Praying for Rain Page 13

  I wish I could say I’d never had to use it.

  Rain slides off the bed and kneels beside the backpack while I pull on my jeans and boots. She shoves her extra clothes, the first aid kit, and my meds inside, but not the hydrocodone. That she uncaps and shakes into her palm without making a sound. I watch out of the corner of my eye as she covertly pushes a little white pill into her mouth and tucks the orange bottle into her bra through the neck of her shirt.

  At first, I thought she didn’t want me to see her dosing because she was afraid I’d take her pills again, but the more I watch her, the more I realize she’s not afraid; she’s ashamed. She’s ashamed of her dependence.

  I know the fucking feeling.

  Crash!

  The sound of glass breaking down the hall shatters our silence. Rain and I freeze, our eyes locking as a chorus of giggles and curse words echo through the house.

  “See? I told you they left.” A girl’s voice.

  “Damn. I was really hoping I’d get to fuck Carter Renshaw before I died.” Another girl.

  “We all were, honey.” A guy.

  Their laughter fills the house as the color drains from Rain’s face.

  “You know them?” I whisper.

  Rain simply nods and covers her mouth with her sleeves.

  “I don’t know why the hell he wasted all his time with Rainbow Williams.” The way this bitch says her name makes me wish she were a guy so that I could go out there and bash her face in.

  “Uh … ’cause she’s gorgeous,” the guy replies, lisping a little on the last S.

  I want to bash his face in, too.

  “I guess, if you’re into that whole goody-goody, Little Miss Perfect thing. But Carter was captain of the basketball team. He should have been dating a cheerleader.”

  Rain’s eyes drop to the floor, and I see red.

  “Oh, like you?” the other girl sasses back.

  “Yeah. Duh.”

  I hear cabinet doors opening and shutting as the trio continues their shit-talking in the kitchen. With the bedroom door wide open and no other sound in the house, we can still hear them clearly. Too clearly.

  “Well, I made out with him senior year, so maybe he just had a thing for blondes.”

  Rain’s eyes flick to mine, wide with shock.

  “Oh my God, you little slut!” the cheerleader cackles. “I can’t believe you never told me!”

  “Are you serious? You would have told the whole school by Monday, and Rainbow probably would have killed herself by Tuesday.”

  “Ugh, you’re so right.”

  I watch Rain shrink, disappearing into her flannel shirt until only her flushed pink face is visible.

  “For real. After we kissed, Carter actually told me he wanted to break up with her, but he was afraid it would, like, send her over the edge. She always seemed so depressed, you know?”

  “Oh, I know. And then she dyed her hair black and started wearing that awful hoodie. I wanted to be like, Girl, I know the world’s ending and all, but you are dating Carter Renshaw. Get some highlights and cheer the fuck up.”

  My irritation flares with the mention of that fucker’s hoodie but cools as soon as I realize that Rain’s not wearing it today. In fact, she hasn’t put any of his clothes back on since last night.

  “I don’t know,” the guy chimes in. “I think Carter should have been on the DL with a certain fluffy queen from drama club instead. Wouldn’t that have just been scandalous?”

  I reach over and give Rain’s thigh a squeeze. “You want me to kill ’em?” I whisper, only partly joking.

  The corner of Rain’s mouth lifts in a half-assed smile, but the look on her face is one hundred percent kicked puppy.

  Crouching down, I look her dead in the fucking eyes and whisper, “Hey, what’s our job?”

  The other corner of her mouth quirks up to match the first. “To say fuck ’em and survive anyway?”

  I smirk at my star student, feeling a swell of possessive pride fill my chest. “Very good, Miss Williams,” I whisper. “Very—”

  “Oh my God, you guys! Corn dogs!”

  “That’s it. These fuckers are gonna die.”

  The impulse to shoot them where they stand sends a thrill down my spine as I pull the 9-millimeter out of my holster. I let the magazine drop into my open palm and count the number of bullets left—or I should say, bullet.

  “Fuck,” I hiss, slamming the clip back into the handle.

  Rain shushes me and places a finger to her lips.

  I sigh and whisper the bad news, “I only have one bullet left. You’re gonna have to pick the one you hate the most.”

  Rain giggles into her sleeves, and the sight makes my heart pound like a fucking gorilla’s fist against my chest. She’s nothing like the girl those bitches described. She’s strong and resilient and sweet and—lucky for one of them—forgiving.

  “I don’t want you to kill them,” she admits, looking up at me from under her naturally black lashes, a sheepish smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.

  “Why not?”

  “Because they just made me feel so much better.”

  Either that pill kicked in way faster than I expected or she’s finally snapped.

  “You feel better? After hearing that?” I gesture toward the empty hallway with my gun.

  Rain nods, swallowing me whole with her expanding pupils. “If Carter cheated, then that means I don’t have to feel bad anymore. About”—her eyes drop to the floor as she shrugs, but when they find mine again, they’re glimmering with courage—“us.”

  Us. Fuck me.

  I don’t do us! I want to fire back, but the words die in my mouth as I realize that they’re no longer true. When I look into that beautiful, hopeful, frightened face, the only thing I see is everything I’ve ever wanted.

  Us.

  From the kitchen, we hear the microwave door slam shut and a plate land with a thud on the counter. “Damn it! I forgot the power’s out!”

  A snort bursts out of Rain before I clap my hand over her mouth, choking on my own laughter. We tumble to the carpet, and I reach out, pushing the door almost completely shut with my hand, hoping it will muffle some of the sounds we’re making.

  “Guess those assholes aren’t gonna get to eat your corn dogs after all,” I whisper, my lips grazing her ear.

  “Shh-h-h-h-h.” Rain giggles even though she’s the one making all the damn noise. Her body shakes underneath me with suppressed laughter as I drop my lips to her shushing mouth.

  I vaguely process the sounds of shouting and squealing and banging around in the kitchen, but my senses are too busy feasting on a rainbow to pay them much attention anymore.

  Rain smells different today, like fruity shampoo instead of sugar cookies, but the feel of her hasn’t changed a bit. Her soft, round edges are obedient—molding to fit the shape of my cupped hands, smoothing flat against my hard planes—but her tongue is a defiant little cocktease. It coaxes me deeper just to disappear with a wet smack as her lips slide down the length of my tongue. The tiny, breathy noises she makes as her hips rise up to meet mine are the sexiest sounds I’ve ever fucking heard, and the sight of her beneath me—eyes shut, back arched, lips parted—could only be better if she were naked.

  “Wes …”

  That one whispered word has me ready to tear the buttons off her fucking shirt. I push up onto my forearms to do just that when her eyes pop open, wide and worried.

  “Wes, do you smell smoke?”

  I sit up and inhale, coughing immediately as my lungs reject the hazy gray air tumbling in from the hallway. “Fuck!”

  I grab Rain by the arms and yank her to her feet, but we both start coughing as soon as we’re upright. The air is so much thicker up here. So much hotter. It burns my eyes and sears my nostrils as I fight to suck the oxygen from it.

  “Get down!” I command, pulling Rain to the ground as I drop to my knees. Crawling over to the door, I look down the hallway and listen for signs o
f life, but all I hear are the sounds of destruction coming from the kitchen.

  Rain is right behind me as we make our way toward the living room, which looks like it’s been inhabited by a swirling black thundercloud. A crash so loud it sounds like a stack of dishes falling off the back of a pickup truck cuts through the thickened air. I ignore it as we emerge from the hallway, my sights set on the closest exit. I turn left and head toward the front door, careful to avoid the broken glass those little shits left everywhere on their way in. When I reach the handle and throw that fucker open, I gulp two lungfuls of humid air before turning to help Rain navigate the glass.

  “Rain?”

  Another crash, even louder than the first, rattles the walls as I peer into the blackness, looking for my girl.

  “Rain!”

  “I’ll be right”—cough—“back!” Rain’s voice sounds strangled as it filters through the smog.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” I scream. When I don’t get a response, I barrel headfirst into the house. “Rain!”

  Knowing her, she probably went to go check on those dumb fucks in the kitchen, so I charge into the living room, heading toward the source of the smoke at the back of the house. After a few feet, the air gets so thick and hot and hard to breathe that I have to drop to my elbows and army crawl the rest of the way.

  “Rain!” I call one last time before making it to the entryway of the kitchen, which now resembles the fiery fucking gates of hell.

  The entire back wall of cabinets is engulfed in flames. They’re burning so bright and so hot it’s as if they were varnished with bacon grease. The stove appears to be the source of the inferno—or I should say, the mangled, melting tower of Tupperware piled on top of the gas burners, which have been turned on full blast. The bottom has already burned out of the cabinets to the left and right of the stove, hence the crashing dishes we heard, and it looks like the roof is gonna be the next thing to give.

  There’s no sign of Rain or the motherfuckers who set the fire, so I turn around and crawl back the way I came.

  At least, I think it’s the way I came. The air is so black I can’t see my own hand in front of my face. I stop as my coughing gets the better of me, but the sound of the ceiling buckling above propels me forward. My heart races faster with every foot of ground that I cover. I should have reached the front door by now. I should have at least hit a wall. Regret coils around my throat, stealing the air from my lungs.

  “Rain!” I snarl between lungfuls of poison, her name leaving an even worse taste in my mouth than the noxious fumes I’m breathing for her.

  I knew from that very first day that she was going to be the death of me. I knew it, and I let it happen anyway.

  “Us,” I hear her soft voice coo in my head.

  The sound makes me want to puke.

  This is what us gets you. It gets you fucking killed.

  I hear her voice again and assume I must be hallucinating until I realize that she’s not saying us.

  She’s saying, “Wes! Wes! Oh my God!”

  I feel her tiny hands reach out to me in the dark, gripping my arms, touching my face. The relief I feel that she’s alive is overshadowed by the rage burning inside me hotter than a Tupperware fire.

  “Just a few more feet. Watch out for the glass.”

  I feel something sharp cut into my forearm as the light of day becomes a gauzy reality up ahead. Rain shuffles backward out the door as I follow, tumbling onto the porch where I alternate between coughing and dry-heaving until the world finally stops spinning. All the while, I can feel her concerned hands all over me.

  “Fucking stop!” I yell, swatting her away as I crawl over to the edge of the porch. I hack up something black and spit it into the bushes below. My head is pounding, and my heart is too as I try to figure out what the fuck to say to her.

  “I’m so sorry.” Her voice is a trembling whisper as she sits on the porch next to where my head is hanging over the ledge. “I just ran back to the bedroom real quick to get the backpack. All your medicine was in there. I couldn’t just leave it. But, when I got back, you were gone. I ran around the whole house looking for you before I realized you’d gone back inside.”

  Her story soothes my anger a little bit but not the festering truth gnawing away at the pit of my stomach—the truth that love and survival are mutually exclusive in my world. I allowed myself to think, for just a few hours, that maybe this time would be different. Maybe I would finally get to have both. Maybe God doesn’t fucking hate me.

  “Wes, say something. Please.”

  “We should get off the porch.”

  Rain jumps to her feet and reaches out to help me up, but I wave her off and use the railing to pull myself up. Stumbling down the stairs, I look for the sun, trying to figure out what time it is. I can’t even find it through the plume of black smoke billowing into the sky above the house, but based on the way the trees’ shadows are clinging to the right side of their trunks, I’d say it’s already after noon.

  Fuck.

  Once again, I find myself tempted to tell her to go home. To scream it at her, but when I turn to deliver the blow, I just can’t. Rain’s forehead is wrinkled in concern. Her blue eyes are rounded in remorse. And when she blinks, twin tears sparkle in the sunlight as they slide down her cheeks.

  “Come here,” I demand, feeling my chest swell and crack and splinter as she leaps forward and buries herself in it.

  “I was so scared,” she wails, fisting the back of my shirt as sobs rack her body. “I thought … I thought I’d lost you!”

  I run my hand over her hair as her words pierce my heart like daggers, the pain more intense than my bullet wound or my soot-stained lungs.

  I’ve finally found what I’ve been missing my whole life, and if I keep it, it will kill me.

  No wonder Rain was wearing a black hoodie when I met her.

  She’s the fifth fucking horseman of the apocalypse.

  Rain

  Heat scorches my back as the house goes up in flames behind me, but I can’t let go of Wes. Not yet.

  Two nights ago, I had a nightmare about Burger Palace, and the next morning I got attacked inside of one. Last night, I had a dream that we burned in a fire, and it almost happened a few hours later. What if these aren’t just coincidences? What if the nightmares are coming true?

  I remember what Wes said about dreaming that I was taken away from him last night, and my fists curl into his shirt.

  The sound of a bomb going off behind me pulls a scream from my lungs. I bury my face in Wes’s shirt and feel his hand cover the back of my head. I try to relax, but his grip is too hard. His posture too rigid.

  “What was that?” I ask without looking up, hoping it was just the stove exploding or the roof caving in.

  When Wes doesn’t answer right away, I glance up at his jaw, tight and grinding. His eyes cut to mine, and his chest puffs up beneath my cheek.

  Exhaling through his flared nostrils, Wes finally replies, “My bike.”

  We walk around the side of Carter’s burning house, and sure enough, Wes was right. He’d parked his bike right against the house, next to the back door, and when the fire finally chewed through the kitchen wall, Wes’s gas tank got so hot that it exploded.

  As we walk past the debris on our way toward the trail—a handlebar here, a fender there—the only thing I can think of to say is, “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine,” he says without looking at me. “I don’t need it anymore anyway.” His curt response gives me chills. It’s detached and automatic, like he’s said it a million times to rationalize a million different losses.

  “I don’t need it anymore anyway.”

  Will he feel that way when the horsemen take me from him, too?

  This morning, he wouldn’t have. This morning, he said the nightmare scared him, that waking up without me scared him. But now, I don’t know. It’s like the real Wes died in that fire, and all I got back is the outer shell.

  We’
re silent as we enter the woods and begin our walk down the trail, concentrating on avoiding the mud puddles and fallen branches in our path.

  “I guess it’s a good thing we’re not on the bike,” I say, stepping over the trunk of a fallen pine tree. “This trail is a mess.”

  “Yeah,” Wes deadpans, clearing the obstacle without even looking down.

  His eyes are fixed on something up ahead. I follow his gaze and feel my already-heavy heart sink even more. Wes is staring at the side of my tree house.

  “Did you go see your mom last night?”

  “Uh … no,” I stammer, stepping over another fallen tree. “I … went early this morning, before you woke up.”

  Wes nods slowly, pressing his lips together in a hard line as his eyes drop to my hiking boots. The hiking boots he probably saw on Carter’s bedroom floor when he woke up.

  Right where I’d left them the night before.

  My sinking heart goes into a full-on free fall at the realization that Wes knows I’m lying, but that’s the only sensation the drugs allow me to feel. I don’t look at my house at all as we pass. It’s not there. It doesn’t exist. Nothing exists, except for my feet on this trail. No past. No future. No feelings. No fear. Just the squish, squish, splash of mud beneath my boots and the sound of birds busily rebuilding their nests after the storm.

  I breathe the cool, humid air and sigh. With the gray clouds overhead and the woodsy smell of burning leaves on the breeze, it feels more like fall than spring.

  But people don’t burn leaves in the spring.

  Looking around, I notice a plume of smoke rising above the trees up ahead. I wonder if we got turned around somehow and are actually headed back toward Carter’s house. This doesn’t smell like Carter’s fire though—all that melting plastic and wood varnish. This fire smells cozy and delicious.

  Wes doesn’t seem to appreciate the scent as much as I do. As we get closer, his cough gets worse. I guess his poisoned lungs have had enough smoke inhalation for one day. Pulling his shirt over his nose, Wes lets a yellow hibiscus filter his oxygen as we press on, emerging from the woods behind the raging inferno that was once the Franklin Springs public library.