Last Seen Leaving (17 page)

 

FOURTEEN

FOR A LONG
moment I just stood there on the windswept stone, the chill October air wrapping itself around me while my mind reeled like a punch-drunk boxer.

Anson was a liar, I reminded myself. January would never have done what he'd described—fellated a piece of fruit to seduce the stepfather she outspokenly disliked. Those were gross fabrications, fantasies spurred on by classism, resentment, and an overweening obsession with porn. He didn't have an ounce of scruples, and fondled his missing stepsister's underwear for thrills; who could believe a thing out of his mouth?

Which thus gave rise to the obvious question: Why was I having so much trouble shrugging the story off as nothing more than an obvious attempt to rile me? “Sundaes with potato chips and maple syrup” formed part of the answer. It was a detail that was so specific, so
her
, that I couldn't just dismiss it. That feminist theory stuff about proxy phalluses and the male gaze also had a distinctly January-esque sound to it—it sure as hell hadn't come from the primitive, misogynistic imagination of Anson Walker, at any rate. He would never have invented that on his own.

I also couldn't pretend that, just twenty-four hours earlier, I hadn't been grappling with my own growing realization that I didn't know my ex-girlfriend nearly as well as I thought I had—that she'd told lies that couldn't be easily justified, for reasons I didn't understand. What else had she kept secret? The shock of seeing her bloodstained hoodie, of realizing that she might have been
killed
, had sent me into a tailspin of emotional memories … but the girl who'd dried and saved a rose from our “perfect date” night was also the girl who'd told her friends I was an emotionally abusive jerk who'd tried to make her feel bad about leaving Riverside.

Anson could easily have cherry-picked some details from a random exchange between January and her stepdad and then used them as set dressing for his bullshit story, but I didn't think he was that conniving. His preferred method of warfare was direct and physical, not psychological. More likely, he'd embellished the hell out of an innocuous conversation, because he was a dick and a pervert, and he got off on offending people. Either way, there was really only one solid truth I felt he'd exposed, even if it had come as no surprise: He liked to spy on his stepsister.

I descended the stairs into the courtyard, walking toward the fountain as I fished in my pocket for my phone, and then stopped short when I saw a black Lexus parked at an angle across the long drive leading back out to the road. It was the only vehicle left, now that the volunteers, media, and police had all departed. Leaning against the driver's side door in his long, dark peacoat was Kaz.

When he realized I'd noticed him, he gave me an awkward wave. “Hey.”

“What are you still doing here?” I asked, surprised. In the numbness and mind-wiping confusion that ensued after the discovery of January's clothes, I'd completely forgotten about him.

“I … I thought you might need a ride home.” It sounded lame, and he offered me a clumsy smile that would have been endearing if I weren't so annoyed.

“I was just about to call my parents,” I reported in a surly voice. This had been an awful and confusing day, and the last thing I really needed was to revisit the scene in the hayloft—not after everything else that had gone down since. “You shouldn't have waited around.”

“I wanted to.” He had his hands jammed in his pockets, shoulders hunched against the cold, and I wondered if he'd actually been standing there staring at the door all this time, like a dog waiting for its owner to emerge from a grocery store. “I thought … it's been a shitty day, right? I just wanted to.” He gestured at the Lexus, which was shiny and obviously a recent model. “Come on, get in.”

With an irritable sigh, I looked down at my phone, and then back at the mansion. Eddie Sward was watching me through the library windows, arms crossed and jaw tight, and although I couldn't see him, I was positive Mr. Walker was behind him. Did I really want to sit down on the freezing-cold fountain and wait twenty to thirty minutes for one of my parents to drive all the way out here to the middle of nowhere, with both men staring daggers at me the entire time?

“Fine,” I said resignedly, moving around the front of the vehicle to the passenger side. As I belted myself in, I forced out a grudging “Thanks.”

“No problem,” Kaz said. The engine purred to life with barely a whisper, and the car did a weightless three-point turn before cruising down the drive through the topiary. The seats were covered in soft leather, still smelling like a showroom floor, and some bass-heavy music thumped at a low volume from the speakers.

We were quiet until we reached the road, by which point the silence between us had begun to feel like a third passenger. Unable to bear it any longer, and anxious to take preemptive control of the conversation, I blurted out, “This is a really nice car.”

“Compliments of the Doctors Bashiri,” Kaz replied with a self-conscious smile. “I won't pretend I don't like driving it, but sometimes it makes me feel really conspicuous. Like, people look at it and immediately think that I'm spoiled, you know?” Then he laughed a little. “Well, okay, I guess I
am
kind of spoiled, but I try not to act like it.”

“I hope this doesn't sound rude, but if your parents are paying for your car and your tuition, why are you working at the toy store?” I was genuinely curious, although the second I heard the question out loud, I realized it really
did
sound kind of rude.

Kaz didn't seem to mind, though. “My parents … I love them, but they think that if they give me money, they have the right to tell me how to spend it. I got sick of having to justify literally every purchase I ever made—like if I wanted to eat McDonald's or download an app, I had to clear it first. Try explaining to your mom why you want to buy sexy underwear, you know?” He shot me a grin, and the image that rushed into my mind made my face feel hot. “Having a crappy job means having money that's just mine, that I can spend on whatever I want to. I can't tell you how good that feels.”

“I think I understand,” I said. It sounded an awful lot like what January had said when I'd asked her the same question—working at the toy store was a way she could take control of her life away from her stepfather. I was starting to see why she and Kaz could relate to each other.

Almost as if he could read my thoughts, Kaz then asked, “How are her parents doing?”

“About as you might expect,” I answered, because getting into detail was too much to unpack at the moment. “Her mom is having a breakdown in a Munchausen syndrome kind of way, and her stepdad is worried about the political ramifications.”

Kaz screwed up his mouth for a moment, but even the strange look on his face couldn't detract from how hot he was. I felt my annoyance becoming more entrenched. What is it about effortlessly good-looking people that is so aggravating? Gently, he then asked, “How are
you
handling it? I mean, it must be hitting you pretty hard, too. After what we saw in that field…”

“I'm okay,” I said quickly. I didn't want to think about it. I wanted to believe that there was a happy ending out there, that I could find an explanation for the blood-drenched hoodie that meant January was still okay—and if it turned out I couldn't, well, I sure as hell did not want to have to face those particular demons in the passenger seat of Kaz's fancy car. “I'm just tired.”

I gave him my address, which he programmed into his GPS, and then we drove in silence for a time before Kaz cleared his throat and said, “I hope you don't mind my asking, but how did you and January start dating?”

Considering the events of the afternoon, it sounded like a loaded question, but I decided to answer anyway. “She was—is best friends with my best friend's girlfriend, so we all just started hanging out a lot, and then … I don't know, we decided to take things to the next level.”

The thing was, January and I had always been something that was a little bit more than “just friends.” I couldn't totally explain it. When I flirted with her freshman year, it wasn't just camouflage; I
felt
something. I felt connected to January in a way that I didn't feel connected to other girls, even if the physical part of the equation was always elusive. When Madison Reinbeck shoved us into the kitchen pantry at the Walker mansion for a lamest-of-the-lame round of Seven Minutes in Heaven at a pool party the previous June, I'd actually been really excited to make out with her.

“Um, I hope it won't make you uncomfortable if I admit that I've actually wanted to kiss you, like, pretty much every day since the beginning of last year,” January had confessed breathlessly when we'd finally come up for air. My head was spinning, and I was so relieved to feel something for a girl that I actually giggled.

“You're really good at it,” I'd said, which was probably the stupidest, lamest thing any guy has ever said, ever—but January didn't seem to mind.

“Does that mean you want to go out with me?”

It was an uncompromising question and, emboldened by the dizzying head rush of the previous seven minutes, I took it by the horns. “Yeah.”

“Well then,
ask
me, dumbass!”

And that was January, in a nutshell. And now … was she ever coming back? Would I ever see her again? I'd made a mess of things in our relationship—maybe we both had—but a sharp pain speared through my chest as I considered the possibility that she might really have disappeared from my life forever.

“Listen…” Kaz began, and even though I was grateful to have my thoughts suddenly interrupted, I recognized immediately where he was heading with this particular opening gambit and briefly considering forcing open the door and rolling out into traffic. “I'm really sorry about what happened in the barn.”

“Let's not talk about it, okay?”

“No, I think we have to,” he insisted obliviously, and I committed my gaze to the roadside. Trees and shrubs rose on both sides of the car, the season slowly whittling their limbs down to the bone as more and more leaves dropped away. “I mean, I guess now you understand why I was so surprised when you made it sound like you thought I was trying to hit on January. She knew I was gay. It's not like it was some big secret, or anything, so it kind of threw me for a loop when I realized that you didn't know, that she'd never told you.” I remained silent, and after a moment, he added, “I guess that's really why I wanted to apologize this morning. If January was keeping that from you to make you jealous of our friendship, then I realized I couldn't exactly trust that she'd been totally honest with me about you, either. The truth is, some of her complaints about you sounded really…”

“Fake?”

“Indulgent. Like she secretly enjoyed being upset about them. Obviously I didn't know enough about you at the time to know they weren't true, but milking the pathos of having a selfish boyfriend seemed to make her weirdly satisfied.”

I thought about my theatrical ex-girlfriend, and how her personal drama meter had always seemed perennially stuck at ten. Certainly she'd had enough legitimate reasons to complain about her life; why had she needed me to be a villain, too? I took a breath. “I'm sorry I was rude to you that day I came into the toy store. It goes without saying that I didn't know better, but I wish I had.”

“Thanks.” There was a tense moment then that seemed to last about fifty years before he spoke again. “I'm sorry about the hayloft, too. I—I don't know what the hell I was thinking.” His eyes were riveted on the road ahead of us, but his face was turning pink. “I got caught up in the moment, I guess, but I was a complete idiot. It was the wrong time, and the wrong situation, and I should've known.”

“You made a mistake. Forget about it,” I said, sincerely hoping he would.

“You know,” he continued lightly, as if it would make me feel better, “January actually told me that sometimes she wondered. She said she wouldn't even have been mad, she'd just have wanted to know.”

I gritted my teeth. “Wanted to know
what
?”

“You know. That you're gay.”

“I'm not gay, though.”

“Flynn—”

“I'm not gay!” I insisted defensively and, it must be said, a trifle hysterically. “I've already told you that I'm not gay, Kaz. How many times do I have to say it? What do I have to do to get the point across? I'm! Not! Gay! Get it? Understand?”

The dark slashes of his eyebrows drew downward, and in a peevish voice he stated, “You kissed me back, Flynn. It wasn't all one-sided up there. I understand if maybe you're freaked out about it, but you can't pretend that it didn't happen. I was there, remember? And it was a really good kiss.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” I said desperately. “Okay? I don't know what I did or didn't do—I was surprised, and it all just happened really fast!”

“It didn't happen
that
fast,” he countered pedantically. “I kissed you, and you didn't stop me. Instead, you stuck your tongue in my—”

“I DIDN'T STICK
ANYTHING ANYWHERE
,” I declared shrilly. I was sweating, and I wanted to be anywhere else in the world but inside that car at that moment. If a chasm in the earth opened up in front of the Lexus right then, and we plummeted straight down to hell, I would have cheered.

“I know what happened. I know what I
felt
,” he said quietly, moving on from my tongue to the other body part that had betrayed me in the hayloft. “You don't have to be ashamed, Flynn.”