
“But why would I stay away from my good friend Hannah?” She was slurring; it was hard to tell how much was rum and how much was effect. “I’m protecting her. Saving her from the big bad wolf.” She smeared a hand across her nose and wiped the snot on her jeans. “Like I should have saved Craig. I’m good now. I do good works. Like Jesus.”
“I need to know what you’re going to do, Nikki. Are you going to tell her?”
Laughing again, she wouldn’t stop laughing. “Tell who? Tell what?” Then she clapped her hands together. “Oh, I get it! All this crap about staying away from Hannah—that’s not about her, that’s about you.”
“No.”
“You’re not afraid of what I’ll do to her. You’re afraid of what I’ll tell her.”
“They’re the same thing.”
“No, Lacey. One is about her. One is about you. Normal people know the difference.”
“Don’t hurt her just to fuck with me.”
“Let’s be clear. I don’t care about fucking with you any more than I care about fucking you.”
“Then why are we here?”
She left without an answer. We both knew the answer.
I made it worse. I tried to warn you, and you didn’t listen, and that part’s your fault, but the rest of it, that’s on me. What she did next. What that made you do. It was all my fault and not my fault at all, same as everything else.