All It Takes (10 page)

I kind of feel like an asshole, though. But Star just smiles at me, looking up at me through her dark lashes.

“They’re kind of shitty, I know,” she says. “I’m not a very good artist.”

“I am,” I murmur, and then freeze when I realize I’ve spoken aloud. I wait a beat. Then two. Three. Then I tear my gaze away from her arm and look up at her. She’s staring at me, a little furrow forming between her brows.

“You are?”

“Shit,” I say, and drop her arm and pull myself out of my crouch, trying to put some distance between us. “I didn’t mean to say that. Your drawings are fine.”

“My drawings look like they were done by a twelve year old on Ritalin,” she says, and instead of just letting it go, she stands and turns to face me. “Now what did you say about being an artist?”

“Oh god,” I say, and reach up to scrub a hand over my face. I am giving too much of myself to this girl, sharing too much. And the damnedest thing is, I want to.

But I can’t. How the hell can I keep my distance when I keep letting her get close.

“Wait here,” I tell her, and then walk down the porch, around the corner, and through the gate.

I could just get in my car,
I think.
Get in my car and just drive away. Then we’d never have to talk about this, and I’d actually be able to stay away from this girl.

But I don’t. When I reach my car, instead of swinging open the door and sliding into the driver’s seat and tearing off down the road, I just lean in and pull out the hardback book I keep on the passenger seat. I don’t even let myself think about what I am doing on the walk back. Because if I do, I’ll chicken out.

“Here.” I thrust the book out to her. She blinks at it, then at me, like she isn’t sure what I’m doing. I sigh, embarrassed. “Just take it,” I tell her. And she does.

She opens the cover, and immediately sinks back down to sit on the step. “Holy shit, Ash.” She says, flipping through pages. “Did you really draw all these?” She goes from page to page, through my sketches. Sketches of Bruiser as a puppy, the yard at the prison I spent five years in, the hallway at Avenue High where my friends and I used to hang out when we should have been in class. They’re decent, but they’re nothing special. I only picked up drawing because it made girls dig you and simultaneously managed to keep me out of trouble in high school. After all, when I was busy drawing, I wasn’t busy doing things I shouldn’t have been doing.

It was a damn shame that I let it fall to the wayside after I got with Gina. Oh, I would sketch here and there—after all, it’s how I managed to get my ex to go out with me in the first place—but it wasn’t anything serious. I only picked it back up for real again after the crash, when I had to do something to keep me busy, or risk going crazy while I was in prison.

But from the look on Star’s face, she seems to think they are okay, and I’m not about to argue with her.

I shove my hands into my pockets as she flips from picture to picture. “Yeah,” I say, trying to keep the embarrassment out of my voice. She tilts her head back and looks up at me.

“I’m serious,” she says. “These are really good.” She smiles at me, and I kind of nod—because what the fuck am I supposed to say to that? Thanks?—and she turns back to the sketchbook. She runs her finger down the page with my drawing of my beach hideaway, and lets out a sigh. “My dad used to draw,” she murmurs, her voice so low I barely hear her.

She’s never mentioned her dad, except for the fact that he died. Not once in the weeks we’ve been working together has she supplied any other little detail about him. And because I’ve never developed an adult brain-to-mouth filter that actually works when it’s supposed to, I blurt that out before realizing what I’ve done and then try to kill myself with my brain.

Luckily, Star doesn’t seem to notice the fact that I’m an idiot. “Yeah. He died when I was really little.” She flips another page. It’s a drawing of a lizard this time, one I did when I finally managed to get my hands on some colored pencils in the joint. Greens and reds and yellows. I went nuts. “But the stuff he drew . . . it was awesome, but it wasn’t like this. This is real. It looks like it could walk off the page. You’re kind of talented, Ash,” she says, turning her head to look at me slyly. “I hope you realize that.”

Now I’m blushing like a twelve year old. Fan-fucking-tastic. “What did your dad draw?” I blurt out, trying desperately to cover my embarrassment.

Star’s face . . .
God
. It just splits into this huge smile, like just thinking about it makes her so freaking happy. “Cartoons. He used to draw me cartoons. Pages and pages of them. There was this one, this little duck. It was so cute. He used to do this crazy duck-voice that didn’t fit at all—he made it sound so
angry.”
She laughs, and all I want to do in that moment is draw her, all her long lines and gorgeous curves. My fingers start to itch with want. “It was so much fun,” she says, but then her face changes, turns sad, and after a moment I realize why. She misses him. She misses him real bad.

“I mean—” she looks down at the sketchbook, runs her fingertips down the edge of the page “—I loved my mother. She was sick and hurting and wasn’t able to take care of me, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t love her. But my dad… All the memories I have of him are good ones. It’s . . . it’s different, somehow.”

“Do you still have any of the drawings?” I ask. But I already know the answer before she shakes her head and flips the sketchbook closed. She hands it back to me.

“If any of them even still exist, they’re in there,” she nods toward the house. “Somewhere. I was hoping I’d be able to find one or two of them, but honestly…” She sighs. “Honestly, I had no idea that the house had gotten this bad. Even if they’re still in there somewhere, I doubt we’ll be able to find them. Not when I need to get this done on deadline. We don’t have time to sort through every single piece of paper.”

“Yeah,” I say, because what the hell else is there to say? She’s right. It’s pretty much impossible. But still, I’m going to try to keep an eye out, anyway. She deserves to have something of her dad. And if I can, I’m going to find it for her.

We sit in silence, until finally the minutes stretch into miles and it turns awkward enough that I can’t take it anymore. “Okay,” I say, and force out a laugh as I reach up and rub at the back of my neck. “This has gotten pretty fucking grim.”

Star chuckles uncomfortably and pulls her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them in a hug. “Yeah,” she says. “Sorry about that.”

“That’s okay,” I say, but even now, the silence starts to drag on and on. All I can think about is the fact that Star’s leaving, and that, no matter what I do, she’s probably going to end up having to leave Avenue without a single good memory of her family to take with her. And it sucks. Honestly, I don’t think she’s going to have a single happy memory of Avenue as a whole. Not after everyone has been treating her like crap, and I know a lot of that is because of me.

That’s when it hits me, and a grin starts spreading across my face. I don’t even try to smother it.

“Hey,” I say, and Star tilts her head back again to look at me, and every single damn time that happens, I get a punch in the gut. She’s so damn beautiful. In another life, maybe things could have been different. If her mom hadn’t messed up, if I hadn’t been such a fuck-up, maybe we could have been something. Something good.

Coulda, woulda, shoulda,
I think. I can’t change the past. But I sure as hell am going to make the best of the present. I raise an eyebrow at her and set my sketchbook down on the porch. “Want some help pissing off the good people of Avenue?” I ask.

A smile tugs at the corner of her mouth. “What do you have in mind?” she asks, and I know I’m grinning like an idiot when I reach out my hand to her.

“Give me some of those markers,” I say. “And you’ll find out.”

Twenty minutes later, Star has the lizard from my sketchbook living on her shoulder, and her smile keeps shining long after the ink has dried.

Chapter 10

Ash

T
here are six sofas in the living room. Six. Seriously.

Why the fuck are there six sofas in the living room? Who the hell could ever need that many sofas? And how the hell did Star’s mom even manage to get them in here by herself? Because she must have done it somehow. Unless she had a load of friends that disappeared into the woodwork the day she died, she did this all on her own. And I just can’t wrap my head around it.

My extreme fucking bafflement must show on my face, because Star just kind of shrugs at me and goes, “Yeah . . . I have no idea.”

We found the first one by mistake when we were trying to carve a path through the piles of stuff. Then we found the second one. That’s when we started to wonder what we were up against, and started climbing on the piles and digging through shit to figure out what was underneath. The answer? Six goddamn sofas. I’m dumbfounded.

But now that I know they’re there, I can’t help but eye one of them, trying to figure out how comfortable it is by sight alone. They’re all piled high with stuff, but they seem to be okay, and even if they’re not, they’re still starting to look pretty tempting, especially since I’ve been sleeping in the backseat of my car for the past
month.
It’s not the end of the world—don’t get me wrong, I’d rather have the car than have nothing—but for the past week I’ve been sharing it with Bruiser. And while having my dog back is amazing, and the big lug is awesome in many different ways, he isn’t exactly what you would call
small.
He takes up almost as much space in the car as I do.

Also, he fucking
snores.

“Well,” Star says, hands on her hips as she surveys the mess in front of us. The living room is now a maze of paths and mountains of stuff, so while we can navigate it, it isn’t exactly welcoming. “The way I see it, the sofas are good news and bad news.”

“So, par for the fucking course, then,” I say, because every time we seem to catch a break, we get blasted with another setback. I have no idea how we’re going to get this done by the end of the summer, if we ever get it done it all. We’ve only just gotten the backyard done, and all we’ve managed to do inside is carve out these paths and get the worst of the trash out of the living room. We haven’t even touched the kitchen yet, other than to snag utensils and steal canned goods when we can manage to reach them. We’re a month in and we’ve barely made any progress at all.

Long story short, we’re fucked.

I groan and scrub my hands through my hair. It’s fucking
scorching
in here. Again. It’s even worse than it was outside, and that’s saying something. “What’s the good news?” I ask, because we could really use some at this point.

“The good news is that this means the piles in here aren’t as high as we thought they were,” she says. And that makes sense. The sofas take up a lot of space so they push everything else up closer to the ceiling. Okay, that’s not so bad. That actually means there’s a lot less shit in here than I originally thought. That’s . . . something.

“And the bad news?” I ask, because I know it’s coming and I figure I might as well get it over with.

Star sighs and kind of rolls her neck. It’s like she’s trying to work the kinks out of it. It makes her hair dance around her shoulders and draws my eyes like a magnet to the glistening skin above the neckline of her shirt. Part of me—a huge fucking part of me—starts hoping that the heat will continue to rise and that she’ll strip down to her bikini top like she did the other day. I wince and tamp that thought down as fast as I can, before the heat pooling in my belly can turn into anything real.

Do not perv on Star,
I remind myself for the thousandth time since I met her.
She’s hot as hell, but she’s also your kind-of boss. And she’s the only person in this town willing to take a chance on your stupid ass. Don’t blow it.

She runs her hands through her hair, pulling it up off her damp neck and piling it up into a messy bun on the top of her head. Then she lets it go, and it falls like a black tidal wave down her back. I swallow. Hard.

“The bad news,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest as she surveys the mountain of stuff in front of us. “Is that there’s no way the sofas are going to fit in either of our cars, not unless we strap it to the roof and drive insanely carefully, and I can’t afford another Dumpster. Not yet, anyway. So I have no idea how we’re going to get them out of here.”

Shit.

She’s right.

We’ve been jockeying stuff to the dump between my car and her mom’s old station wagon ever since they hauled away the Dumpster when it filled up. And that had been nothing in comparison to this, it had only held the stuff from the backyard. This was a hell of a lot more. I have no idea how much the Dumpster cost her, but judging by the look on her face when she got the bill, well . . . we weren’t going to be getting another one any time soon.

Fuck.

I turn to her to ask what the plan is, but the instant I open my mouth the sound of a car horn fills the air, cutting me off. And it’s the loudest, longest fucking car horn I’ve ever heard, and I turn away from the sound with a wince. But as I do, something flashes through my memory, and I feel my body freeze. All at once, I’m back there, the night of the accident. And all I can hear is the sound of the guy I killed as he honked his car horn frantically. I can see it, hear it. It plays over and over in my mind. The sound. The lights. The pounding of my heart as I realize I’ve lost control of the car. The screech the tires make against the asphalt as I try to stop, but go careening toward him despite everything.

Shit.

I squeeze my eyes shut and shove the heel of my hand into my eye socket, trying to block it all out.

“Ash?” Star’s voice cuts through me like a knife and I pull in a deep breath and hold it until my chest starts to burn. Then I let it out slowly, trying to calm the beating of my heart. I drop my hand back to my side and open my eyes. She’s staring at me, her confusion plain on her face. But there’s more there.
Shit,
I think.
I scared her.

“Ash?” she says again. “Are you okay?” She steps closer to me, lays a hand on my arm, and I force myself to nod, to focus on the feel of her skin against mine, clasping onto the feeling like an anchor to hold myself in the here and now.

“Yeah,” I say, nodding shakily. I hate what this does to me, the flashes I get. “Just…” I blow out a breath. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here, what I’m supposed to say. All I’ve ever been able to do is wait it out, and eventually the sounds and the images fade back into half-forgotten memory. I look down at her, and I realize with a jolt just how close she’s standing. She’s right in front of me, looking up at me with those big brown eyes of hers.

Fuck,
I think.
I could just reach out and touch her.
Six inches. That’s all it would take. I could just lean forward, close the distance between us and kiss her. I’m moving before I know what I’m doing, and Star’s eyes flicker from mine down to my mouth and back up again.

And the car outside blasts its horn again and I jerk away.

“Jesus Christ,” I say, pulling back and trying to get my muscles to unclench before I get pulled under again. “What the hell is all that honking about?”

“I have no idea,” she says, stepping back. I let myself mourn the loss for an instant, then shake it off. I shouldn’t be kissing her, anyway. I shouldn’t even be
thinking
about it. She gives me one last once-over with her eyes, making sure I’m okay, and then turns away. I watch as she starts navigating the path we cleared to the front door, and then I follow. I want to find out what the hell is going on out there.

Star jerks open the front door and together we step out onto the porch. Bruiser, who decided that the single sofa we managed to get cleared off now belongs to
him
and has spent the last hour napping on it while Star and I surveyed the rest of the mess, is now hot at my heels. He’s sniffing the air, his ears folded low, like all of the survival instincts he picked up over the past five years are suddenly on red alert, and he’s waiting for an attack.

He might have the right idea, I realize when I lay eyes on the truck. I take an instinctive step back when I see it.

It’s this huge shit-kicker pickup, old and blue and rusty around the edges. It looks like it must belong to some kind of gigantic redneck that goes by the name Bubba.

Beside me, Star stands frozen, and all at once all the muscles in my body have tensed back up again and I feel like I’m about to head into a brawl. Beside me, Bruiser growls low in his throat, and I reach out and grab him by his collar, holding him back. Whatever is about to happen—and something is going to happen, of that I have no fucking doubt—I don’t want Bruiser to be the one to start it.

The truck’s passenger door swings open suddenly, and Bruiser barks at the movement and lunges forward. I look down and jerk him back before he can make a break for it. Then I look back up, and I
freeze.

What the hell?

I watch as a plump brunette hops out of the cab of the pickup. She’s got a smile on her face so big that she looks like she could light up the night sky with it. There’s a slam and a figure emerges from the other side, rounding the nose of the truck and heading for the front path. It’s a dude, but he’s far from the bible-thumping, squirrel-shooting redneck I’d been picturing. This guy looks more like a Mormon or something. His dark hair is all neatly cut and styled, and he’s wearing a pair of khakis that I can see from here have been ironed. Not to mention the dress shirt he’s wearing that he’s actually
tucked into
the pressed khakis.

Who the hell are these people?
I wonder. Beside me, Bruiser lets out another bark and I hiss at him to be quiet. I turn to Star, hoping she has some idea of what’s going on.

But what I see when I turn to look is
not
what I expected. At all.

Star . . . The only word that I can come up with to describe the look on her face is
joyous.
She looks like she just won the lottery, and she hasn’t had time to decide if she’s going to freak out and start screaming or if she’s going to start crying. She looks
so happy.
And it makes something inside me lurch.

I can’t believe how gorgeous she looks.

Before I can ask who these people are, she’s off the porch and racing toward the couple. The girl from the truck all but squeaks with joy, and opens her arms and catches Star as she barrels full-speed into a hug. The guy just stands there, hands in his pockets, smiling at the two girls. But his smile is fond. There’s affection there, and I try to make the thought of this straight-laced Mormon-looking dude and badass Star fit together in my brain. But as I’m twisting and turning this information over in my mind, I see Star’s hand shoot out, and watch as she grabs the guy by the front of his immaculately pressed shirt and yanks him into a reluctant group hug.

I . . . do not know what’s going on here. I glance down at Bruiser and find him staring up at me, his big puppy eyes full of confusion. His tail thumps once against the slats of the porch, as if to say
Well?

Apparently Bruiser doesn’t know what to make of this, either.

Star

I
can’t believe they’re actually here. What were they thinking? This is ridiculous. They drove through two states to get here. Who
does
that?

My friends are un-freaking-believable. I can’t believe how much I’ve missed them. I don’t think I even let myself feel it, until they were staring me right in the face.

I smile and shake my head as Autumn leans down and ruffles Bruiser’s ears. I can’t believe they’re here. I honestly feel like if I close my eyes or turn my head or even let them out of my sight for too long, Autumn and Roth will disappear.

I can’t remember ever being this happy, except for when I got into college. But that was different. That was my own achievement. That was happiness mixed with pride. This is something different. This is the friendship I’ve waited all my life for, a friendship big enough to make my chest hurt from their kindness.

This is what Ash felt when he found Bruiser. I just know it.

My smile is so big that my cheeks are starting to hurt, but I can’t stop. Bruiser is feeding off the energy, and is racing about like he’s having the time of his life, rushing back and forth along the length of the porch, stopping for pets and cuddles, before squirming away and racing off and back again.

Ash, on the other hand, seems kid of . . . wary.

“So . . . ” he says, shifting his weight from his heels to the balls of his feet and back again in an awkward little sway. He’s got his hands buried deep in the pockets of his jeans, as though he has no idea what he should do with them, so he’s just decided to take them out of the equation entirely. “How long are you guys staying?”

“Just for the weekend,” Autumn says, giving Bruiser one last pat before she pulls herself back upright. “It’s a really long drive, so we’re going to have to head back early Monday morning. We’re sorry we didn’t come sooner,” she says, turning to me. “But we figured the long weekend was the best time to do it.”

Holy crap. Is it almost the Fourth of July already? I can’t believe so much time has passed. It feels like the last time I blinked it was the beginning of June. The realization is like a pit in my stomach. It’s already been a month and it’s felt like days.

How much longer until I’m forced to say goodbye to Ash. And worse, how much longer will it actually feel?

Crap. I shake my head, trying to rid myself of those kinds of thoughts. My friends are here, and that is something to celebrate.

“What are you guys even doing here?” I ask. Because as happy as I am to see them, it isn’t like Avenue is a hopping vacation resort. “I mean, I’m happy you’re here, but it’s kind of boring. We can show you the lake, I guess, but . . . ”

“Ugh, we’re here to help you, Star,” Autumn groans out, and her words take a second to sink in.

“You mean—”