When he kisses me, I hardly notice. It’s a quick press of his ruined lips against mine before he searches my eyes for some sort of reaction. I have no reaction. I stare back at him, hollow, vacant.
Fresh blood on his lips, James frowns and kisses me again, longer this time. When he tries to work my mouth open, his tongue sliding across my bloody lip, I turn away.
“Please…” He mirrors my every move, following as I turn my face right and left so our mouths are never more than a couple inches apart. “I love you. Let me love you.”
Sam said the same thing, but this time the words have the opposite effect. I shake my head harder but he’s right there, keeping my body melded to his.
He dips his head and presses his mouth against mine so hard, the split in my lip our father gave me rips back open. The pain snaps me out of my numbness.
“No!” I try to twist away, but everywhere I go, he’s there forcing me to accept his kiss, his hands on my body, and my fate. I fight harder. “I’ll never be with you!”
The door flies open, slamming into the wall less than two feet from my head.
“Get your fucking hands off of her!”
Forty-nine
One look at his former best friend, bruised eyes seething with hate, sends James backpedaling into the living room. When Sam rushes toward me, I burst into tears.
“I’m so sorry,” I sob. “I should’ve listened to you. I shouldn’t have come back.”
He cups my cheeks in his hands and shushes me, his hard gaze returning again and again to my bottom lip, which has swollen even more under the onslaught of James’s kisses. “It doesn’t matter,” he tells me gently. “You’re safe now. Okay?”
His words trigger another wave of panic. My heart flutters and the room tilts dangerously. When I grab Sam’s shirt, he squeezes me tight, kisses the side of my mouth that isn’t bleeding.
“We’ll be okay,” he whispers and smiles.
All the hell I’ve endured drains away and I press myself as close to him as I can get, trying to ignore how with each second that passes, his body tenses even more beneath my hands. The room is silent except for his labored breathing and my sniffles, but I know James is still here. Still watching and waiting. I don’t want Sam to face him and there’s no way I’ll be able to stop it from happening.
Slowly, as if he’s afraid of spooking my brother, Sam turns around and moves me behind him. “James,” he says.
I peek around his broad shoulder at my battered brother, standing in the middle of the living room with blood-smeared lips, paler than I’ve ever seen him. His eyes sway slowly from Sam to me, back and forth and back again. He looks unsteady and I have the urge to go to him, even after everything that’s happened. As if Sam senses this, he puts his arm out to keep me back.
James still hasn’t said anything. Sam moves closer, his hands raised slightly. That’s when I realize the gun isn’t in James’s pants anymore—it’s in his hand.
“Give me the gun,” Sam says evenly. “You don’t want to hurt Sarah any more than I do. If you want to fight some more, let’s take this out back.”
I gasp. “No!”
Sam reaches behind him for my hand and squeezes, but I’m not reassured.
“Let’s just leave,” I plead. “We can come back after James calms down. Please!”
James shakes himself out of his trance and stares hard at Sam. “Stay away from her.”
Dropping my hand, Sam takes a step closer to James, away from me. I want to scream at him to stop because James looks exactly like our father the second before he snaps.
“You know I can’t,” Sam says.
James lifts the gun and shoots.
Blood sprays everywhere and for a second, I think James shot me instead of Sam. When Sam falls to his knees, I feel the pain explode in my chest. I scream, dive the three feet between us, and barely catch him before he topples to the ground.
“Sam?” I cry. “Oh, God, no. Talk to me, Sam. Please!”
When I lay him down, the hole where the bullet ripped into his chest gushes blood. I try to cover the wound with my hands to stop the bleeding but it seeps past my fingers and dribbles onto the living room carpet. I grab the nearest shredded shirt off the floor, my favorite pink cotton one, and press it to the ugly hole that shouldn’t be there. He groans and closes his eyes.
“We’re going to get help, okay? Hang in there.”
Standing in our doorway, a horrified Mr. Espinosa bellows a stream of Spanish to his wife across the yard. “Lydia is calling the police,” he says to me. “Who else?”
“Liz Donavon,” I say in a broken voice. “Tell the police to call Liz Donavon.”
When Mr. Espinosa nods and runs back to his house, the only sound left is Sam’s uneven breathing and the sound of him gulping. James’s Godsmack is conspicuously missing.
I smooth the hair away from Sam’s blood-spattered face and press my forehead to his. “I love you,” I whisper. “Please don’t leave me. Please.”
His eyes are glassy when he opens them. Fixed on me, but not quite seeing. Choking on the burnt stench of gunpowder, I whirl around to scream at James, “Do something!”
James’s face has gone ashen. Dropping the gun, he sways, then drops to his knees.
Sam’s cold hand on my stomach draws my attention back to him. His eyes, the darkest storm cloud gray I’ve seen them yet, are frantic and afraid. “My mom,” he chokes out.
Any hope I’ve been clinging to evaporates the second he tries to swallow and can’t. “They’re calling her. Hold on, okay? She’s going to be so excited when we tell her about our wedding. Think of all the flowers she’ll order.”
He nods almost imperceptibly and closes his eyes. I don’t want his eyes to close. I want to brand their color and intensity into my brain in case I never get to see them again. I fall forward, my forehead pressed to his again, and pray for the first time in my life.
Please God, don’t take him away. His mom needs him. I need him. Please. Take me, but don’t take him.
He sputters again and my heart breaks.
Behind us, James babbles a stream of apologies I don’t want to hear. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Oh, God. It wasn’t supposed to happen like that.”
“You shot him!” I cry over my shoulder. “What did you think would happen?”
He ignores me. “Leslie said it would be fast. No pain, just peace. She’d die in her sleep, just like she wanted.”
I whirl around, horrified. “You killed mom?”
“She begged me to!” He hugs his knees to his chest and rocks back and forth, back and forth, his eyes fixed on the gun at his feet. “I was going to kill Dad, too, but I fucked up. I tried to save you like she wanted and fucked that up, too. I fuck everything up.”
Turning back to Sam, I gulp back the bile trying to claw its way up my throat. The night before our mother died hadn’t been a dream. I knew it was real, but admitting it to myself before now had felt impossible. I remember her tracing James’s foot through the thin blanket and how he stirred when she touched his jaw.
She’d been saying goodbye.
I bury my face in Sam’s neck, sickened by the sticky blood, and rock softly against him, shushing him like James used to do for me. “I need you, Sam,” I whisper in his ear. “I don’t want to live without you. I love you.”
He tries to say something, but sputters violently. Feeling his struggle, I try to give him space but he grabs my hand. He tugs his father’s bloody chain out from beneath his shirt and wraps my fingers around the dog tags. His eyes are pleading with me. Trying to make me understand what he can’t say. “Love…you.”
The tears I’ve waited too long to shed are like a noose cinched tightly around my throat. I choke before I can breathe in what I’m afraid will be his final words, which makes the tears flow harder and hotter. I need those words. Need to hide them somewhere deep inside of myself where no one can steal them away. Those words might be all I have left.
When his ch
est spasms one last time, I curl over his body in a feeble attempt to keep him warm and try to hum. You are my sunshine, my only sunshine… The sirens screaming in the distance are too late. They’re always too late.
Behind me, James sings the final verse in a shaky voice.
You told me once, dear, you really loved me
And no one else could come between.
But now you’ve left me and love another;
You have shattered all my dreams.
I can’t look at him. Won’t.
Behind me, the gun scrapes across the floor.
Save James, she had said, but I’m too late. I wait for the shot that will take me to wherever Sam is going. If James ever loved me, he’ll do this one last thing for me. It’s the only way to make everything right.
The gun fires again and thuds, lifeless, to the floor.
I melt into Sam and close my eyes.
Fifty
I stretch my legs out on the spongy green grass in front of Sam’s house and stare at my purple toenails. Last night, Liz and I spent a couple hours giving each other pedicures without saying much. Though neither of us is completely comfortable with the whole mother-daughter routine yet, I asked because I needed the closeness and knew she did, too.
Sam and James died a year ago, yesterday.
The scars on my legs have all faded to a silvery white that shimmers beneath my golden tan. My flaws. Even though I still remember exactly how I got each one, still dream about my father and towers of beer cans and his leather belt, I don’t hide behind them anymore. They’re part of what makes me me, not something to be ashamed of. Sam taught me that.
Liz wanders across the lawn with a bag full of last minute things in her arms, looking like she’s lost something important and has no idea where to find it. The haunted look I see in her eyes has been there since the night she showed up at the hospital to find me covered in her son’s blood. It fades a little when our eyes meet.
I don’t blame her for hiding that part of herself from me. If it had been my son who died, I don’t think I could have handled seeing the person responsible, let alone taking her into my home. Liz’s love, even on the days it feels reluctant, gives me hope. When I’m around her, I almost believe I can be a good person. Like she is. Like Sam was. Like James could have been, if not for…everything.
All around me, bugs and dandelion seeds dance on the gentle summer breeze. I breathe deeply, taking in the fragrant roses in the yard behind me, the heat of summer, and something unidentifiable that surrounds this house and reminds me of Sam, and tuck it deep inside myself with all my other treasured memories.
I will never forget this place. Not ever.
There’s nowhere to go but forward, I remind myself. I’ve spent the last twelve months making sure of it.
Liz stops beside me and glances at the house. I wonder if she’s remembering the countless stories she’s told me about Sam and his dad playing tackle football in the front yard, hanging Christmas lights in August so they could do it together before the next deployment, and belly flopping onto their old Slip-n-Slide. A house as small as Sam’s shouldn’t be able to hold so many memories, but it does.
At first, James rarely popped up in her stories. I didn’t want to hear those ones. It was easier to hate my brother after what happened than deal with losing him. But Liz forced me to listen to the stories I’d never heard from back when my brother used to play at Sam’s house. Now I’m glad she did. In giving me her memories, she gave me back my brother.
“You ready?” she asks.
“I think so.”
We’re moving in with Sam’s grandparents until Liz can get the newest franchise of Enchanted Garden up and running—something she’s thrown herself into to keep her own nightmares at bay, I think. The house is less than a mile from UC Davis, so she’s been prodding me to apply there next year so I don’t have to take the bus all the way across town to the community college. She has no idea I applied for UC Davis’ botany program six months ago—the same day I got my GED—or that I got my acceptance letter last week. I kept it tacked to Sam’s corkboard right next to his UCLA acceptance letter where I could gaze at it every night before I fell asleep. Now I get to surprise Liz with the news.
My mother would be proud of me, I think. Sam definitely would be.
As we load the last minute bags into the front seat of the moving truck, I realize I’m about to do all the things I thought I’d only get to experience if I had Sam by my side. But I’m doing them. Me.
If I’ve learned anything in the last twelve months, it’s that I’m far stronger than I ever thought possible.
“Sam mentioned a diner by Mt. Shasta that you guys used to stop at on your drives to California,” I say to Liz.
“Mmm,” she says, a faint smile on her lips. “He and his father used to eat the restaurant’s whole day’s supply of their blackberry cobbler in one sitting. The other customers hated us.”
“Think it’s still there?”
She gives me a curious look. “Probably. Why?”
Sam had wanted to take me to that diner. To make new memories, he’d said before kissing me like there would be an endless supply of new memories to be made.
Little did he know.
A few nights ago, when I first remembered his words, I knew how I’d tell Liz my good news.
Maybe she needed a new memory, too?
I finger the folded up university letterhead in my pocket and try not to smile. “I think I’d like to stop there, if you’re up for it.”
Acknowledgments
This was a very hard book to write. If not for the slew of people who cheered me on, I might not have been able to tell James and Sarah’s story at all.
To the AofA, quite possibly the most talented writing group on the planet—thank you for spending a month in that chat room writing with me, for screaming just as loud as I did when my power went out one chapter before “The End,” and for critting the book practically the second I finished. Your friendship and advice means so much to me.
To my editor Liz Pelletier, thank you for believing in my book, for sticking to your guns when I lost faith, and for everything you’ve done for me and my family. Meeting you was truly life-changing.
To Christa, thank you for loving this story enough to talk about it everywhere you go, and for fangirling dark books just as much as I do. Is it next Fall yet?
To Ann, thank you for all your help with the fight scene. I would have been lost without you!
To Lori, thank you for paying me the best compliment I’ve ever received. Your classes completely changed my writing life.
To Mandy, thank you for championing this book before I’d even finished it, and for all your encouragement and advice. To Becca, thank you for teasing out the potential I missed.
To the very first #DarkDarlings—Jena, Brooke, Jessirae, Amanda, Kari, Mandie, and Jamie—thank you for never giving up on me, for loving Sarah and James and Sam sight unseen, and for freaking out in the very best way when I finally sent excerpts. You guys make me feel like a rockstar!
To my family, thank you for rolling your eyes and insisting you’ll buy three thousand copies of the book (and read every single one), no matter how many times I beg you not to.
And finally, thank you to my husband. Without him, this book—especially the ending—wouldn’t exist. Your faith in me is more precious than you know.
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