“The last thing I need is her running off to tell my dad I’m over here trying to get in your pants.”
“She’s at Spin class.” I looked at my alarm clock. It was too early for Cash to be awake, let alone at my house. “Trouble in paradise?”
He shrugged and pulled his pencil out from behind his ear, opening his sketchpad. “You could say that. What about you?” He nodded to the journal in my hands. “More dreams?”
I nodded and closed my eyes, trying to remember more of my dream. It was already fading. Damn it.
“Well, don’t let me bother you.” His lips quirked into a grin as he started to draw. His messy black spikes stood straight up on his head, flecks of red and gold paint glinting from the tips.
“What are you drawing?”
“You.” His wrist moved fluidly, his pencil scratching against the paper as he studied the curve of my face.
I groaned and stuffed my face in my hands. “Seriously, Cash. I just woke up.”
“Come on, it’s for class,” he said. “We’re supposed to sketch someone in a natural pose. Someone who doesn’t know we’re drawing them.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Seems a little stalkerish. Besides, I know you’re drawing me, so that sort of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?”
“So pretend you don’t know I’m here. Go back to whatever you were writing.”
Not possible. I couldn’t immerse myself in those kinds of memories while he was sitting here analyzing every one of my expressions. Cash knew me too well as it was. My horrible poker face was only going to make everything worse.
“Besides, the light is amazing in here right now. Don’t move. Don’t even blink. I swear, the way the sun is hitting you…” His inspiration must have stolen the rest of his words because he sank into a heavy silence, the hiss of his charcoal pencil speaking for him as it frantically worked at replicating my sleep-mussed state.
I peered around his sketchbook to see which T-shirt he was wearing today. This one said, I’m only here because my flux capacitor is broken. It was the same one he’d been wearing yesterday.
“You do realize kids in our generation are not going to get a reference to Back to the Future?” I asked.
“You just did,” he said without looking up.
“Only because you’ve forced me to sit through it like three hundred times.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t wear them for anyone else. I wear them for me.”
I sighed. So much for trying to distract him. “I never agreed to this, you know,” I said fruitlessly. I knew he’d get what he wanted, even if what he wanted was my humiliation served on a silver platter.
Or in this case, a leather sketchpad.
“I’ll let you punch me if you let me finish,” he said.
“Not good enough. You have to buy me coffee and a chocolate croissant and let me punch you.”
“Hmm.” Another graceful arc of the pencil branded more of me onto the page. “That’s a pretty high price. Maybe we should make this a nude if I’m having to spring for croissants. Oh wait! I already did one of those last night.”
He grinned down at the paper and waggled his eyebrows. The tiny silver piercing embedded in his right brow caught the sunlight. I clutched my journal to my chest and threw a pillow at him.
“You are so gross.” I crawled out of bed to search for school clothes, then pulled open a drawer and grabbed a pair of jeans. “Who was it this time?”
He closed his sketchpad, tucked his pencil behind his ear, and wandered over to lean on my dresser.
“Tinley. In my studio where my dad walked in, so as you can imagine, my house is a hostile environment right now.” Cash snatched the journal out of my hand. “Are you ever going to let me see what you write in here?”
“Give that back!”
“Nope.” He grinned. “I swear to God if I find hearts doodled around some guy’s name in here, I’m gonna throw up.”
I ripped it out of his hand and dropped it into the drawer. The only things in those journals were nightmares and disfigured memories of my dad. I didn’t care about boys and Cash knew it. I didn’t have the time, the patience, or the kind of emotional energy they demanded.
Cash peeked in another drawer and frowned. “Lace?” he said, distracted. “That’s…disturbing. I feel like I just walked in on my dad having sex or something. Since when do you wear sexy underwear?”
I slammed the drawer shut on his fingers. “Quit snooping through my stuff!”
He shook his hand. “It’s not like I haven’t seen it all before.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Cash walked over to the window and peeked out the blinds to see his house. “I like to do a monthly sweep of your room.”
Horror made the room spin. “You go through my stuff?”
“No, not really. But I should. Just to make sure nothing weird is going on with you. Which I wouldn’t have to do if you actually talked to me anymore.”
“You’re a real pain in the ass,” I said. “You know that, right?”
“So I hear.” He snapped the blinds shut and groaned. “Why hasn’t he left yet?”
I stuffed my books and camera into my bag. “Probably because he’s waiting to annihilate you.”
“Hey.” Cash leaned over and picked up the bobblehead zombie he got me for my birthday last year.
“Nice way to treat Francisco.” He brushed it off and placed it back next to my lip gloss and the fancy perfume Mom gave me that I never wore.
I gripped my bag, remembering the sound that had woken me up this morning. As if someone had knocked something over. “Sorry.”
“I’ll forgive you if you let me use your shower. I’d like to postpone my annihilation as long as possible, and want to smell good while doing it.” He crossed over to my closet. “Do you still have any of your dad’s old T-shirts around?”
I pulled Dad’s Stanford sweatshirt from the back of my closet, stopping to run my fingers over the faded letters. It had been his favorite. So many memories swirled inside my head of him in that sweatshirt. “No shower and I better get this back,” I said, tossing it to him. “And do you even realize what will happen if Mom comes home and finds you in our shower? I don’t need that kind of drama.”
I grabbed my clothes and headed for the hall. Cash followed me to the bathroom, where I slammed the door in his face. I heard what I guessed was his forehead thump against the door, and his muffled voice seeped through the wood. “Come on, Em. Don’t throw me to the sharks.”
I twisted on the hot water in the shower and spun around to grab my toothbrush. My hand froze, hovering above counter, shaking. On my mirror, the words hello Allison were written in smudged black eyeliner. I slapped my hand over my mouth to hold in my scream and stumbled back into the towel rack. Not again. I squeezed my eyes shut. Please not again.
Cash tapped on the door again. “Emma?”
I made my hands into a cup and breathed into them until my heart slowed.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said as soon as I could get the words out. Desperate, I grabbed the hand towel off the rack behind me and scrubbed at the mirror. I was not going back to Brookhaven again. No way was I spending my senior year in a mental institution. The condensation from the shower made it easy work, but my white towel had black splotches all over it by the time I was finished. Cash couldn’t see this.
Nobody could.
“She’s crying out for attention,” the doctor had said to Mom like I wasn’t sitting right there. “It’s not uncommon for a young person to lash out like this after a traumatic experience.”
Cash tapped on the other side of the door with the toe of his shoe. “Are you okay?”