Page 82 of The Burning
My stomach lurched. She was right.
“Elodie is here—she just won’t be living in your house.” I tried to take a little of her anxiety away.
“Yeah, for now. But once the baby is born and Phillip comes back, I’ll barely see her. Plus, chances are high that they will get stationed somewhere else. Then what will I do? Austin will be gone, too, and I’ll be here in this house by myself. I’ll have no one. I’ll go to work and come home to an empty house.”
Anxiety was coming off her in waves. I wanted to calm it. I hated how alone she was in this world. She deserved to be surrounded by people who loved her.
“You have me?”
She let go of my hand to pick at the stitching on the blanket between us. Her silence made me lose my breath.
“For how long, though?” she asked me, her eyes looking toward the night sky.
“I wish I knew the answer.”
She sighed into the silent night air, then rolled over, propping herself up on one elbow. I stayed on my back, watching her closely. The tips of her hair fell onto my face as she tried to clip her curls back up. I brushed them back with my fingers and she closed her eyes.
“Every aspect of my life feels uncertain, and I can’t handle you being a part of that. I keep trying to just ignore the reality, our reality, but it hurts. I wish you could be my stability,” she said, then pointed to the brightest star above us and closed her eyes.
“I’d like to be,” I told her, wishing on the same star. I continued to run her hair through my fingers and she dropped her head down to rest her chin in my palm.
“Are we just hurting each other more by doing this?” she quietly questioned.
I didn’t know the answer. If it were anyone else in our position, I would say they were crazy, wasting their time and energy, and to cut their ties and run the other way, but when it came to Karina, I couldn’t do that. And to my very pleasant surprise, she couldn’t seem to, either.
“Maybe, but it’s going to hurt either way.” My words were ludicrous, but they were true. “We might as well go as far as we can, right? Isn’t that what life is about? Love and pain, happiness and suffering? Who says we can’t be happy until the suffering begins?”
Karina’s eyes shone as they filled with silent tears. She blinked them away before one could fall and lay back down, resting her head against my pounding heart. All I could think about was how good it felt, like getting a bandage with numbing cream wrapped over a fresh, bloody wound. My heart was pounding, more afraid of the future than I’d ever admit, but at least it was still beating . . . for now.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Karina
That Thursday, my birthday eve, I was sitting on the couch, scrolling on my phone, looking at a picture I had taken of Kael asleep in my bed. I moved to Twitter and the first thing I saw was a collage of celebrity red carpet photos at a movie premiere. I lifted the phone to Elodie to show her an up-and-coming actress who starred in one of her favorite Netflix movies, and she squinted to see from where she sat on the other end of the couch.
“She looks so pretty; How much does it cost to look like that?” I sighed, zooming in on her clear skin and sleek hair.
“Your skin is beautiful.” Elodie scooted a little closer to me to look at my screen again. “And, her dress is hideous.” She giggled, then looked down at her own outfit. Black Nike shorts that certainly were mine because none of Elodie’s clothes fit her anymore and an oversized T-shirt that I could have sworn was Austin’s, with a stain that looked like hot sauce or ketchup. I had a three-dollar overnight hair mask on, and we both had sheet masks stuck to our faces. Elodie’s was sliding down her nose and some of the serum was dripping down her neck.
I was in pajamas, too, an old T-shirt from my brother’s football days and cotton shorts, legs stubbly. I wiped my dirty phone screen clean with the bottom of my shirt.
“Look at us, how glamorous we are, judging the most beautiful people in the world.” I rolled my eyes, zooming back in on the actress’s complexion. I mean, seriously, not one pore showed on her perfectly contoured face.
“Speak for yourself.” Elodie stuck her tongue out at me and waved her hand over her messy blond hair. “Once this baby is out, it’s over for all these girls. Even the Jenners.” She flicked her wrist, laughing.
She had a way of making me feel special, like a normal girl with a real best friend.
“I can hear you from the kitchen,” Austin said, making his way into the living room with a bowl of cereal in his hand. “You two are beautiful, don’t be ridiculous.”
He sat on the floor next to the couch in front of Elodie, and she eyed his cereal bowl.
“Want some?” he offered, holding it up to her. She nodded and he dipped the spoon into the bowl—Cheerios and milk with sugar, the way our mom always had it. Austin spoon-fed Elodie and if they weren’t my brother and my best friend, I would have felt like the third wheel.
“If I had the money, I would be prettier.” Elodie spoke while the cereal crunched between her teeth. “They have lasers for everything now. And Amazon has these little sucker things that make your pores and stretch marks disappear.” She lifted the bottom of her shirt to show the thin purple marks on her pale skin.
“You don’t need it. I do. Plus, pores don’t shrink. Didn’t you learn that in training?” I teased her.
“Why are girls like this?” Austin moaned, turning to his phone, his fingers tapping away on the screen. “You two are being so weird right now.”
