She seems to scare Tristan, too, who surrenders with his hands in front of him and backs toward the doorway. “Fine. Jesus, Nova. You don’t have to get crazy about it.”

“You haven’t even begun to see me get crazy,” she snaps, pointing at the door. “Now go get a damn bag.”

After Tristan leaves, she turns to the doorway and says, “What am I going to do?”

I can’t see who she’s talking to and it makes me wonder who the hell is in here. Delilah? I doubt it, since I don’t think she’d be asking Delilah that question.

“I don’t know,” someone replies. I still can’t see who it is, but I can tell the voice belongs to a female and I hate how excited I get over the fact that Nova’s not here with a guy.

Suddenly a girl with black hair and big blue eyes steps in. “He looks…” She assesses me, then looks at Nova. “He looks like he needs to go to a hospital.”

“No hospitals,” I croak. “I don’t have the cash to pay for that.” And I don’t deserve to heal so easily. I should suffer for getting up and running away from my death.

Nova stares down at me with reluctance. “Quinton, I really think you need to go to a hospital.” She kneels back down on the mattress, sweeping her long brown hair to the side as she leans over me. Her fingers gently enfold my wrist and, moving slowly, she bends my arm so I can get a good view of my hand. It’s twice the size it normally is and my skin is purple and blue. Even where her fingers are, the skin is swollen and raw, and it seems like her touch should hurt, but all I can feel is heat—her heat. God, I’ve missed her heat. I’ve spent the last year wrapped up in coldness, feeling the numbness of drugs and sex with random women and now she’s here and I feel like I’m burning up.

“It’s just a bruise,” I say, not looking at my hand, but at her. I want to hold her, hug her, kiss her, touch her, but I also want her to go away. Stay. Leave. Right. Wrong. Lexi. Nova. Guilt.

Guilt.

Guilt.

Guilt.

It was all your fault.

As my past strikes me in the face, I jerk my hand away from her, not carefully, and this time I feel the pain, but I don’t react to it. Instead I finally struggle to sit up on the mattress. As soon as I’m upright, sharp pains stab at my side, making it hard to breathe. I gasp, clutching at my side as I hunch over.

“What’s wrong?” Nova asks with genuine concern, and it only makes it harder to breathe.

“Nova, just go,” I grunt, trying to focus on my breathing, but it’s like I’m being punched over and over again…my thoughts drift back to earlier today…

Donny strikes me with the tire iron, over and over again. I fall to the ground. I’m not even sure why I fall, other than that I’m tired of standing. I’m ready to give up and I do as he slams the heavy metal bar into shoulder, my rib cage, kicking me, punching me, beating me repeatedly.

I can see it in his eyes that he wants to kill me and I welcome it as I lie in the gravel, the rocks piercing my skin, the sky blue above me.

“Go ahead.” I choke on the blood gushing up in my mouth as I stare up at him. “Kill me.”

He smiles, then hits me again with the bar, and I feel one of my ribs crack as the metal slams against it. It sucks the air out of me, causes blinding pain to erupt through my body. But I feel nothing. I’m numb. Dead.

I give up.

He tosses the bar to the side and rolls up his sleeves, switching to hitting me with his fists. And when he aims one of them at my head, I sprawl my arms and legs out to the side, making sure he finishes me off. Just do it. I’m done.

“You act like you want this,” Donny says with eagerness and confusion on his face and then his fist collides with my cheek.

“Maybe I do,” is all I say, the taste of blood filling up my mouth. I do—I know I do.

“God, you crackheads are such worthless pieces of shit,” he says with a smile. “Nothing to live for. No one to care whether you live or die.”

He says it like he’s not a crackhead himself and I wonder if he is, or if he just deals, sells shit to people, helps f**k up their lives for cash. I wonder if he has something to live for. Someone who cares about him. What would that be like, to have someone, like that, like I did once with Lexi?

Or Nova. I blink the thought from my head and try to force it out as he moves to hit me again, with a look on his face that makes me wonder if he’s going to kill me.

Good, I think, yet for the briefest of moments I feel conflicted. I’m not even sure where the feeling stems from. Myself or thoughts of Nova. Or the simple fear that this could be it—that this time there’s going to be no ambulance to show up and revive me. Paranoia sets in.

What the fuck.

“But I’m going to let you live,” the guy says as he swings his fist down to strike, anger burning in his eyes, which are bloodshot. He’s high and I know there’s little control inside him, that even though he says he’s going to let me live, he could easily take it one swing too far and probably wouldn’t even realize it until it was too late. “So you can tell your little pu**y friend that just took off that he better watch his back.”

He slams his fist into my ribs again and the pain erupts through my body and I want to shout at him to not do me the favor of letting me live. To finish me off. But instead, as he brings his arm up to hit me again, I do something I wasn’t expecting. I get up and run, like a f**king wimp, running away from death, running away from what I deserve.

Fuck, what am I doing? Why didn’t I tell him to finish me off? He probably would have if I’d made him angry enough. But instead I ran. Chose life. To come back to this? It’s time to nail the damn coffin shut.

“Quinton, are you okay?” The sound of Nova’s voice jerks me back to the present and I get angry because she’s f**king with my head. Even after nine months, she consumes my thoughts almost as much as Lexi. She makes me hesitate with stuff and I don’t like it.

I look at her, getting pissed off because she’s here when I thought she’d let me go—she should have. Plus, there’s barely any drugs left in my system and I feel like I could f**king claw someone’s eyes out.

“Nova, just go away,” I say, moving my legs off the mattress. My knees are stiff and my joints ache. I’m also missing a shoe and my foot is cut up and scraped raw on the top.

Nova sits down beside me, shaking her head. “Not until I help you…Quinton, I want to help you.”

For a second my heart skips a beat, but then the scar on my chest burns, telling my emotions to shut the hell up. I need to stop reacting to her and I need to get a line in my system so I won’t even feel any of this—feel her.

“I don’t want you to help me.” Trying to appear more confident than I feel, I push to my feet and stand up. My knees promptly begin to wobble, but I fight the compulsion to fall to the floor. “Now I’m asking you to go.”

She glances at her friend, who briefly scrutinizes me, seeing what I really am, what Nova won’t see. “We should probably listen,” she says to Nova, apparently seeing something she doesn’t like, and I wish Nova would get on the same page.

Nova smashes her lips together so forcefully the skin around her mouth whitens. “No.” Her eyes lock on me. “I’m not going until you let me help you.”

I start to spastically shake even more and try to blame it on the fact that I need to do a line, but it’s not just that. It’s her. Her eyes. Her words. The simple fact that she’s right in front of me, just within arm’s reach, yet I can’t touch her. I’d be leaving my own self-made prison if I did. I’d be trying to escape from the bars I built around myself for a reason, made of guilt, the foundation formed by a promise I made to never forget the love of my life, whose life ended because of me.

“You can’t help me,” I snap. “Now just get the f**k out before I make you get out.”

She flinches as if I’ve slapped her, yet it seems to bring more determination out of her as she scoots closer to me. “I’m not going anywhere, so you might as well let me help you at least clean off those cuts you have all over you—they’re going to get infected.”

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 as**ole 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.”