After tugging down my denim cut-offs to make them decent, I pull the trunk of my Jeep open and grasp the handle of my turquoise Tripp suitcase. Somewhere behind me, a front door peels open, and heavy, familiar footsteps skitter in my direction.
“You need a hand?” Dean calls in his charming American boy drawl. “Looks heavy.” A second later, he’s skipped the dividing wall between our houses and is behind me, the bulk of him warm despite our lack of direct contact.
“Oh. I’m good, cheers.”
He doesn’t step away. And this is my own fault, really. I should never have led Dean on the way I did.
“How’s Harvard, English? Your brain get any bigger? If that’s possible,” he adds, not without boyish pride. That tone a boy’s voice takes on when he once owned you, even if it was just that once…he’s never really lost it.
“It’s getting there.” I throw him a brief glance, complete with apologetic half-smile. “I filed a patent last month.”
“Whoa. Like, for a design?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What kinda design?”
I tap the side of my nose. “I’d tell you, but…”
“…Then you’d have to kill me.” He chuckles, all low, bumpy waves that remind me of when he said naughtier things right in my ear.
God, I should not have indulged him.
“Let me get that.” Dean tugs at my waist gently, pulling me to the side of the car. Then he lifts my suitcase as if it’s stuffed with feathers, not a heap of textbooks and toiletries and clothes. “After you.”
“After…? Oh.” He thinks he’s taking it up to my bedroom. “Oh.”
“Sun going to your head, huh, English?”
I say nothing, just wander over to the door and jam the key into the lock. Inside the house is cool and airy; a fresh vase of ferns and lilies sits on the sideboard, their yellow tongues poking out to greet me. Dean follows, the suitcase dangling weightlessly from his tensed left arm.
“So…you back for long?” he asks as we climb the stairs.
“Just a week or so. How about you?”
“All summer—well, I might go see some friends in the Hamptons, but it’s not far, so whatever. You going back to England, then?”
“No. I’m going to stay with a friend.”
The thick cream carpet on the landing baulks beneath our shoes in crisp little gasps. Every step toward my bedroom feels oddly foreboding; we walk toward memories I’d rather not recall. Tantrums and tears and drapes yanked closed; Dean calling around one dismal evening when I was alone and upset, needing to forget ghosts that would not close their shadow mouths.
Before I can push the door, Dean reaches over my shoulder to hold it open. I spill into solace, drinking in the sight of my neatly ordered bookshelves and red satin comforter, and Dean traipses in behind me, uninvited but clueless. I wish I could hate him for it, but there’s an innocence to him I’ve never possessed, even before I knew the things I shouldn’t. The dark things.
“Which friend?” His voice is lower now. He seems unwilling to set down my suitcase; it’s his tether, his excuse to be present. “Is…um. Is it your girlfriend?”
I drop my keys on my dressing table with a clatter, and freeze. “I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“Only, I saw that picture on Facebook a little while back, and—”
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
Rachel gets upset sometimes because I don’t want to go public. She knows we have to be quiet if we’re going to catch Aeron out—that he’d be suspicious beyond belief if he ever realized our involvement—but it hurts her, the way so many things do. She got drunk one night and posted a photo of us. A private photo. Tagged me in it with a bunch of heart icons usually reserved for pre-teen girls. We were on her bed, wrapped around each other; she bit my earlobe and I had my hand in her vest. The whole thing was awkward and unsettling in its intimacy, not least because I’d told no one of Rachel, and I whipped the thing down in five minutes, but…people saw. And people talk.
After that, I had to hook up with a couple guys on campus just to kill any chance of a rumor. It made Rachel cry.