Читать книгу Bad Girls with Perfect Faces - Lynn Weingarten - Страница 11

XAVIER

Xavier and Ivy stared at each other googly-eyed, kiss-drunk. “I really missed you,” she said. And then she held his face in her hands and looked right at him in this way that overwhelmed him with love. During moments like this, it was impossible to remember the bad things that had happened. This feeling was the real one. Everything else was just noise.

“I can’t believe I ever let you go,” Ivy said. “There is no one as kind or as sweet as you. Like literally no one on earth. I am garbage.”

“You’re not,” Xavier said. “Stop saying . . .”

But then Ivy did something, something he would think about later, something he would replay in his head over and over so many times, trying to understand it.

She took both his hands, brought them up to her face, held one on each cheek and looked him straight in the eye. Then she lowered his hands down to her collar.

“Do it,” she said.

Xavier didn’t understand. “Do what?”

“Choke me.” She tried to wrap his hands around her neck. She tried to get him to squeeze. It took a while for his brain to process what was even happening. He started to pull away. She wouldn’t let him.

“No. I don’t want to.”

“But I deserve it,” she said. “And you do want to. I can tell.”

Xavier realized then that they were both drunker than he’d thought. And that he really, really, did not like the feeling of his hands around her throat. He did not like how thin her neck felt, how easy it would be to break her.

“No,” he said. “Stop! I don’t want that at all!”

He tried to pull away again. This time she let him go.

“Just kidding,” she said. Then she buried her face in his chest. “You still smell the same. It’s very hard to remember a smell, but I swear I always could with you . . .”

And then she kissed him again, harder this time. She kissed him and wiped every thought he’d ever had out of his brain. She kissed him and pressed up against him, and when she reached into the hole in the tree for the big box of condoms she’d put there in the spring and there was only one left in the box, he tried not to think about what had happened to the others.

Xavier wondered if later he would regret this. He wondered if later he’d remember this moment and wish he could go back and drag himself out of the woods and stop whatever happened next. The problem with time is it only ever goes forward. And when you are careening toward disaster, you never know it until it is way too late.