Page 57 of The Love of My Next Life
“How’d you get here?” I ask, glancing at him briefly. He’s slouched in the seat with his eyes closed, holding some tissues to his lips to stop the bleeding. I might have to take him to get stitches.
“I drove.”
“YouWHAT?” I screech, ready to slam on the brakes and beat the crap out of him myself. “You’rewasted! You said you—”
“Chill, Lennon, fuck,” he scolds. “I was sober when I drove. My car is at the liquor store. I walked from there to Daddy Dearest’s house.”
I heave a sigh of relief. It’s still not good. But it’s better than I thought it was two seconds ago. I look at him again. He’s obviously in no condition to drive. If I bring him home, he’ll have to come back and get his car at some point. But I don’t want Claire or Drea, or heck, even my dad, to see him like this.
I’m hit, once again, with this deep, urgent worry. A familiar anxiety clawing desperately at my mind and chest.
Macon needssomething. I’m not sure what. I doubt he knows either.
But if he doesn’t find it, he’ll seek it out with pills or alcohol or sex. Probably all three, and the reality makes me sick to my stomach. I look at him, his hunched, broken form in my passenger seat. How is this talented, strong, beautiful boy so haunted?
I picture the absolute disgust, the hatred, in Macon’s dad’s eyes just before he stormed back into his house. The way Claire talks about him like he’s wasted life. Andrea’s tears.
Don’t fucking remind me.
Do us all a favor next time and OD.
He’s justtroubled.
Oh, Macon. Suddenly, I want to cry, but I swallow it back and school my face.
I make the decision without consulting him. I just punch the address into my GPS, then hook my phone to Bluetooth and turn on my Fleetwood Mac playlist. With the music playing and the GPS set, I head toward the interstate, taking the East ramp instead of the West.
When Macon cracks his eyes open fifteen minutes later and realizes we’re not heading back to Franklin, he sits up and turns in his seat to look at me with his eyebrow popped.
I glance at him and smirk.
“Go back to sleep, loser,” I say with my eyes back on the road. “I’ll wake you when we get there.”
THIRTEEN
When Lennon pulls upin front of a familiar house, I can’t stay quiet anymore. I turn in my seat and stare at her.
“What’s this?” I ask, hooking my thumb over my shoulder at the four-bedroom beach house we stayed in during our Virginia Beach vacation a few years ago. It looks the same.
Lennon holds her finger up, silencing me, while she types on her phone. So, I wait. Thirty more seconds. Sixty. Just before we hit four minutes and I lose it, Lennon puts her phone in her lap and smiles at me.
“Luckily, it wasn’t rented since the tourist season is over,” she says, as if that tells me anything.
“Okay...?”
“Well,” she says with a shy shrug, “I just rented it for the night. Obviously, we can’t stay here overnight, but we can use it to fix this—” she waves her fingers in a circle around my face, “—and hang out until you’ve sobered up enough to drive your own car home.”
Warmth spreads in my chest, but I don’t let it show.
“We couldn’t have just hung out at a park or some shit?”
She rolls her eyes. “Shut up and get out of the car, Macon.”
I smirk, but the motion causes a flicker of pain when my lip cracks. I lick at the blood and do what she said. I unbuckle my seat belt and trail her up the stairs, where she punches a code into the door. It unlocks with a whir, so she pushes it open, and I follow her inside.
“The furniture is new,” she says absently, walking around the living room and lightly touching everything. The couch, the chair, the strategically, hand-picked books on the built-ins. She drags her fingertips over every surface, testing it out, feeling it, in the same odd way she always has. I’m fascinated in the same consuming way I’ve always been.
She wants to touch everything. To experience it all.
