The Stars Will Shine (8 page)

“You okay?” The voice belongs to Trevyn. I know it without even looking at him. The rock music in the background shoves its way through the opening as he steps inside, and becomes muffled once more when he shuts the door quietly behind him. “I sent them away,” he says. “If it helps.” He tucks one hand into a pocket of his faded blue jeans and runs the other over his curly hair.

I suck in a shaky breath. “I hate him,” I say.

“C’mon, Delilah, I know that’s not true.” His fingers graze my shoulder, offering comfort. I bite down on my bottom lip and shut my eyes.

“It
is
true. He’s horrible to me, and he doesn’t personally have a reason to be.”

“Aren’t even the best of friends sometimes the cruelest to each oth—”

I laugh, and he stops short. “We are
not
friends. We share blood and nothing more.”

“Doesn’t that count for something?”

“Obviously not to him.”

“He cares for you.”

“No…No, he doesn’t. Trust me.”

“Maybe he’s just been going through some stuff.”

“Oh? You mean spoiled boy’s rich parents don’t want him stealing hundred-and-fifty dollar bottles of wine? I’m so sorry, I should’ve realized the absolute
shit
he was having to deal with.”

“Isn’t someone in the world always suffering something worse than everybody else? Isn’t that the way it works? You can’t belittle someone else’s issues just because their circumstances are different.”

I stare hard at Trevyn now. “How about you tell that to him? Or better yet, tell him not to belittle people in general. People like me, you know, especially since we’re
blood
and all.” I storm past him, but Trevyn grabs my arm and stays me.

His fingers tighten around my upper arm when he urges in a low voice, “Don’t let one person bring you down this much.” I look to his fingers on my arm, and he loosens his hold. Then my eyes trail up to his.

He doesn’t know that I have no friends, that I have no family. That I lost all of that when I let my dignity go. “It isn’t just one person. It’s everybody.” I shake my arm from his hold, and I leave.

I don’t leave the store, though. I tell myself I owe it to Trevyn to stay.

We don’t talk anything personal the rest of the day, only work-related things, with him calling out names of bands and titles of records as he stocks them on the shelves, and me manually adding them to the database and thinking how much easier it’ll be when the software program we ordered—the one that can build a database and track inventory simply by scanning product barcodes—shows up.

“Hey,” he says, as I push the door open to leave, my messenger bag slung over my shoulder. I pause but don’t turn around. “Talk to me anytime you need to, okay?”

“Yeah,” I murmur.
Not
.

***

Dylan shouts through my bedroom door, “What the hell was that?” He was in his room when I got home, playing video games by the sounds of it, but he must’ve heard me shut my bedroom door. Damn, because I really don’t want to deal with him right now. The rest of his family wasn’t home when I got here, so by the sheer volume of his voice, I take it he knows this.

“Come on, Delilah!”

I hear a lower voice say, “Chill out, man.” Probably Aiden, still with him. Perfect.

“That was you getting what you deserve!” I shout back. I strip my bed of the pink sheets and crumple them into a pile on the floor. My foot gets caught in the sheets and I trip just as Dylan bursts through the door. I look up to find him glaring down at me, his face in a noiseless snarl.

“You did, didn’t you?” he insists.

“What?”

“You slept with him, didn’t you?”

“God, Dylan!”

“You wanna just fuck all my friends?”

“No!” We’re both breathing hard as we glower at each other.

Dylan points to Aiden, who still stands outside the doorway, looking uneasy. “Shit, while you’re at it, why don’t you just go ahead and fuck him, too?” My heart sinks to the floor. What the hell is wrong with him? I meet Aiden’s eyes, and quickly divert mine, heat burning my face, my neck, and everywhere my body touches the floor.

“Jesus, man, calm down.” Aiden has entered the room now, his steps slow, unsure. I can feel his gaze burning me where I lay trapped in these sheets that tether me to this place, this hell of judgment for eternity. I meet his eyes again, and we both look away as soon as our gazes touch. I go back to burying my eyes in Dylan’s.

“I didn’t sleep with Trevyn,” I say, my voice eerily quiet now. “I checked the place out after you mentioned it, and he kindly offered me a job when I said I was looking. But it’s nice to know what little respect you have for me. I’ll remember that if I ever feel an urge to be nice to you.” My shoulders rise and fall as though there’s a heavy weight upon them and it’s all I can do just to breathe. “Besides,” I say, letting a cold smile curl my lips, “what’s it to you if I had?”

Dylan scoffs. “You’re such a whore. I don’t know why my mom let you stay with us.”

Aiden steps forward so that he blocks our sight of each other. “Cut it out, Dylan.
Now
.” But Dylan is already storming from the room, and he slams the door on the way out, leaving Aiden and me alone.

Neither of us says a word for an entire minute.

“The color looks good.”

“Huh?” I squint up at Aiden through the strands of hair that hang tangled and limp along my face.

“The orange. It looks good,” he clarifies.

“Oh.” I glance around the room, distracted. “Yeah…Thanks for picking it out.” He nods, eyes on the floor. And then his lashes lift, and his gaze steadies on mine, almost deliberately so. My lungs clench hold of the breath I was about to let out.

“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” he tells me. He walks backwards a few steps, eyes still trained on me, before turning and heading out the door. The air comes out of my lungs with the force of a windstorm.

What Aiden doesn’t know is that Dylan isn’t wrong. He’s wrong about me sleeping with Trevyn, yeah, but he’s not wrong about me being a whore. And I don’t really blame him. In a way, I understand why Dylan doesn’t want me in his life…because just as Trevyn said today, Dylan and I are blood. And that alone ties us, no matter how different we are, no matter how little we’ve seen of each other in our lives. I’m just someone he doesn’t want to answer for, someone he doesn’t want causing rifts in his friendships, someone he doesn’t want around to be a bad influence on his little sister. Most of all, I’m someone he doesn’t
want
to claim as blood.

I hear music start up in Dylan’s room—a riff on an electric guitar. He must be playing. It sounds like pure melancholy…Led Zeppelin’s version of “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You.” I collapse onto my bed and stare up at the ceiling.

I don’t think about anything for the longest time except for trying to find shapes in the plaster—elephants or faces or ships—like I did with my mom when I was little. An hour later, Dylan is still playing, and I think I hear—I sit up—Aiden singing? His voice barely carries through the wall. Maybe it’s Dylan, I don’t know. But whoever it is, his voice is strangely beautiful.

I sigh and let my cheek touch the bare mattress as I listen.

“Dylan, Delilah, dinner!” comes a shout from downstairs. Aunt Miranda has just returned home, probably with takeout. I can hear Leah’s flip flops smacking the marble tiles. The jam session in Dylan’s room cuts to silence.

Once I hear Dylan head downstairs, I yawn and roll onto my side. I still can’t stand the thought of sitting at that table, with Aunt Miranda trying to keep small talk and probably trying to correct the way I hold my fork and chew my food. Which is why I close my eyes and fall asleep instead.

Chapter Six

Two birds are perched right outside my window. They cock their heads at each other, while hopping back and forth, and neither will
shut the fuck up
. I yank my pillow out from under my head and chuck it at the window. The birds, startled out of their wits, take flight in opposite directions.

Ugh
, now that I’m awake, I’ve got this sudden, overwhelming urge to pee, and it’s making my bladder ache. And at some point in my slumber, my feet must have gotten tucked awkwardly under my legs, resulting in the pins and needles sensation overrunning them right now. I manage to plant them on the ground and shuffle to the bathroom.

Since I skipped dinner last night, I roused for a midnight snack. As I passed the golden pool of light at the foot of Dylan’s door, I heard him and Aiden letting out endless streams of expletives and subsequently hollering triumphantly about a “nice headshot” and taking some guy “out with a crowbar.” I figured they were up late playing violent video games, as boys often are.

Now, in my half-awake state, I don’t think about the fact that the bathroom door is only a crack open and that the light is on inside. I don’t know why, but I don’t. I push the door open wide as I rub my eyes, and I drag my feet right on in.

And of all the ways I could’ve started this day, this definitely wasn’t one of the expected. I find myself staring right at Aiden—a very shirtless and messy-haired, very lean and well-cut Aiden in dark blue boxers, standing over the toilet. Relieving himself. It takes a second too long to register with me, so I just stand there, gaping at him, probably looking like a deer in the headlights, until I hear him go, “Er, Delilah?” He has a look on his face that suggests he’s maybe a quarter embarrassed, a quarter amused, and half curious as to what the hell’s wrong with me. Mostly, he just looks like he didn’t get enough sleep.

“Oh, shit,” I whisper and leap out of the bathroom, pulling the door shut with me. I drop my forehead into my hands.

A snicker behind me has me turning to Dylan with my middle finger in salute. He leans against his doorjamb, smirking.

“What a creep,” he remarks as he slips back into his room.

I raise my other finger and shoot his shut door a glare meant to combust it, which sadly does not work, then hurry back to my room. I walk in circles at the foot of my bed, twisting my hands over each other. It’s really not a big deal. I shrug a couple times and shake out my arms. Aiden’s definitely not the first guy I’ve seen half-naked, let alone the twentieth. Still, thoughts of his upper half saturate my mind, and I come to a stop, dazed for a second, until the sound of a dog barking outside snaps me out of it.

Fuck
.

Okay, I should grab some breakfast before I sneak off to work again. I open my door and—

Jesus Christ, there’s Aiden again. He looks up at me with a surprised smile just as I shut the door hard in his face. I lean my forehead into the wood and tap it against the door a few times. Okay, now I really made things awkward.

He knocks, and I jump. Eyeing the handle, I step back, as though he might bust the thing in.

Another knock, and I flinch again. “Delilah?”

“…Yeah?”

A silence ensues. “Can you, um, open the door?”

It takes me a few seconds, but I oblige, opening it slowly and dreading the way my face will look when he sees it—red, embarrassed, visibly cringing. Thankfully he’s dressed now, in dark jeans and a plain white tee-shirt.

Though I can still see his muscles taut in his arms when he crosses them over his chest…

He clears his throat.

“I’m so sorry for walking in on you, um, you know”—I wave my hand—“when you were…” I swallow the rest of my words.

Aiden presses his lips together.

Wait, is he—is he
angry
about this? If so, I have no problem flipping him the bird and slamming this door in his face a second time. I’ll probably enjoy it, too.

But Aiden starts laughing. It’s only a little bit at first, but it builds until he has to lean into the door frame for support. I gape at him.

“What’s so funny?”

He shakes his head, laughter still tumbling out. “That you’re the one apologizing,” he manages to get out, “when I’m the one who should be.” He stands up straighter, ruffles his hair, sighs to stop the laughter, and says, “What I mean is, I’m so sorry you had to see that. You know, me…pissing.” He wears an apologetic, almost innocent expression that is immediately contradicted by his next words. “Not really how I wanted you to see me naked for the first time.”

Now, usually in this scenario, I’d have an equally suggestive comeback, but for once, I’m silenced by the unexpected flush that washes over me. This seems to both surprise and please him. His eyes light up, and he pushes off the doorframe to stand a little taller. Rolling my eyes, I start to shut the door, but Aiden holds up a hand to stop it.

“Wait,” he says. “I just wanted you to know that I’m telling your aunt now…you know, that you had nothing to do with stealing the wine. That way you don’t have to keep sneaking out for work.” There’s a shadow in his eyes that suggests he’s remembering how Dylan treated me yesterday. “I know that must be a pain.”

I push my lips to the side and look away. “Thank you.”