Fragile Darkness (26 page)

They ended up together, but when they turned onto the street with the shotgun houses, Dylan had already slipped back to the courtyard.

“We were looking all over the place when we heard shouting and saw two guys running from back here,” Deuce said.

“He said one of them was Will,” Jessica said. “The other one had on a jester mask.”

Deuce sprinted after them, while Jessica ran to the courtyard and found Dylan by the fountain, then me. Somewhere along the line she called Detective Jackson, who'd kept in touch with her since last fall.

Dylan stared off toward the door with the “B”. “He came up from behind me.” The paramedics wanted him to sit, but he refused, standing all Dylan-still instead, with his bloodstained shirt in a heap on the ground, a big white bandage at his side, and against his left breastbone, a small tattoo I'd never seen before.

A green dragonfly.

I slipped toward him, stopping when I saw the way he stiffened.

“I should have stopped him.”

I'd never heard his voice stretched that thin. I could tell he blamed himself for what happened. But that's not what I saw. “You did,” I said. “If you hadn't been here, he would have come back for me.”

His eyes darkened, but he said nothing, just stood staring at something only he could see.

By the time a patrol unit drove us back to the condo several hours later, the only questions remaining were ones we couldn't answer.

Where was Will? Who followed us there? And how much had they overheard?

*   *   *

A cardboard box sat outside the door, and thankfully, Aunt Sara wasn't home.

Red. That was the first thing I saw when we stepped inside the condo. The disturbing color screamed from the walls, uneven streaks and swirls and drips that had dried inches before reaching the tarps scrunched against the floor. Bold and dark and angry, it was like bucketfuls of blood had been thrown at the soothing sage walls.

Three open paint cans sat by the ladder.

“Mile High?” Deuce asked, looking at me as Dylan set the box on the table. “Red?”

It looked more like a crime scene than a room in midrenovation. “Yeah,” I said. “She keeps changing it.”

I made myself look away. “Anyone hungry?” I asked lamely.

No one said yes.

“Dad sent over a camera,” Dylan said, and with the words, I saw the quick wince, the way he automatically lifted a hand to the bandage at his side.

It wasn't white anymore.

“You're bleeding,” I whispered. Everything was.

He glanced down, frowning. “It's not bad.”

He was so lying. I'd seen him by the fountain. I'd seen the gash torn into his side. I knew what could have happened. “Maybe you should go home and get some of that salve you used for me.” The one that reduced deep gouges to faint welts in only hours.

Only a few feet separated us, but it might as well have been miles. He stood by the plastic-covered sofa, watching me carefully, as if I was the one who'd been knifed. His chest expanded with each rhythmic breath, sending the dragonfly tat into a slow-motion flight. “I'm not leaving.”

My breath caught.

“And,” he said, and finally the stone of his expression cracked, freeing the faintest twitch at his mouth, “I don't need the salve.”

I couldn't stop staring. “Then—”

“Just a bathroom.”

Delphi wandered over to say hello, smears of red paint dotting the white of her fur.

“Trinity.”

I looked up.

His eyes gleamed. “I'm okay.”

My throat knotted.

“And I'm going to stay that way,” he said more quietly. “And so are you.”

I swallowed, knowing I needed to say something, but not sure what. “There are clean towels.”

And then he was gone, turning to limp down the hall and vanish into the bathroom. I stood watching him, not sure why each beat of my heart felt more like a rip.

“What about clothes?”

It took a second for Jessica's words to register. “What?” I asked, blinking her and Deuce back into the condo.

She was holding Delphi, running a thumb along her little pink nose. “For Dylan,” she said. “He can't put the bloody ones back on.”

I hadn't thought about that. Grateful to have something to focus on, I hurried to my room, hesitating before turning in. We'd done this before. We'd lived this moment, but the other way around. That very first night Dylan had taken me to his apartment, to get cleaned up after I fell into the river. After my shower, he'd given me a T-shirt that hung to my knees and gym shorts.

My T-shirts and shorts were never going to work.

Swinging back to Aunt Sara's room, I let myself in and wandered to her closet, thinking she might have a pair of sweats that, while not necessarily fitting Dylan, might make it over his thighs. And she loved big T-shirts. She was bound to have something.

Clothes hung neatly on both sides of her closet, dresses and pantsuits to the left, shirts and blouses and slacks to the right. It was a ridiculous time to grin, but the image flashed as I ran my hand along silk, of Dylan in a ruffled blouse and—

Shaking it off, I dropped to my knees and slid plastic tubs from beneath the clothes. The first held swimsuits. The second held purses. The third—

Everything started to rush, an invisible vacuum sucking all the air as I hung there, staring at the two stacks of neatly folded men's clothes. My stomach turned. Bile backed up. My chest hurt.

Why in the world would she keep LaSalle's clothes?

But the second the thought formed, memory rushed forward. He'd spent a lot of time here. They'd cooked and hung out, worked on projects for the shop and watched movies.

Had he spent the night? I scrolled through their months together, but couldn't find any morning that I'd awoken to find him here. I'd always felt bad that my presence was cramping her love life. He'd never spent the night. I was sure of that.

Intrigued, I leaned forward, running my hand along a black T-shirt.

Black.

That's when it hit me. They were all black, the shirts, the sweatpants, even the flannel pajama bottoms, which turned two shades of black into a plaid.

Black.

Julian, I realized, smiling softly. My aunt had some of Julian's clothes.

After selecting pajama bottoms and one of the five identical shirts, I carefully replaced the tubs and left the room, hesitating outside the bathroom.

“There are clothes by the door,” I said, setting them down.

Over the rush of the water, I heard Dylan's voice, but not his words.

Needing to do something, I headed for the box on the table, but stilled when I noticed Deuce watching Jessica dragging her finger along the wall.

“It was green this morning,” I said as if that mattered.

She shifted, and the random lines and circles became tall, skeletal trees with moss dripping from branches. “It's what she feels inside.”

Aunt Sara.

Jessica was right. My aunt was an artist. She expressed herself through her work. When she was happy, her art was sweet and simple. When she was stressed, even her jewelry got darker, lots of twisted metal and asymmetrical designs.

The room, the room she'd painted three times in the past three days, was a reflection of what Aaron LaSalle had done to her.

Hugging myself, I watched Jessica trace the the stick-like scene my aunt had painted, the birds in the trees with featherlight clouds and a sun sinking against the crimson horizon.

“Sometimes it helps,” she murmured. “You don't even know what you're painting until you step back and it's there.”

I couldn't stop staring. “I didn't know you painted.” Didn't know a lot about her, actually.

She glanced back through a tangle of wavy hair, flashing a smile that erased six full months and threw me back to the first day of school, when I'd seen her across the courtyard with Chase. Her hair had been long and wavy, and she'd been smiling.

Even in the conservative white shirt and blue skirt of the Enduring Grace uniform, she'd been beautiful.

I saw it all over again, for the briefest sliver of a moment, before the shadows crowded back into her eyes, and the months returned.

She stepped back, inspecting what was more of an etching than a painting. “Up until a few months ago, I couldn't.” Her sleeve slipped, revealing the bracelet Chase had bought for her. “Or at least I never tried. My parents aren't crayons and finger paint kind of people.”

I stared at the soft strip of leather, identical to my own, except with different words:
FAITH, BELIEVE, TOGETHER.

“Now I love it,” she said. “My dad got me an easel and I'll go in the backyard and paint for hours.”

To let out what she felt inside. Because of what LaSalle did to her. To us all.

“Sometimes Chase would sit with me,” she whispered. “Sometimes I'd swear he still is.” Hesitating, she glanced at Deuce, who flashed her one of his Deuce-smiles before she turned back to me. “I think that's how I knew to follow you today.”

I felt myself get really still.

“You need to stay away from that guy Will and those parties,” she said. “They're bad news.”

Several things hit me at once, how bizarre it was to have Jessica in my condo with red smeared along her fingertips, warning me, and the fact that she knew about Will.

“I know things are bad right now,” she said, stepping toward me. “But taking chances isn't the answer. You're playing with fire—”

I don't know which happened first, if she stopped, or my eyes widened as another piece of the puzzle drifted into place.

“You sent that text,” I realized, the one at Club Rouge:

People who play with fire get burned. Go home now, while you can.

Dark hair slipped against her face. She made no move to push it back. “Yeah,” she said quietly. “I did.”

Of all the possibilities I'd considered, she'd never crossed my mind. “But why?”

“Because I could see how much you were hurting. And I know what that feels like, to have a huge hole inside, a hole that won't go away, that keeps getting bigger and bigger. Because I saw you at that party Sunday, I saw you run outside, and that guy follow you.” She pressed her lips together, hesitating. “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

I just stared at her.

“I found you in the woods.”

She
found me in the woods?

“You were on the ground and you weren't moving, and at first I thought…”

Her words trailed off, telling me exactly what she thought, the same thing Jim had thought. “That I was gone.”

Her eyes filled. “But then I heard you, and I asked you if you were okay, and you kept saying ‘Dylan.'”

Delphi rubbed against my leg. I couldn't move.

“So I took you to him.”

“
You
took me to him?” It was hard to process what she was saying. “But why didn't you say anything? Why didn't you tell us what happened?”

“Because I knew I was the last person you'd listen to or trust.” Hugging her arms around herself, she started to rock. “And I couldn't risk Jim Fourcade telling my parents where I'd been. They'd keep me home and … well, I knew bad stuff was happening, and I knew I had to try to warn you.”

The moment locked around us, drowning out everything else.

“I was so horrible to you,” she whispered with tears streaming down her face. “I was horrible to Chase, too. I loved him, but I didn't know how to be the girlfriend he wanted. He was always trying to fix
me.
”

I'd never thought about it like that.

“I think because he couldn't fix what was broken inside him,” Jessica whispered.

“Because of the adoption,” I knew. That's why Chase had helped me learn about my parents, because he'd never been able to learn about his.

Tears streamed down Jessica's face. “And I resented him for that, for not loving me the way I was. So I punished him. I lied. I cheated. All to make him feel the way I felt, like I wasn't good enough.

“Then you came along,” she said, smiling through her tears. “And you were everything I wasn't, and I knew it. He knew it, too.” She looked down a long second before continuing. “I
hated
you,” she said. “All I could think about was punishing you, too.”

My eyes burned.

Lifting her hands as if she had no idea what to do with them, she pressed them together. “And because of that, because of
me,
he died.”

 

TWENTY-SIX

The bright afternoon sun made the big window glow, leaving shadows to fall around Jessica. She held her hands prayer-like against her mouth, her long sleeves slipping against her pale, bony wrists. The bracelet wrapped around one. Faded red slashes streaked the other.

“Jessica,”
I whispered. Maybe I should have stayed where I was. But that was impossible. Stepping toward her, I reached for her wrist, skimming my finger against the crisscross of scars that had not been there the night we'd found her at Big Charity.

Cutting.

Sometime between last fall and now she'd started cutting herself, but the scars were from Aaron LaSalle all the same.

“No,” I said. “It's not your fault.”

“Yes, it is.” Tangled hair fell from the center part, framing eyes that had once been defiant, but were now devastated. “A few days before that night at the old house, Chase and I had a big fight. He told me it was over. I told him it was just beginning, that if he thought he could go off and fix
you,
then I'd give him something to fix.”

I winced.

“That's what the truth or dare was about, hurting you. And him. It was all so stupid.” Tears fell. Her words were garbled. “If I hadn't been so consumed with punishing you…”