“Go lie down,” he calls over his shoulder in an icy tone.

She keeps herself from falling by grasping the back of a chair. “I…need…” She blinks around the room and despite everything we’ve been through, all the crappy moments we shared, my heart twists inside my chest.

“What’s she on?” I ask, inching forward, preparing to help her.

Dylan turns around and slams a hand on each side of the doorframe, blocking my way in. “That’s none of your damn business.”

I stand on my tiptoes and glance over his shoulder at Delilah. “Delilah, are you okay?”

She stumbles over a glass pipe on the floor as she makes the rest of the short walk back to the sofa and then flops down on her back. “I’m fine…go…k…” She waves her hand at me, shooing me away.

“You don’t look fine,” I say, wondering what it would take to get Dylan out of my way.

Dylan leans to the side, shielding her completely from my view. “She said she was fine. Now back off,” he growls in a low voice.

I tip my chin up and meet his sullen eyes. I think about saying something like “Fuck off,” which is completely out of character for me, but at the same time being here isn’t really me either.

I never manage to find my voice, though, and instead Dylan just ends up smirking at me for a painfully long minute. When I see Quinton emerge from the hallway, I exhale deafeningly and Dylan seems pleased about the fact that he was making me nervous.

Quinton glances at Delilah, who’s lying on the sofa with her eyes shut, as he makes his way across the room. He doesn’t say anything as he pushes Dylan aside and squeezes between him and the doorway. Dylan glowers at him and Quinton seems edgy, even placing his arm around my back and hurriedly guiding me away from the door. “You ready?” he asks.

“Yeah…” I peek over my shoulder at Dylan, who’s watching us walk away, lighting up a cigarette. It creeps me out even more and I scoot closer to Quinton, feeling a little safer being near him.

Dylan stays that way until we’re halfway across the balcony and then goes back inside the apartment, shutting the door behind him.

I turn around and focus on walking. “Is Delilah okay?” I ask Quinton.

He shields his eyes from the sun with his hand. “She’s as okay as the rest of us.”

“She seemed out of it.”

“That’s because she was.”

“What’s she on?”

He hesitates, his hand on my back tensing. “You really want to know?” he asks, and I nod. “She’s on heroin.”

“Do you…” I inspect his arms, noting they’re sore-free, but I want to be sure. “Do you do it?”

He shakes his head with no hesitancy. “Not my thing.”

“Oh.” I’m not sure if that makes me feel better, because he still does drugs. “What about Dylan?” I ask as he guides me around a man standing in the middle of the balcony, smoking. “What’s he on?”

“His asshole-ness,” Quinton begrudgingly says.

“So he doesn’t do drugs?” I ask, astonished by the idea.

“No, he does,” he replies, slowing down as we approach the stairs. “But high or not, he’s always a dick.”

It’s a lot to take in—maybe too much. Everything around here is so dark and it hurts to walk around in it, even if I’m only visiting. I can still feel it taking a toll on me. The heaviness. The fear. The temptation. So much could go wrong just from my being here.

But you need to be here. You need to save him. Like you didn’t with Landon.

Quinton withdraws his hand from my back and we start down the stairs. “So where are we going today? Or are we just chilling in your car again?” He seems twitchy, his brown eyes really large and glossy and his nose red. It makes me sad to see it, how he’s hurting himself.

“Do you want to go somewhere else?” I ask, holding on to the railing.

He shrugs as we reach the bottom of the stairway. “I’m down for wherever, just as long as I’m back by like five.”

I want to ask him why, but at the same time I fear the answer, so I keep my lips sealed. We climb in the car and I start up the engine and crank the air, trying to think of a safe place to go. “There’s this good restaurant my friend Lea told me about,” I say. “We could go get something to eat there.”

He waves me off. “Nah, I’m not really hungry.”

“Okay.” I try to think of somewhere else, but I don’t know Vegas very well.

“I know somewhere we can go,” Quinton says with a thoughtful look on his face, his honey-brown eyes temporarily lighting up. “But you’re going to have to trust me.”

It takes me a minute to respond, because even though I want to trust him, I’m not sure I can. “Okay, but where is this place?”

“It’s a surprise.” He gives me a smile, but it’s difficult to see it because I don’t think it’s real, rather created by his high. But I play along, because it’s all I can do. Pretend that it’s real. Pretend I’m okay with everything. “Okay, but you got to give me directions.”

He motions to me to drive forward. “Get going and I’ll guide you there.” He winks at me. “Just relax. You can trust me, Nova.”

Even though every single part of me screams that I can’t, I force myself to drive forward, letting him guide me, hoping I’m not going to do something stupid and make a wrong turn. Because one wrong turn can lead to a lot of damage.


Quinton

Dylan’s been acting strange lately, even though we managed to pay him back with some money we stole from a house the other night. He seems more violent and erratic than he has in the past. I think all the smack is starting to screw with his head a little bit, so I don’t like it when I walk out and he’s paying so much attention to Nova. I shouldn’t have left her out there alone, but the moment I saw her, my heart leaped in my chest, way too excited to see her. Such a wrong reaction and I had to go back and get enough crystal for a hit or two if I need it, if I get to feeling too much while I’m out with her.

I’m actually probably way too high to be doing anything, yet somehow I find myself out and about. It’s like one minute I’m back in my room, absorbing as much intoxicating crystal as I can, feeling my heart rate speed up to the point where I feel like I’m flying—feel like I could do anything, and then suddenly I’m driving in the car with Nova, flirting with her like we’re on a date.

Stupid.

Stupid.

Stupid.

Yet at the same time I’m perfectly content with being stupid—with being near her, because I’m soaring.

High.

Confused.

After I get her away from the apartment and Dylan, I tell her to drive and she does, trusting me, which she shouldn’t, yet it pleases me in the most fucked-up way possible. By the time we’re pulling up to the building, I can tell I’m going to mess this up badly. I can feel it, yet I’m too spun out of my mind to care.

“So this is where you wanted to take me?” Nova asks, with a baffled look on her face at the sight of the dated motel that I found one day when Tristan and I were looking for a place to crash after we got caught shoplifting and had to find a quick place to hide. The thing is I’m still not even sure if we were ever being chased or if paranoia set in.

I take off my seat belt because she always makes me wear it whenever I’m in the car with her. “Yeah. I know it looks a little sketchy, but we’ll be okay,” I tell her, and when she still looks skeptical, I add, “Trust me, Nova.” My thoughts laugh at me, deep down knowing I’m not trustworthy, but it’s like I can’t get my emotions to link with my thoughts and my thoughts to link with my mouth, so I’m just saying stuff, cruising through the motions without thinking of the consequences.

She swallows hard, but then unbuckles her seat belt, and we get out of the car. I meet her around the front and I don’t know why but I slip my arm around her waist and again I don’t know why, but for some reason she lets me. It’s so hard being near her when I feel this pull toward her, yet I also feel this push away from her, driven by my guilt.

“You seem in a really good mood today,” she notes, glancing up at me with those gorgeous eyes that I’ve been sketching every day despite the battle of my inner thoughts.

I shrug and pull my hand away, giving in to the push and the guilt. “I’m just in a normal mood.”

She doesn’t say anything else as she follows me through the door that’s marked as an exit. She instantly stiffens as she steps into the dust and the darkness and the debris on the floor. The walls are caving in and there’s spray paint on the wall and I get her reluctance, but at the same time I know she’ll appreciate why I brought her here.

“Just follow me.” I slip my fingers through hers, surrendering to the pull. “I promise when we get to the top, it’ll be worth it.”

Her eyes widen as she angles her chin back and looks up at the hole in the ceiling that stretches through five floors. “Is it safe to get to the top?”

“Of course,” I say, but I’m not really sure. “Just follow where I walk.”

She nods and then moves to the side when I do, tracking my footsteps, clutching my hand, her skin damp. It briefly registers through her nervous touch that she’s trusting me to keep her safe and so when I reach the place where Tristan and I climbed up through the holes in the walls to get to the top, I instead go to the right to the stairway, because it’s safer.

“So this place used to be an old hotel?” she asks as she takes calculated steps, making sure to stay close to the wall.

I put my hand on the wall as the stairs creak below our feet. “I think so. At least that’s what the sign said outside. I’m guessing, though, that it was probably a casino, too, since most of the hotels here are.”

She glances at an open room that still has orange shag carpet and brightly painted yellow walls with a rainbow pattern down them. “Yeah, they even have slot machines in the gas stations. It’s weird and noisy. Plus, everyone’s always smoking,” she says, and when I pause, she quickly adds, “It doesn’t bother me, but my friend Lea can’t stand the smell of cigarettes.”

I start walking again. It’s amazing how a single sentence can remind me just how far apart we are, even if part of me doesn’t want us to be that way. “Is Lea the girl who was with you the first day you showed up at my place?”

She nods with her head tipped down, hair veiling her face, her attention focused on the floor as she chews her lip, and all I can think is how perfect she is and how much I want to draw her. As soon as the thought surfaces, it makes me feel like I’m cheating on Lexi, thinking about doing that with someone else, and I seriously almost turn around and bail out, wishing I could go back to my room and do more lines.

“I met her at the beginning of the school year,” Nova continues as she sidesteps a large chunk of Sheetrock. “She came up to me and introduced herself when I went to this center for people who’ve lost a loved one to suicide.”

I look over my shoulder at her. “She’s lost someone, too?”

“Her dad,” Nova explains as she holds on to my hand and the fingers of her other hand wrap around my arm. “Even though it’s not quite the same as what I went through, we really connected, sort of like I did with you for a while there.”

I stop walking, moving, breathing. Time stops. She ends up nearly running into me, stumbling over her feet, but catches herself by jabbing her fingertips deeper into my arm and putting her hand on the wall beside us.

She grips my arm as she stares up at me. “What’s wrong?”

“What do you mean you connected with me?” I ask, my voice coming out a little sharper than I planned.

“Last summer,” she says timidly. “That time we spent together—I thought we sort of connected. Not like in a hey-we’re-best-friends way, but…” She releases my arm to drag her fingers through her hair. She must have gotten dust on her hand from touching the wall because the movement leaves a streak of it in her hair. “But I could talk to you about stuff that I wasn’t able to talk to anyone else about. Stuff about my dad and Landon.”

I reach up and brush my hand across her hair, trying to get the dust off her head, and I hate how excited my heart gets when her breathing speeds up, all from me touching her. “Nova, I’m pretty sure that was the weed that let you talk openly like that, not me.”

She shakes her head, her tongue slipping out of her mouth to wet her dry lips, and all I want to do is back her into the wall, pick her up, and devour her. But the wall would probably crumble under the slightest pressure and I’m not sure we’d survive the fall.