Chapter 1: The Last Guests Depart
The last car had pulled away ten minutes ago, its taillights swallowed by the country dark, leaving nothing but the crackle of dying embers and the heavy scent of woodsmoke. Gage stabbed at the bonfire with a rusty poker, sending a constellation of sparks spiraling up toward the fairy lights strung between the oak trees. They twitched in the hot air rising from the coals.
From the house, the clatter of his aunt loading the dishwasher echoed. A familiar, safe sound. He focused on it, on the simple chore of dismantling the party, on anything but the weight of her gaze he could feel drilling into his back.
“They didn’t even notice I took it.”
Her voice was close, too close, a whisper woven with smoke and defiance. He didn’t turn. He kept poking the fire, his shoulders tight.
“Took what, Carly?”
“This.”
She moved into his periphery, a slip of a thing in a denim jacket two sizes too big. She thrust a dented silver flask between him and the fire. The metal caught the low glow, a wicked little wink.
He finally looked at her. At eighteen years old, standing in the wreckage of her birthday party, she looked both terrifyingly young and ancient with planning. Her honey-brown hair was messier now, falling from its clip, and her wide hazel eyes reflected the fire’s dance. There was a flush on her cheeks that hadn’t been there when she was blowing out candles two hours ago.
“Put it back,” he said, his voice low. “Your dad will skin you.”
“He’s already asleep. Prayed over the cake, kissed my forehead, checked the locks.” She recited it like a boring nursery rhyme. Her fingers, pale and delicate, unscrewed the cap. She took a quick, gulping sip, and her face immediately contorted. She choked, a harsh, dry sound. “Oh, God. That’s awful.”
“It’s cheap whiskey,” Gage said, a faint, unwilling smile touching his lips. “What did you expect?”
“I don’t know. Sweetness?” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, then held the flask out to him. “Your turn.”
He stared at it. At her. The air between them grew thick, charged with everything he’d spent years carefully walling up. He was her cousin. He was twenty-one. He worked on engines because their logic made sense. She was a universe of variables he had no business calculating.
“Not my thing,” he lied.
“Liar.” She stepped closer. The toes of her sneakers bumped his work boots. He could smell the whiskey on her breath, yes, but underneath it, the clean scent of her shampoo, something like vanilla and sunlight. A kid’s shampoo. “I see you sometimes. When you think no one’s looking. You get so quiet. Like you’re somewhere else. Somewhere louder.”
His throat constricted. She saw too much.
“I’m just tired, Carly.”
“Teach me,” she breathed. The words weren’t a request; they were a plea dropped into the space between their hearts.
“Teach you what? How to steal liquor and hate the taste?”
“Everything.” The word was a exhalation, ripe with a desperate, naive hunger. “They kept me in a glass box, Gage. I could see the world, but I couldn’t touch it. I couldn’t hear it. I don’t know anything. Not about music, or real people, or… or what it feels like.”
She reached out. Her fingertips, cold from the metal flask, brushed against the back of his hand where it gripped the poker. A jolt, pure and electric, shot up his arm. He froze, every muscle locking.
“What what feels like?” he managed, his voice gravel.
“You know.” Her gaze dropped to his mouth, then back to his eyes, bold and terrified all at once. “I want you to be the one. Please.”
The ‘please’ undid him. It was the crack in her bravado, the child peering out from behind the woman’s mask she was trying on. He saw the hope there, and the fear of rejection, and it was more dangerous than any practiced seduction.
He dropped the poker. It thudded softly on the grass. In one movement, he took the flask from her, his calloused fingers closing over hers for a second too long. He took a long, burning pull, letting the cheap heat fortify the crumbling walls inside him.
“This is a bad idea,” he said, the whiskey scraping his throat.
“I know,” she whispered, a thrill in her voice. She was leaning in, drawn to his heat, to the danger of it.
“I’m not a good teacher.”
“You’re the only one I trust.”
He looked down at her, at the fairy lights tangled in her hair, at the vulnerable column of her throat. The rational part of his mind screamed warnings, a clanging alarm about lines and consequences and family dinners that would never be the same.
But under that, a deeper, darker current pulled. She was offering him a match. He was a powder keg of silent wants. It was physics. It was inevitable.
He capped the flask, the click final in the quiet night. He didn’t hand it back. He kept it, his fist closing around the cool metal.
“You trust me,” he repeated, the words tasting strange. “You shouldn’t.”
He saw the slight tremor in her lower lip, the uncertainty flickering behind the determination. Good. She should be scared. This was real. This had weight.
Before he could stop himself, before he could rebuild the wall, his free hand came up. He didn’t cup her face. He didn’t pull her in. He just let the rough pad of his thumb brush once, fleetingly, over the apple of her cheek. A touch so brief it might have been the night air stirring.
Her breath hitched. Her eyes went wide, drinking him in.
In the house, the kitchen light went off.
The movement broke the spell. Gage stepped back, putting a foot of careful, crucial distance between them. The flask was a cold, heavy secret in his hand.
“You should go in,” he said, his voice back under a strained control. “Aunt Linda will check on you.”
“Gage—”
“Go on, Carly.” It wasn’t a rejection. It was a postponement. The tension hadn’t snapped; it had thickened, coiled around them both like vine.
She searched his face, looking for the promise in his retreat. After a long moment, she nodded, a small, decisive motion. She turned and walked toward the back porch light, her steps unhurried. She didn’t look back.
Gage watched until the screen door sighed shut behind her. He looked down at the flask in his hand, then out at the dark fields beyond the fence line. The fire was just embers now, a pulsating heart of orange in the ash.
He brought his thumb to his nose, catching the faint, ghostly trace of her skin.
Everything had just changed.