The idea of her taking care of me like that both pleases and appalls me. I want her to stay, which means there’s only one thing I can do. Fighting the impulse inside my body to grab her and crush my lips against hers, I get up and limp toward the doorway, dodging around her friend. I head across the hallway to Delilah’s room. The door’s wide open and the room is unoccupied, which is what I’m looking for.
“Where are you going?” Nova chases after me, but I slam the door right in her face. Like the ass**le that I am. I lock it and she starts to bang on it, shouting for me to open up, but I ignore her and flop down on the dirty mattress. Then I reach down between it and the wall where I know Delilah hides her stash and take the small plastic bag out. There’s barely enough for a line in there, but it’ll have to be enough for now, at least until Nova stops banging on the door.
I can hear her talking to someone on the other side as I scrape the remaining crystal out of the bag and onto the Tupperware bin beside the mattress. It sounds like she’s crying, but I could be wrong and honestly I don’t care. I only care about one thing, knowing it’ll make everything feel better and then everything—the fight, Nova—won’t matter.
There’s a pen on the bin and I pick it up as someone knocks on the door. They say something but I don’t hear them as I lean down and suck the tiny white crystals up my nose, feeling the gnawing ache in my body slowly evaporate.
“Quinton, please open up,” Nova says through the door with one soft tap of her hand. There’s a plea in her voice that rips at my throat, but the white powder entering my system quickly heals it. Sure it’s only temporary, but all I’ll need is another hit once the wound starts to open again. I’ll never have to feel again if I follow the process.
Nova says something else, but I cover my ears with my hands and ball up on the mattress until her voice fades out.
And I fade with it.
Chapter 6
Nova
I can’t stop crying. The tears started flowing the moment Quinton locked himself into that room. I didn’t know what to do, so I tried everything I could. I begged. I pleaded. I sobbed as I pounded on the door. But he wouldn’t listen and it hurt me to think about him broken and beat up on the other side, doing God knows what while I couldn’t do anything to stop him, all because of a door. A stupid door with a lock that I couldn’t break.
Finally Lea dragged me out of there and I can barely remember what happened over the next few hours, other than that I ended up back at her uncle’s house in the guest room bed with a blanket over me and I feel so exhausted.
“We should have never gone there,” she says as she lies down on the bed beside me. “That was bad, Nova. Like really, really bad.”
“It was the ugly part of life,” I agree, my tears subsiding. “But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have gone there…he needs my help, Lea.”
“He needs more than your help,” she replies, tucking her arm under her head. “He needs to go to a hospital and then rehab or something.”
“I know that.” I rotate to my side and stare out the window at the stars in the sky and the view calms me. “But I don’t know how I can get him to do that, so I’m doing the only thing I can think of right now.”
“I’m worried about you,” she admits. “I don’t think you should go back there.”
“I have to,” I whisper. “Now that I’ve seen him…seen how he’s living, seen the condition he’s in, I can’t walk away.” I thought maybe my feelings for him would have changed, that maybe last summer was just an illusion built around weed, but it’s not. And I realized that the second I saw him lying in that bed, and when he kissed me, half out of it, it only heightened my feelings. And I didn’t see Landon this time, I just saw a broken guy I wish I could just hug better.
“Nova, please just think about it,” she says. “Think before you go back. Promise me you will. I think you’re going to get in over your head…and those papers I was reading…helping meth addicts is complicated. You need to understand what you’re getting into and if you really want to get into it.”
“Okay, I promise I’ll think about what I’m doing.” But I already know what the answer will be. I’m going back because I’m not ready to give up on him, not when I’ve barely gotten started. I have to figure this out, somehow.
“And read the papers,” she adds, fluffing the pillow and getting situated.
“Okay,” I promise again, wondering just how much insight papers from the Internet can give, but I guess reading them won’t hurt. At the moment I’ll do anything I think can help.
It gets quiet and I close my eyes, ready to fall asleep, wishing upon wishing that I could see a way through this.
* * *
“If you were stuck on a desert island,” I say to Landon as he draws line after line in his sketchbook. I scoot forward on the bed, pretending I’m scratching my foot, when really I just want to be closer to him. “What’s the one thing you’d want there with you?”
He frowns down at his drawing, a self-portrait, his face half shadowed, his hair shorter on one side, and his cheekbone shaded to look sunken in so it looks like he’s wearing the mask from The Phantom of the Opera. “I’m not sure…maybe a pencil.” He stares at the pencil in his hand and then looks at his drawing. “But then again, if I couldn’t have both a pencil and paper, there really wouldn’t be any point to taking one and not the other.” He sets the pencil down on the paper and rubs some smeared graphite off his hand with a thoughtful look on his face, while I pretend not to be sad over the fact that he didn’t say he’d want me on the island with him. “But then again…” He looks up at me and his honey-brown eyes burn with intensity. “Maybe I’d just take you.” He strokes his finger across my cheek, leaving a smudge there I’m sure. “Having you there could have its perks.”
I crinkle my nose like it’s an absurd idea when really my stomach is fluttering with butterflies. “How would that be a perk? I’m not resourceful in intense situations…I’d probably do more harm than good.”
He shakes his head, tracing his finger up my cheekbone to a lock of my hair. He twirls it around his fingers as he sets his pencil and sketchbook to the side. “No way, Nova Reed, you’d be a lifesaver.”