Drowning in You by Rebecca Berto

Author:Rebecca Berto
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: relationships, love story, contemporary romance, hopeless, new adult, abbi glines, colleen hoover

18. Catching Charlee

Dexter

Dad’s footsteps are thuds pounding toward my bedroom. He chucks open my door and says he’s doing this and do I want this, too?

“Nah, whatevs,” I reply, replaying chords, then continuing, finding my rhythm again.

Your hand is my warm when I’ve spent the night in the cold / My hands fit your curves when you lean into my body / My lips are the puzzle fittin’ the crook of your neck / Still somehow we ain’t nothing but a wreck.

I clamp my hand down, suffocating the echoing ring from my guitar. The door just slammed. Did Dad leave?

Before I forget them, I scribble the lyrics on my makeshift paper-wrapped blackboard. The pen keeps drying out while I write. I try to revive it, shaking it in the air, banging it on my bedside table, until it makes a cracking sound and physically snaps in half. Royal-blue ink splatters onto my bare chest and blurts the paperboard like I’ve sliced open the pen’s aorta. “Fuck,” I mutter, jerking back. “Fuck, fuck—”

Then it hits me, reeling me back like a yo-yo string curling around its base. The car is making its usual dying, gurgling sound off in the distance. And I’m home alone.

I cross to the door, ink following me in the form of a thin blue print. I shove my feet into my military boots and grab one of my workout rags from a basket of dirty stuff.

Do you want something from the store, bud? That’s what Dad asked me, I think. I’d know if I had paid attention.

How long is he going to be out? Do I have time?

Dad and I, we haven’t always stared daggers at each other’s backs. We used to play hoops in Chicago with Jack, and sometimes Dad would teach Jack and I how to steer the wheel of the car, making engine noises with his mouth, which at five and seven really sounded like a car idling. Tahny would roll her eyes, faking interest in the back seat, squealing at her Seventeen mag.

Fast-forward fourteen years and Tahny has a toddler and no boyfriend, Dad has us in debt and possibly wants to steal money from Walter yet feels guilty about it, and Jack is under my skin on one forearm, woven through the forest on the other tricep, and six feet under.

After I’ve washed as much of the pen ink from my hands as possible—some has seeped into my skin, temporarily adding new tattoos to my fingers—I pad down the hall to the end room. I grit my teeth, bracing for disappointment, but the lock pops. The door swings in and bounces off the stop.

At first I don’t move because I’m just imagining this luck, that Dad couldn’t have left the door to the room where he’s keeping his secrets wide open. But I’m inside, so it must be real. It’s funny that the inside of this spare room looks so different compared to how I imagined it before. The bed is more an instrument for his mess than a possibility of somewhere for a guest to sleep.

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