Ace of Spades Sneak Peek(53)
We were friends.
“Just friends?” I ask. He looks at me now, his eyes glassy. I feel a pang in my chest. “Do you kiss all your friends, Dre?”
He sniffs and shifts uncomfortably.
“Sleep with them too?” I continue, vision blurring. “Tell them you love them?”
I wipe my eyes. I need to focus. He’s quiet, staring at me now, unwavering.
“You know that’s not what I meant.”
Don’t lose focus.
“We have different paths,” he starts, looking away from me again. “I’m a high school dropout, I have no family, I live to survive. Your path is school, then a job, and looking after your ma. You don’t know how much I think about you, Von. I want to call you but I can’t, because this thing we have has an expiration date, whether it’s when you go to some fancy college or when you realize that you’re too different from me.”
I want to say that isn’t true, but I have a feeling I can’t be certain about that.
“You say you love me, yet your boys beat me—”
“’Cause you weren’t gonna deal for me anymore. Everyone gets an exit beating!” he says with his voice raised. This conversation is riling him up. Dre’s usually a lot calmer, but everything about him seems on edge today.
I don’t care for his excuses and I don’t want to hear his gang’s political bullshit.
“You could have stopped them, Dre, but you didn’t. You knew what was gonna happen to me.”
“I wanted to stop it, but then they’d ask questions—”
“Think they don’t know what we do when I come here? Think they’re senseless?”
He turns away from me, wiping his face with his sleeve. I feel another pang, but I ignore it. I can’t let myself lose sight of what’s important.
Cry, Dre, I’m not gonna judge you for crying.
“If that’s what you do to the people you love, I’m glad this is done.”
He shakes his head, still turned away. “I was thinking about surviving, and those people at your school saying things. If I lose this, I lose everything—but if you lose me, you still have everything.”
Why doesn’t he get that he’s a huge chunk of everything?
I look around the room, how dark and cold it is—drugs on the table, some I know he’s locked away in the drawers. I wish he didn’t find comfort in temporary highs. I want to tell him that his path could be something different, but I’d be lying. He makes a lot doing this. It helps him survive.
He was so happy when he made enough to rent this place, and I just want him to be happy, even though I wish he was doing something less dangerous.
A draft of wind from an open window makes the room feel even colder. Dre and I are over; I knew that when he told me to get out last week, when his boys beat me up, and more so now that he can’t even look at me, but I’m so used to being with him, it feels impossible to let go.
His tense shoulders drop, then rise, and he turns, the tears I saw earlier gone.
“Can I kiss you goodbye?” I say, thinking of Terrell and his goodbye hugs. Andre gives me a look like it’s starting to dawn on him what goodbye means for us.
The wind pushes him toward me, only slightly.
“Yeah, of course,” he says softly. I ignore my gut, screaming at me to leave, to not kiss a boy who hurt me so badly, but my heart was always stronger than my gut. I inch forward with hesitation, my forehead resting against his as I breathe in his scent. I once asked Dre what cologne he used, and I remember how he smiled and told me “sweat,” which was BS. I wish I knew now. I want to be surrounded by it after this kiss; I don’t want to walk away from it. Dre’s arms pull me in, our noses touching, then our lips. He’s pulling me in so close it hurts, like he’s trying to fuse our bodies together. My heart is steady somehow, but the rest of me is shaky.
We break apart, but I’m still trapped inside his arms. I rest my head on his shoulder, breathing slowly, trying not to think about when I’ll have to move away, wave, and leave. For good.
Don’t lose focus.
But I did. I was going to leave without telling him that I need one or two small jobs, just to help Ma out. I look up.
His face, tearstained and wet, surprises me. It surprises me even more that he lets me reach up and wipe the tears away.
“Really gonna miss your company, Devon,” he tells me.
“Me too.”
I still stand here in this cocoon, waiting for him to pull back. But he doesn’t. I know I’m gonna regret this someday—maybe even moments from now—but I’m not ready to let go just yet, and I can feel him releasing his arms, and that scares the shit out of me, and so I kiss him again. He stops and pulls me close again, and even though my heart is rattling like I just ran a mile, I let him guide me backward slowly, like he’s done many times before.
Future Devon is shaking his head, watching as the back of my knees hit Dre’s bed, then how I quickly scoot back toward the cold pillows, finally breaking the kiss to pull my hoodie over my head. But I ignore future-me’s judgment.
Dre looks like he wants to speak, tell me to go home or say we shouldn’t be doing something like this. I can hear his thoughts racing. He’s overthinking this, like I would be if I didn’t keep pushing the feeling back. His thoughts are screaming, but then as if swallowed by a vacuum, there is complete silence. All worry disappears and all that matters is right now, not the future versions of us that might regret this, just present Andre and me, who both want to do this, kiss the pain away for a little while.