Last Summer (7 page)

“Hey, Rapunzel, let down your hair,” the
all-too-familiar voice calls from below. I just glare at him, at
Logan
. “Okay, fine,” he says. “I’ll come up.”

I’m too stunned to say anything. He’s alive?
He’s . . . alive.
He’s here, climbing up the lattice like he’s
Prince Charming, rescuing a damsel in distress.
Am I a damsel
in distress? It’s quite possible these days since my stress level
is way out there. He throws his backpack on the patio’s miniature
roof as he finishes the climb to me. I step back to let him in.

Slightly out of breath, he says, “What?
You’re not happy to see me?” He grins, but that fades when he sees
my face. “What’s wrong?”

“It wasn’t you,” I say, and then slam into
him, full force. This might be totally inappropriate, but who
cares? I’m just happy he’s here.

His arms falter before finally circling
around my waist, his chin resting atop my head. “No,” he says, “it
wasn’t me. But I knew the guy.”

I pull back to look up at him. “I’m sorry to
hear that. Were you close?”

He shrugs. “You could say that.”

Rushing over to my bedroom door, I lock it.
There’s a sudden thrill coursing through my body, reminding me this
is completely outlawed. If my mom catches Logan up here, he’ll be
dead.

“Hey, keep quiet,” I say as Logan collapses
onto my bed. “If my mom hears any added noise up here, she’ll be
suspicious.”

Logan wiggles his fingers in the air and
says, “Ooooh. I’m so scared.”

Hands on hips, I retort, “What’s with you
this morning?”

“What do you mean?” he asks, resting on his
elbows.

“You’re too . . . happy.” I frown; that
doesn’t seem right. He just lost his friend in a murder and he’s up
early
and
he climbed up to my window to see me. This guy has
yet to be glad to see me. Even during our brief meetings he finds
ways to avoid looking at me, or he cuts the meeting short. I narrow
my eyes. “What’s
really
with you? I mean, did you shoot up,
or whatever it’s called, this morning?”

He pushes off his elbows and sits at the
edge of my bed. “You think I can’t just be happy for once?”

“No, I’m not say—”

“That because I’m a depressed, homeless,
drug-addicted guy, there’s no possible way for me to ever have
feelings again? That I’m forever stuck in this shitty limbo of
needles, permanent roaming, and scavenging for food? Is that what
you think?”

I shake my head and hiss, “Keep it
down.”

He bolts off my bed and crosses the room. I
let out a tiny squeal as he pushes me against the wall and covers
my mouth with his hand. “Quiet,” he whispers, pressing his body
against mine. There’s nothing separating the two of us but clothes,
and I feel the heat radiating from his skin. “I have news for you,
Chloe: I won’t always be a horrible guy. One day I’ll go back to
being me, but until then, I am stuck in my own personal purgatory,
tortured by demons you can’t imagine.”

He removes his hand, our lips only inches
apart. I refrain from closing the distance between us, knowing it’s
wrong; I set out to assist the guy, not torture him even more.

“I’ll help you, but you have to trust me,” I
tell him, my chest rising and falling with irregular breaths. “I
can’t do this if you aren’t on board one hundred percent, got
it?”

He nods.

“First things first, take a shower,” I say,
pushing him off me and wrinkling my nose for an added effect. He
blushes a little. “Oh, don’t be embarrassed. I’m not judging you; I
know you can’t help it. Now, go.” I hold out my arm, pointing
toward the bathroom. “When you’re finished, I’ll wash your
clothes.”

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” he
says.

“We have an agreement, don’t we? I’m not
going to let you just . . . rot.”

His eyebrows tighten together. “So, now I’m
rotting?”

“Worse,” I say. “You smell like dry dirt and
B.O.” I emphasize this with a
yuck
. “And yes, you might be
rotting on the inside. There’s no telling what drugs have done to
you.”

“Fine,” he says. “Have it your way.” Without
breaking eye contact, he strips off his shirt.

And his jeans.

And—
gasp!
—his boxers.

Oh, holy mother. I can’t close my mouth, or
avert my eyes.
Pull yourself together, Chloe!

“Like what you see?” asks Logan, with a big,
cheesy grin on his face.

“Just . . . shoo!” I turn my head away and
wave toward the bathroom.

Logan laughs, deep and throaty. “You don’t
want to join me?”

Don’t tempt me, son of Aphrodite!
“Um, no.” I clear my throat. “Maybe some other time.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” he says.

I jerk my head around to face him, eyes
wide. “I-I didn’t mean—”

“Oh, you said it,” he adds promptly. “You
said it, and there’s no Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card lying around, so
guess what that means?”

I try swallowing the knot in my throat.

“It means your naked ass will be mine.
Soon.” He still has that cheap smile plastered to his face as he
closes the bathroom door behind him.

Eight
•
Logan

W
hat am I doing? I
mean, really. I need to grab a hold of my balls and act like a
fucking man, not spend my time dicking around with Chloe. She’ll be
gone within a couple of months, and if I don’t clean up before
then, well, I’m shit out of luck. No returning home and patching
things up with the fam. No playing football with Lucas on the front
lawn. This is my
life
we’re attempting to transform. I need
to stop jacking off and focus on what’s important.

But Chloe is too damn intoxicating. Yeah, I
guess that’s the right word. Her hair smells like a cool ocean
breeze and is as bright as the sun, and her curvy lips are just
begging
me to kiss them. That or it’s my fucked-up mind
playing tricks on me. I could’ve opened her mouth with mine, let my
tongue discover hers. She thought about it, too. I saw the way she
watched my lips hovering three inches away; she
wanted
me to
kiss her.

And I’m a fucking idiot because I didn’t.
Instead, I had to conduct a striptease in the middle of her room
and ask if she liked the view, or some shit.
Why’d you do that,
Logan? Why, why, why?
asks one-half of my brain. The other half
is saying,
You want her as much as she wants you. Don’t
stop.

No. This ends here, in her bathroom. Odd
place, I know, but if I don’t stop myself now, I’m not entirely
sure what will become of us later. And I don’t want to ruin her
friendship, especially when she’s trying to help me get my old life
back.

“Hey, Logan?”

I freeze. Her voice is barely audible over
the running water. “Yeah?”

“I brought you a couple of towels. I’ll just
set them over here.”

I have no idea where “here” is, but that’s
nice of her. “Okay, thanks.”

She closes the door, and I can breathe
again. Funny how five minutes ago I didn’t care about showing my
junk, but now I feel awkward in a shower. Probably has something to
do with the fact that I’ve talked myself out of her pants. For now,
at least.

I finish showering and dry off, wrapping a
towel around my waist, and open the bathroom door, releasing the
humid air. I hand Chloe my clothes, which she mixes in with her own
dirty laundry so her mom won’t notice.

“What about your other clothes?” she asks,
nodding toward my backpack.

I shrug. “Don’t worry about them.”

“Okay. I’ll be back,” she says. She snatches
a towel out of her closet and wraps it around her head. “Can’t
exactly walk downstairs with dry hair; that’d be tough to
explain.”

After she disappears, I check out her room.
The walls change colors between blue and purple, and the shift
between the two fades like sidewalk chalk during a rainstorm. It’s
a strange paint job, to say the least. She also has purple shelves
attached to each wall; some hold books, some hold local souvenirs,
some hold picture frames filled with memories. Those are what I
scan through, seeing what her past holds. What I find saddens me,
because the girl in these photographs is not the Chloe I know; the
girl from the past is the real deal, smiling and laughing, and
Chloe’s just a shadow. The girl from the past seems happy and
vivacious, and the present-day Chloe is held back by fear and
unhappiness, and maybe even desperation. Chloe’s reaching for
something, but she doesn’t know what it is just yet.

Maybe it’s me. Maybe that’s why she wanted
to help—I’m what she’s been searching for all along. The thought
stops my heart for a mere second. If that’s true, if fate is so
fucked up as to bring us together under horrible circumstances,
then she and I won’t have much time together. She’ll be gone in
less than two months, and I’ll be Godknowswhere.

“I’m back,” she says, startling me. “Remind
me to check on the clothes in twenty minutes or so. I don’t want my
mom to accidentally pick up yours and interrogate me.” She rolls
her eyes and unwraps the towel around her head.

I just stare at her.
Who are you?
I
want to ask.
Who are you and what have you done with the real
Chloe?
I want to meet her, the real you.

Instead, like the pussy that I am, I say,
“Okay,” and leave it at that.

“So, while you were in the shower, I came up
with a few ideas,” she goes on, picking up a piece of paper and
sitting on the edge of her bed. “And since you won’t hand over your
stash, we’re going to have to come up with a new plan of
action.”

“Oh, yeah? Like what?”

“Like, sports or outdoor activities,
something that will keep your mind focused on anything but drugs.”
There she goes again with that nose scrunching. “You don’t look so
thrilled.”

“Um, sure. Sports. Yeah. Totally
stoked.”

Shaking her head, she says, “At some point
you do realize you’ll have to discard whatever needles and/or
paraphernalia you have on you, right? This process isn’t going to
work unless you go all the way.”

“We’ll deal with that later,” I say,
gritting my teeth. I don’t want to think about what withdrawal will
be like, for both our sakes. Right now I need to focus on how I’ll
be coping when the withdrawal hits me, which won’t be pretty.

“All right. So,” she begins, glancing over
her little to-do list, “what do you think about this weekend? For
starting this routine, I mean.” She glances up at me, big blue eyes
under thick eyelashes.

“Tomorrow,” I respond. “There’s no sense in
waiting. I need to get in shape, and we probably won’t have much
time, anyway.”

Puzzled, her brows crush together. “Why
won’t we have time?”

Go for the kill, heartbreaker. Do what
you do best.
“Because you’ll leave in a couple of months, go
back to wherever it is you came from, and we won’t ever see each
other again. So, that’s that. The sooner we can get this over with,
the sooner I can return home and we can ‘part ways,’” I say, adding
air quotes around the last bit.

Her head jerks back slightly, but she’s
quick to cover up her offended expression with a more neutral one.
“All right.” She even fakes a smile.

I nod.

“Um,” she says, breaking our stare by
glancing at her notepaper, “tomorrow it is, then. Bright and early,
we’ll go running. How does that sound?”

“Good.”

“I’m just going to . . .” She points toward
her bedroom door and smiles, partially.

“Yeah, sure, go ahead.”

The door closes behind her and I want to
beat the shit out of myself. How am I not going to fall for this
girl over the next two months? She cute, sexy, and smart—and she
has no idea she’s any of these things. I bet a guy’s never told
her, either. Has she even been kissed? What if I’m her first?

Lose the idea, Logan.
It can’t
happen.

But it
can
happen, and that’s what
I’m afraid of. I’m afraid that, for once in my life, I’ll
accomplish something great, I won’t be a failure, and, as it always
happens, that something will be ripped from my arms—and my heart,
if we get that far. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned from
our short meetings together, it’s that my heart is definitely in
trouble.

Chloe returns with two sandwiches and two
bottles of water.

“I was trying to hurry,” she murmurs. “I
didn’t want Mom asking why I had two of each. Fortunately, she
didn’t even look up from the TV.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“Yeah, so . . . I was thinking . . .”

We sit down on her bed, and I rearrange my
towel so I won’t flash her like earlier, even if that was
intentional. She and I need to be able to hold a serious
conversation without my junk interfering as a sideshow.

“About what?”

“About your sleeping situation,” she says
slowly. “You don’t plan on staying in the old cottage, do you?”

I lift my shoulders for a couple of seconds,
and then let them fall. “I guess. I mean, I don’t have anywhere
else to sleep.”

“That’s what I thought you’d say,” she says,
in between bites of her sandwich. Her eyes dance, like she’s up to
no good. “What if I asked you to stay here and sleep in my closet?
There’s plenty of room.”

I don’t know what worries me more: the fact
that I’m concerned, at first, about how much closet space she has,
or the fact that I don’t question staying here before I question
the closet space. And if these two thoughts aren’t dire enough, I
actually glance toward her closet to assess the amount of room
available.

She follows my line of sight and stands up.
“Want me to open it?”

“Nah, that’s okay.”
Stay away from her,
man. You guys
cannot
sleep under the same roof.