“Night, Kai.”
I hung up, vibrating, unsure of what passed between us but sure that I liked it. I wanted to curl in on myself as if to trap the clement heat in, but I also wanted to stretch, as if I’d just taken a deep, satisfying nap, let the energy from the good resting spread me straight, pull me taller. I was smiling. My phone buzzed—a notification pushed away the rosy warmth that filled me, dropping down from my screen almost gleefully.
Rianne Tucker has tagged you in a photo.
My heart moved to my mouth as I clicked, breath hitched. #ThrowbackThursday. A picture of both of us in year 10, hair slicked back into side buns, held by silver-toned snap barrettes that were there to control what Eco Styler couldn’t, 99-p hair-shop lip gloss slathered on as we pouted into the camera, arms slung around ourselves, holding each other tight.
Bedazzled on the throwback photo, pink and glitzy, were the words: BFFs 4 Lyfe.
Chapter 16
The Usual Suspects had been successful in their campaign to get me out. Or at least, they’d felt successful in their campaign to get me out. The truth was I’d been all or nothing, and when I decided I wasn’t nothing I was determined to be all: wearing a push-up bra under my strappy top, whining on Lysha and Yinda, and then becoming the protein in a whine sandwich while Mavado told us that we were so special, so special so special, so special. And I felt special, braids swinging, vodka pouring. Koffee was back, on the tables, the heartbeat of the party racing to forget—doing the most to forget—the fragility of everything, especially the person who usually wore the gold-star pendant around my neck.
Clear hair-shop lip-gloss had been slicked on, a touch of mascara and my mum’s too-light-for-me powder pressed haphazardly on my face. I’d gone into my parents’ room to retrieve it. Her vanity was a little dusty. I ran my fingers across her perfumes, her creams. I sniffed them, remembering the time her neck didn’t smell like clinical sterility, of sweat and hot tears that fell from my eyes on to the hollows of her collarbone. Her neck had always been elegant, her body soft and curvy, but there had always been a stately dip in the connect between her throat and chest, queenly, an elegant deck for a gold star pendant. Now, it was emaciated with tubes coming out of it. I tried to move as much as I could, as if every hip swish and waist twist was a prayer of vitality, as if the more alive I forced myself to be, the more alive she would be. I found that alcohol lubricated my body and made this easier, made the hard edges in my mind soft, the bristles buck.
While I was stood breathless against a wall, taking a break, dizzy head spinning delightfully, Nile came over and took my hand. “Come on. I promised I’d look after you.”
I smiled woozily and followed him to the kitchen, where he refilled my cup. I leaned back against a counter as people squeezed past, to and from the fridge.
“Yeah? Looking after me means giving me more drink?”
Nile shrugged as he passed me the cup. “It’s good to see you have fun, K. Relaxed, like this. Felt like I lost you for a while.”
I held still, the cup hovering by my mouth. An alcoholic heat rush and hormonal heat rush combined to make me feel like I was aflame. I swayed and held tighter on to the counter. The room was pleasantly soupy.
“Bro. Bruh. Did you ever even have me to lose me?”
Nile let out a slow, sexy smile. “I nearly did. Year 11. You were crushing on me like brazy.”
I rolled my eyes. “Brazy? Why do you talk like that? Such a beg. You’re corny! And it’s exactly for that reason that it was the other way round.”
“Just admit that you wanted me.”
“You wish.”
Nile’s smile faded slightly, eyes giving off a metal-edged glint as he gazed lazily at me. There were a few other people in the kitchen, but they were busy, not paying attention, music too loud to focus. Nile glanced around quickly, then stepped closer to me, whispered in my ear.
“Yeah? What if I do?”
I opened and shut my mouth, my heart pounding against my chest, his heavy, masculine heat and Christmas-present-first-grown cologne new to me, this whole thing new to me. My mum getting sick had suspended milestones for me and, as mouthy as I was, my mouth was yet to make contact with a boy’s. This was wrong, I knew it. He was Rianne’s man, but everything, everything in my body wanted to be against his body, in pursuit of forgetting, in losing myself in the heat.
“Don’t say that, Nile. You shouldn’t be saying that.” I pushed him off slightly.
Nile stepped back but his eyes remained fastened to me. “Let’s talk. Somewhere private.”