Never Could Stop, page 6
part #7 of Tasting Never Series
“Is that why you were attacked? Because of all that stuff?”
“Uh,” he starts, and I can just imagine his brown eyes boring into mine, trying to tear me apart and break me down to the most basic components of my humanity. The man says he wants to be a psychologist or something. He'd be seriously fucking good at it. “You know, I'm kind of concerned, kid. You took off and left a note threatening suicide, and now you're asking about this. Are you okay?”
“It is why, isn't it?” I ask, feeling a little breathless and light-headed. “I have to go.”
“Jade—” Ty starts, but I hang up before he can get another word out. Now I know he's safe; word will spread to my other sisters that I'm safe. There. That's more courtesy than Never ever gave us when she ran away. I called and checked in, but I don't have to take their shit or their interrogations. This is my new life, and maybe it started out with a hitch for a reason?
I hang up and head back to the parking lot to find Foster sliding into the front seat.
Before he can start the engine, I'm opening the front passenger side and climbing in.
“I don't know where you're going,” I tell him as I glance over at the navy eyes of a stranger. “But take me with you.”
9
For the next few days, I just sit quietly in the front seat of the car—I guess it's a Chevy Celebrity or something—and let Foster do the driving. Surprisingly, he doesn't ask me why I want to stay with him and his sister, just carries us along rural highways and back roads in a paranoid zigzag and taps his left hand against his thigh in time to music that he hums under his breath. The radio in the car is broken and neither sibling offers up an iPod for tunes. Mine's in my bag, but I decide that it's maybe best I just don't let them know that I have it.
When he starts falling asleep at the wheel, Foster pulls into random gas stations and loads up on energy drinks—always mocha flavored—peanuts and ice cream sandwiches that he struggles to eat before they melt all over his fingers. That usually keeps him going for a good couple of hours. Once that burst of energy runs out, he finds a shitty motel and we all share a room.
The first night we did that, he asked me if I'd prefer it if he slept in the car. And then he told me if I wanted to sleep in the bathroom with the door locked, that I could do that, too. The sad part about his suggestions were that I didn't even think about that kind of stuff until he brought it up.
I think I really am naïve.
You'd think a girl who got assaulted by her own father—on two separate occasions—would know better. Maybe I'm just stupid?
“We really need some fucking music,” Hadley whines, putting her palms on either of our seats and leaning up between them to pick at the dashboard with nails painted like rainbows. She already said she wasn't gay like fifty times, but I totally don't care why her nails are that color. My own nails—freshly touched up in fire engine red—tease the threads of my fishnet tights as I watch her try and fail to get the radio to work. “And I'm sick of this car. Can't we just pick a city and see if we like it?”
I bite my lower lip, tasting the waxy flavor of my lipstick. I think some people would be righteously horrified at the idea of being nomadic, but it's exciting to me. Pick a city, any city. If you hate it, move on. No cages, no stuffy farmhouses with a bunch of copper haired girls living in it. Did I mention that my sisters and I all basically look the same? Copper hair, hazel eyes, small noses. We could be clones.
It's stifling.
“No.”
Sitting next to Foster, I feel like I've learned as much from watching him as I would from a hundred conversations. He's not very talkative, but his face cycles through emotions when he thinks nobody's looking. I've even seen him cry twice and we've only been traveling together for … five days? I think it's been five days. There's something liberating about not knowing or caring about exact numbers.
Hadley grabs a handful of his electric blue hair and gives it a tug.
“Why not? Do you really think Keenan would follow us all this way?” she asks, glancing sidelong at me like she's still not sure what I'm doing here. While Foster accepted my presence with hardly a blink, Hadley seems equal parts curious and suspicious. At least they've both stopped staring at me with pity and frustration.
“I don't know,” Foster says, giving her a quick flick of his blue eyes, “and that's enough for me to be sure we can't stop. I'm not taking any chances.”
“You're not?” she asks, like she's completely baffled. “Then what about Jade? Jade's a chance.”
“Jade was a mark,” he says firmly, turning my blood to ice. I still have basically zero idea of what's going on, but I don't care. We don't talk about it. Fuck, we don't even talk. The three of us have had about an hour's worth of conversation total over the last few days. Doesn't matter. At home, all my family does is talk, talk, talk. There's always something going on, someone getting in my business. Here, on the open road with the window rolled down and the loose fabric ceiling liner billowing against my head, I'm completely disconnected from everyone and everything.
That's how I want it.
“Jade could be working for Keenan,” Hadley says and then gives me an apologetic look, like sorry, but it's a distinct possibility, babe.
“She's not working for Keenan,” Foster says firmly as he hits the blinker and takes the car off on some desolate looking exit with a sign for lodging. I think we're in Arkansas right now, but I'm not entirely sure.
Hadley looks at him for a long moment and then just sighs, flopping back into her seat with a sigh. Based on the limited amount of conversation we've had, I've learned she's actually only fifteen years old (explains the serious attitude problem), an Aries, and that her last name is Wallace. Other than that, all she talks about is her monster crush on Skrillex, how much she misses her iPhone (she never mentions what exactly happened to it), and how Foster's a dick for not letting her use his.
“It was her brother that was the snitch, remember? Keenan would never have a snitch's sister working for him.”
“A snitch?” I ask, perking up at this new bit of information. Whoa. Ty McCabe is a snitch? Like, to the cops or something?
Foster cringes like he didn't mean to say as much. But then he just starts talking anyway.
“Yeah. He told the police about this big case involving a girl named Marin Rice.”
“Foster,” Hadley snaps, but he just slams his palms against the steering wheel.
“What?!” he snaps right back, reminding me of me and my sisters. Any little conversation can be turned into an argument, so something as big as this? It's mostly just screaming that happens if one of them tries to bring it up. “If Jade was going to fuck us over, she would've done it already, don't you think?”
He glances over at me, face lit in random bursts from the streetlights whizzing by outside the window. Each time he comes into focus, I only get a second to study him so I do it one feature at a time. A sad but full mouth, a dark brow with a single scar cut through it, a slash of cheekbone. My jaw tingles with the remembered brush of his lips, the feathering of warm breath against my ear. What would it be like to kiss him? I wonder, a strange throbbing starting up behind my rib cage. He's kind of an angry, cranky weird sort of a person, but he has a pretty mouth. I've never kissed a guy with a pretty mouth.
My cheeks heat with shame at the thought of the kind of guys I have kissed. Men with booze on their breath and roughly stubbled cheeks. Men I didn't really want to kiss but did anyway, like I was punishing myself by letting them touch me with sweaty, grasping hands. But I never went any further than that, never left the bar or the club to take them up on their offers.
Nope. Still a virgin. I'm too scared of my impulses to see what I would do given free reign. My sister, Never, was a fucking sex addict. And my mom had eight kids with six dads. My older sister Beth has two children at the age of twenty-four, both fathered by some rich asshole from Jackson that treats her like spittle on the bottom of his shoe.
So basically, I'm doomed to either have no love life—or a really shitty one.
“Who was Marin Rice?” I ask after a few moments of silence have passed. I notice the hotel in the distance, some tasteless, featureless value inn plopped in the middle of nowhere. It sits under a purple-navy sky splattered with stars.
“A girl from New York,” Foster says, whispering again. I notice he really only has two volumes—this tired, dreary sounding whisper that's rough as gravel and then this cranky, irritated shouting that he mostly reserves for his sister. To be honest, he's kind of an unlikable guy, right? But I think I like him anyway. “She was kidnapped, sold, raped and murdered.”
He pulls into the parking lot and brings the coughing, shuttering old car to a stop in a space in front of the lobby doors then turns off the ignition.
“Same thing that happened to our cousin, Gianna.”
“Gianna isn't dead!” Hadley screams at Foster as he opens the door and climbs out of the car, slamming it behind him as his sister lays on the horn and he flips her off with both hands through the windshield. I try not to judge them for their weirdness; I know what it's like to bicker with your siblings. And I think they probably just take all their feelings out on each other. There doesn't seem to be anyone else around—not once have they mentioned their parents. Or the fact that Hadley should be going to high school somewhere. “She's not fucking dead,” Hadley says and then after a pause, “can I bum a cigarette?”
“Your brother knows you smoke,” I tell her, turning in my seat and passing a smoke and a lighter back to her. “He says he can smell it on you.”
“No, he doesn't,” she says, lighting up and taking a few frantic puffs while she cranes her neck to try and make sure Foster isn't on his way back out of the lobby just yet. “And he didn't say that to you. He wouldn't.”
“Well, he didn't say it to me, but I heard him mumbling under his breath.”
Hadley ignores me.
A few minutes later, when the glass doors slide apart and he steps outside in the same old jeans and sneakers, a gray t-shirt clinging to the slender body underneath, she flicks her smoke aside and doesn't seem to give a shit that it's burned a brand-new hole in the blue velour seat.
“First floor facing the pool,” he says, rolling his eyes at the smell of cigarette smoke and singed fibers. He gives me an exasperated sidelong glance, like he's asking for help. “You have seven sisters, right?” he asks as he starts the car again and I have to try really hard to keep myself from promising God all sorts of things to make that engine turn over. Most of the promises I make I wouldn't keep anyway. “How the fuck are you still alive right now?”
“I have no idea,” I say, flipping long copper hair over one shoulder and noticing that Foster's gaze lingers on me for a long moment before he drags it away. When it goes, it feels like he takes my skin along with it, like he leaves me sitting there naked or something. A shiver curls through me like a beckoning skeletal finger, like that tattoo on his hand's come to life and is calling me to bathe and drown in its stark gray and black ink. “Honestly, they were well on their way to suffocating me; that's why I left.”
The car jerks to an abrupt stop in a space around the back of the hotel, near the gate to the pool.
Fuck.
I did it again.
“I thought your spirit was just too big for one city?” he asks with a tight smile, and then he opens his door and climbs out before I can respond. Shit, shit, shit. I'm blowing my cover left and right here. It shouldn't matter—why should I give a damn if a few stupid lies fall apart in front of strangers—but somehow it does anyway. Like, am I so damaged that it's literally impossible for me to start over again?
If I can't even get a lie right, then how am I going to start a whole new life?
I sit there for so long that Hadley changes into a red bikini and appears at the gate, letting herself into the pool area. I think it's technically closed, but nobody's bothered to lock it. Out here in Butt Fuck Nowhere, probably no one cares as long as she's quiet.
“Are you alright?” Foster asks, opening my door with an agonizing creak and a flaking of rust across the pavement. This really is the absolute shittiest car I've ever ridden in in my life, and I've seen some real gems. My mom was a belly dancer; she didn't exactly make enough money to buy fancy cars. Or cheap new cars. Or low mileage used ones. Or basically anything but a bucket on wheels.
“Yeah, totally fine,” I say with a breezy air, stepping out of the car in fishnets with no shoes. I can feel the pattern on my bare feet; it's fucking weird. My short skirt swirls around my thighs and my bare arms tingle in the cold night air as I drag my backpack out of the car and hook my fingers in my shoes.
Foster watches me the entire time, just stands there with his tattooed hand on the top of the rusty old door and takes me in as a whole person, instead of just in bits. I've noticed a lot of guys just do the bit thing. Face, tits, hips, ass. And then it's either yes or no—usually yes because I've also noticed that most guys aren't very choosy.
This particular guy observes me like he can see the forest and the trees, if you know what I mean.
“Are you going swimming?” I ask as he closes and locks the door behind me.
“No.”
Most people, when they respond in clipped little one word answers like that are trying to be rude. I think it's just part of Foster's personality. He says exactly what he needs to say and nothing more.
“Then why are you standing out here?” I continue, trying to prompt just a little more out of him. I've decided that even if his voice sounds like shattered glass, I like it. It's not just rough; it's real. Not all slick and smooth like Beth's ex, Danny Delphino. Ugh. What a fucking creep.
“I don't want to let either of you out of my sight,” he says, sending shivery little thrills through me. Whoa. What's that about?
“Are you protecting us?” I joke, using my best flirty voice, the one New Jade would use if she were going into a bar for the first time and trying to pick up cute boys. Because that's exactly what New Jade would do. She'd find a guy with an easy smile and a clean shaven face and she'd take him home and have sex with him, just because she could. She'd get it over with, but really, it would be no big deal. She wouldn't get into a relationship with him, and she sure as hell wouldn't let him turn into her baby daddy or hit her or move into her old farmhouse with all her daughters.
Deep breath, deep breath.
Whenever I have a mean thought about my mother—like that one just now—I start to hyperventilate. I won't think ill of the dead. I won't, I won't, I won't.
“With my life,” Foster growls out and then lights up a cigarette with his Zippo, standing guard between the door of our hotel room and the black iron fence around the pool. In a way, he reminds me of Ty—tattooed, ripped, a serious chain-smoker. But I guess their similarities are sort of limited to the physical. Ty is outgoing and vacillates between gravely serious and adorably goofy. Foster is … well, I don't really know what Foster is.
“Why?” is what I decide to ask, standing there with my miniskirt billowing around my legs, maybe even flashing my fishnets and panties underneath, copper hair sticking to my lips as Hadley ruins the moment by splashing loudly into the pool.
Foster cranes his head slowly to look at me.
“Because your eyes are hard, but your mouth …” He drops that heavy gaze to my lips, and I feel my breath catch sharply. “Is still soft.”
And then he stops talking.
I have no idea what that means, but I can't shake the idea that I've just been complimented.
10
“I don't know when I'm coming home,” I say with an air of superiority, wishing my younger sister, Zella, could see the way I'm waving my cigarette around like I don't have a care in the world. I'm loving the power I have over her right now, like she's really not all that special because of her scholarships and her perfect grades and her talk of becoming a lawyer. “Or if I'm coming home,” I add, ashing my smoke into the grass.
“Yeah, well, I think you're being seriously flipping selfish right now. Mom just died, Jade.”
“You think I don't know that?” I hiss, noticing that Foster's glancing my way from the opposite side of the bench. His elbows are on his denim clad knees, his chin parked in his hands. It's a little creepy with that skeleton tattoo of his, those bony fingers clutching his chin—but a tiny bit sexy, too. “I'm the only person in that house that actually cares that she's gone. You and everyone else, you're just relieved to have her out of the way.”
“That's not true,” Zella whispers, and I can tell I'm pissing her off. “I loved Mom; we all did. But she wasn't an easy or pleasant person to be around. Even you can't deny that. When she was here—which wasn't all that often—you fought like cats and dogs.”
“Is there a reason you called me other than to bitch?” I snap back at her, feeling that hot, flustered feeling wash over me, like I'm being judged again. I definitely don't miss that feeling.
“I just wanted you to know that we all miss you. We all want you to come home.”
“Hmm,” I start, looking up at a blue-blue sky, completely free of clouds. “I'll think about it.”
I hang up on her, knowing all the while that I'm being a complete and utter bitch. Maybe a teensy little part of me misses my family, but that's just the old me wanting to fall into old habits. This new me is carefree and wild, and she does whatever the fuck she wants whenever the fuck she wants.
Like climbing into an old station wagon with a stranger with no idea of where she's going.
Hadley lays on her back on the grass in front of us, the shiny azure surface of the Mississippi River snaking across the landscape like a fat, lazy snake. The color reminds me of Foster's eyes.
