I start to pull away from her. She latches her arm around mine, but I keep pulling.
“This is too much.” I pretend to cry. For a moment, I consider that I’m a total freaking geek on the roof of this fancy apartment building where I don’t belong, but the moment passes and I decide that I don’t give a shit. “The betrayal!” I bury my face in my hands.
Nora shrieks with laughter. “Oh, stop,” she giggles, trying to pry my hands from my face.
I’m not stopping. She’s laughing and I love it. I shake my head in despair, my hands hiding the huge grin on my face. “I thought I knew you!” I mock-cry, and she can’t stop laughing as she tries, again, to move my hands from my face.
When she pulls harder, I stop resisting and her arms fly with mine and I grab her waist and lay her down on the couch. Playful surprise fills her face, and her eyes are wide on mine. The neckline of her shirt is ridiculously low now that I’ve rumpled her perfect outfit and pinned her underneath my body. I run my nose from one side of her chest to the other, following the soft curve of the fabric over her soft breasts.
“What am I going to do with you?” I ask, and she groans under my feverish touch. I lick her skin, then pull away. I keep an arm’s length between her body on the couch and myself, and I hold myself up using my arms, like I’m doing a push-up.
“I could think of a few things,” she says, inches from my mouth.
If I knew for certain that none of her sister’s neighbors would join us up here, I would have dropped my mouth between her thighs.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Nora
DO YOU THINK WE SHOULD go inside?” he asks me after another two rounds of our game. I have come to love this game, and he still hasn’t skipped a question. He thinks I don’t notice.
I notice everything about him. My head is now in his lap, and his fingers are on my scalp, softly rubbing. I could fall asleep like this. When you go so long without being touched by another person, you forget how important that is. It’s ingrained into our brains, that we need the touch of another from our first day of life to our last.
“One more round,” I suggest. I’ve saved my planned questions for the last round.
Landon gently pats the top of my head. “One more.”
I close my eyes and brace myself for the turn in the conversation. “Did you believe me when I told you that Dakota cheated on you? Did her brother disappearing make you feel like you had to protect her?” Landon’s fingers freeze on my scalp. I force myself to continue. “And—”
“Her brother didn’t disappear.” Landon puts his hands under my shoulders and lifts me off his lap.
This is it. This is the trigger on their loaded gun.
“That’s what I know,” I carefully explain. That’s the story she told me the night that I found her screaming his name in her sleep. I can’t imagine—what could be worse than that?
Landon’s face is turned away from me when I look at him. I sit up, facing the door to the staircase behind us.
“You don’t know anything, then.” His voice is flat.
“Well, then tell me. Because this is a wall between us. You want answers to all of your questions, but you don’t want to give me anything in return. That’s convenient. This is what links you to her so fiercely.”
He shakes his head, still not looking at me. “It’s not my story to tell.”
“Yes, it is. You were a part of the story—it’s yours, too.” I’m starting to get frustrated; I could be more understanding if I knew what happened. “Landon, you can trust me. I just want you to open up to me.”
The irony of this statement is not lost on me.
Landon seems to take this in. He looks uncomfortable, and I feel like a bitch for pushing him this far. I have my share of secrets around my ex and divert Landon’s every effort to get to the bottom of what’s up there. I will share them with him one day, one day soon. I just need a little more time to make sense of what’s happening. I thought I had my mind made up, but Landon is clouding everything, making me unsure about my future.
His voice starts out quiet, and I keep my mouth closed and my hand close to his, in case he wants to take it. “Carter was having a rough time at school. He was the target of a lot of people in our plat, his dad included. Our plat was the worst of them, all families from Kentucky and West Virginia. Stuck in their old ways and bigotry. It was one of those neighborhoods where you would see a rebel flag hanging from the window where there should be a curtain. Unemployment was incredibly high, and the grown-ups had nothing better to do than gossip about what the young people were up to. It was rumored that Carter and his best friend, Julian . . .” Landon pauses, gazing straight forward. His eyes aren’t focused. “It was said that they liked to kiss.”
“Did they?” My stomach is tying into knots, and as much as I don’t want to hear this, I know I need to. I wish I were magical like Landon and could take some of this pain away, the way he does for me.
“They did. The grown-ups could ignore it for the most part, make their jokes about Carter’s clothes being a little too tight and his voice being a little too high for their liking. Those were all jokes, their ignorance shining. Everything was fine until a rumor started that he tried to kiss