BETH
Straw is soft to lie on.
Sort of scratchy.
Comfortable.
Great for weightlessness.
It smells musty and dusty and dirty. The corners of my lips flinch in a moment of joy. Musty. Dusty. And dirty. Those words flow well together. Staring at the shadows from the light created by the camping lantern Ryan found in the corner of Scott’s barn, I inhale deeply. I’m finally high.
Not pot high. Ryan’s too straitlaced for that. Airy in alcohol would be a better description.
Three beers. Isaiah would laugh his ass off. Three beers and I’m floating. Guess that’s what happens when you stay sober for a couple of weeks in a row.
Isaiah.
My chest aches.
“My best friend is pissed at me and I’m pissed at him.” I’m the first to break the silence beyond the crack and hiss of beer cans popping open and the rustle and cooing of birds in the rafters. “My only friend.”
In slow motion, Ryan rolls his head to look at me. He sits on the ground with his torso sloppily supported by a stack of baled hay. A glaze covers his light brown eyes. I give him major props. At six beers, the boy has drunk me under the table. Correction—under bales of hay. “Which one?”
“Isaiah,” I say and my heart twists. “He’s the guy with the tattoos.”
“Is the other one your boyfriend?”
I mean to chuckle. Instead, it comes out more of a snort and a hiccup. Ryan laughs at me, but I’m so weightless I don’t care. “Noah? No, he’s helplessly in love with some insane chick. Besides, Noah and I aren’t friends. We’re more like siblings.”
“Really?” The disbelief oozes from Ryan. “You don’t resemble each other.”
I wave my hand frantically in the air. “No. We’re not related. Noah can’t stand me, but he loves me. Takes up for me. Like siblings.”
Love. I purposely knock the back of my head against the ground in frustration. Isaiah said he loved me. I search the cobwebbed corridors of my emotions and try to imagine loving him back. All I find is a hollow emptiness. Is that what love is? Emptiness?
Ryan narrows his eyes for a deep-in-thought expression, but six beers in an hour tells me he probably spaced out. “So you don’t have a boyfriend?”
“Nope.”
Ryan cracks open another beer. I start to protest as he has infiltrated my stash, but decide against it. I want weightless, not puking. I have to return to Scott’s in three hours and coherency will be required.
“Why is Isaiah mad at you?” he asks.
“He loves me,” I say without thinking, and immediately regret it. “And other things.”
“Do you love him back?” That’s the fastest Ryan has responded since his second beer.
I sigh heavily. Do I? “I’d throw myself in front of a bus to push him out of the way.” If it would save him. If it would make him happy. That’s love, right?
“I’d do that for most people, but it doesn’t mean that I love them.”
“Oh.” Oh. Then I have no idea what love is.
“What other things?” he prods.
Other things? Oh yeah, Ryan asked why Isaiah is mad at me. I shake my head back and forth, causing the straw to crackle. “You wouldn’t understand. My problems…” My mom. “My family isn’t perfect. We have problems.”
Ryan chuckles and sips his beer.
I rise on my elbows. “What’s so damn funny?”
Ryan tilts back the beer and I watch his throat move as he swallows. He crushes the empty can in his hand. “Perfect. Family. Problems. Gay brothers.”
We’re obviously not talking about me and Isaiah anymore. “You’re drunk.”
“Good.” Even inebriated, the ache I saw earlier while he was carrying me out of the Jeep darkens his eyes.
“Is that why you got defensive with the football asshole?” I ask. “Because you have a gay brother?”
Ryan tosses the can near the other empty ones and rubs his eyes. “Yes. And if you don’t mind, I’d prefer not to talk about it. Or talk at all.”
“Fine.” I can do silence. My arms fall over my head as I plop back onto the straw. Isaiah would let me talk. I could rattle on about anything…ribbons and dresses, and he’d placate me when I questioned whether I was too harsh with Noah. Sometimes I think about what life would be like if I gave Echo a break. I mean, she does make Noah happy and Isaiah likes her. Sometimes she’s cool.
“You’re talking,” says Ryan. “In fact, you’ve been talking since you finished your first beer.”
I blink and close my mouth, not having realized that I had verbalized a thing.
A black bird flaps its wings overhead, creating a shadow on the ceiling. Images of a deadly archangel coming to destroy us all enter my mind. The bird grows more agitated and the other birds fly to a beam on the opposite side of the barn. He takes off into the air and smacks the wall, dips down, flies across the barn, and rams into the opposite wall. My heart thunders with every hit. I watch with wide eyes and shaking hands. “We have to help him.”
I jump up and stumble toward the barn door. Struggling for balance, I force one of the doors open with a loud creak. I lean against the frame and wait for the bird that’s damaging itself over and over again to escape. “Go! Get out of here!”
“Shut the door,” Ryan says. “Birds are stupid. If you want it out, you’re going to have to trap it and drag it out.”
I gesture wildly into the open night. “But the door is open!”
“And the bird’s so panicked that it’ll never see the opening. All you’re doing is inviting your uncle to come in here and find us. Unless you’re ready to go home, close the door.”
The bird smacks itself into the wall again and flutters to a nearby beam. He ruffles his feathers over and over again, then finally draws in his wings to rest. My stomach rolls in torture. Why can’t the bird see the way out?
“Who’s Echo?” asks Ryan.
“But the bird…” I say, ignoring his question.
“Doesn’t understand you’re trying to help. If anything, it sees you as a threat. Now, tell me, who’s Echo?”
I take a deep breath and close the door. I want the bird to find freedom, but I’m not ready to go back to Scott’s. Thanks to my impaired state, I half walk, half trip back to my bed of straw. Damn bird. Why can’t something be easy? “Noah’s girlfriend.”
“That’s a screwed-up name,” he says.
I giggle. “She’s a screwed-up girl.” I stop giggling and remember how Noah looked at her: as if she were the only person on the planet, the only person that mattered. “But Noah loves her.”
That must be love: when everything else in the world could implode and you wouldn’t care as long as you had that one person standing beside you. Isaiah has it all wrong. For many reasons. He doesn’t love me. He can’t. For starters, he doesn’t look at me like Noah does Echo. Besides, I’m not worthy of that type of love.
The bird hides its head under its wing. I understand that feeling of wishing the world would go away. If I had wings, I’d hide underneath them too.
“It’s just a bird, Beth. It’ll find its way out eventually.”
Something deep and dark and heavy inside me tells me it won’t. The poor bird will die in this damn barn and will never see blue sky again.
Straw rustles and Ryan drops beside me, stirring dust into the air. He clumsily rolls onto his side to face me. His warm body touches mine and his eyes have a strange intensity. “Don’t do that.”
My heart trips over itself. Ryan kept his hat off and I like it more than I should. His hair kicks out crazily in the back and it gives a boyish charm to a face that belongs to a man.
“Do what?” I ask, ashamed that my voice comes out a little breathless.
His eyebrows inch closer together and he moves his hand near my face. He stops and so does my breathing. Ryan stares at my lips and then caresses my cheek.
“You do that a lot.” His finger slides steadily to the tip of my mouth. My skin tingles under his touch. “Look sad. I hate it. Your mouth turns down. Your cheeks lose all color. You lose everything about you that makes you…you.”
I lick my lips and I swear he watches. His finger pauses before tracing another teasing path across my cheek. My pulse quickens and heat spreads through my body. His touch—oh God—feels good. And I want good. So much.
But I don’t want him. At least, I don’t think so. “Are you stalking me?”
His lips burst into a bright smile and he withdraws his hand. “Welcome back.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
Ryan does it again—his smile. The one that makes my stomach flip.
“I like you,” he says.
I raise an eyebrow. He must have snorted some crack earlier, or maybe he’s doing that steroid crap. What do they call it? Juicing. Yeah. The kid is definitely juicing. And drunk. “You like me?”
He shakes his head and it’s a strange clumsy mix of yes and no at the same time. Ryan is sloshed. “I don’t know. The way you talk. The way you act. I know what I’m going to get from you, but then I don’t. I mean, you’re unpredictable, yet I know whatever reaction you’re going to give me is real, you know?”
Officially cutting him off, I slide the few remaining beers from him and conceal them in the hay while trying to keep his eyes on me. His declaration of “like” has placed him in the category of beyond intoxicated and there’s no way I can lug him home. “You mean you like knowing that our conversations will end with me telling you to go fuck yourself?”
He laughs. “Exactly.”
“You’re weird.”
“So are you.”
He has me there.
“Is there anything you don’t pierce?” Ryan stares at my belly button. My shirt must have ridden up, exposing the red jewel dangling on my stomach. On my sixteenth birthday, Isaiah paid for my belly button piercing. At seventeen he paid for the tattoo. Both times he came up with the “consent.” Isaiah is crafty like that.
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
Ryan’s eyes flash to mine and I see he understands the innuendo. I laugh when his cheeks turn red. “What are you, Ryan?”
“Did you just ask what I am?”
I nod. “Why would a jock be holed up with me in a barn, drinking beer, when he could be screwing half the female population at school? You aren’t fitting the profile.”
His eyes search my face and he ignores my question. “What’s your tattoo mean?”
“It’s a reminder.” It means freedom. Something I’ll never have. My destiny was built for me before I sucked in my first breath.
“You’re doing it again,” says Ryan. And he touches me again. This time on my stomach, yet his eyes hold mine. His finger lightly explores the edges of the jeweled ring. Tickling me. Entrancing me. Taking my haze higher. And that’s exactly where I want to go—higher.
“What would you say, Ryan, if I said I didn’t want to be alone?”
His fingers slip to my side and his warm palm clings to the curve of my waist, inching me and my body slowly toward heaven. “I’d say I don’t want to be alone either.”