Page 20 of Darling Venom
“You haven’t tried to…” I trailed off.
“I’m still here, aren’t I? When I try to kill myself, I’ll succeed. I’m a perfectionist, Dicks.”
When.
I cleared my throat, smashing the carrot cake with my tight fist. “But… why?”
“Giving up on porn and beer is harder than I thought.”
I swatted him on the chest. “Have you tried talking to someone?”
“Yeah. Talking to a therapist just makes it worse. Either I’m stuck with someone I don’t click with, so I just fake it and spend an hour making shit up and dragging them around, or I do click with them and start surfacing shit I don’t want to think about.”
“You kn
ow it’s only temporary, right? Tate won’t have custody of you forever.”
“It’s not just Tate. I hate everyone at school.”
“Everybody hates everyone at school. Not peaking in high school is an accomplishment. What a sad existence our popular peers are going to have. We only have two and a half years to go.”
He fell silent for a moment, peering down from the roof. “Tate and Hannah are getting hitched. They’re staying in New York, but Tate told me he’s sending my ass to an out-of-state college. I’m not talking New England, either. Berkeley or UCLA or some shit. Somewhere far. He doesn’t want me anywhere near Dad. He flat-out told me so.”
I groaned, covering my face with my hands.
Kellan added, “He also stopped giving me any allowance or lunch money.”
“Monster.”
Surprisingly, I meant it.
And I normally wasn’t the mean type.
Kellan scratched at his chin, which was now coated with a layer of light-brown whiskers. Suddenly, I really wanted to kiss him.
It made no sense.
I wasn’t into him.
And yet, he appeared perfectly kissable right in this moment. More so than Mark, who I actually did make out with frequently.
Come to think of it, I sometimes thought about what Kellan was doing while I was with Mark. Not sexually, but what he was reading, where he was going, what he was thinking…
The stupid penny I kept tossing Kellan’s way seemed to finally drop.
Charlotte, you idiot.
Something swelled in my throat.
I wanted Kellan.
I really, really wanted Kellan.
“Anyway.” Kellan lit a cigarette, tipping his chin upward, sending a ribbon of white smoke to the dark universe. “Tell me something about you. Something real. Something intimate.”
I told him about Leah and about visiting my parents’ graves and working a summer job as a busser at an Italian joint that specialized in events. We had to break up drunken fights at least twice a week, but the tips were awesome.
My mind had fixated on kissing him the entire time, so I finished by saying, “Oh, and I started getting frisky this year. So underwhelming.”
