Better Left Buried (19 page)

“
When did the lock get fixed?” Adam asked. For months before she agreed to move in with him, he’d been after her to let him repair it. She’d refused every time saying it’d only get the door broken in, again, which, even now, she considered likely.

“Last night.” She helped her mother inside. “What do you think?” She
had hoped focusing on her mother’s reaction would keep her from having to answer to Adam, but the plan was short-lived. Harmony didn’t expect a flood of gratitude or anything, but when her mother walked down the hall to her bedroom and slammed the door behind her, her spirit temporarily deflated. “That was time and energy well spent.” She carried the grocery bags in two at a time, refusing to let Adam help.

“Looks like the door wasn’t the only thing fixed.” His tone was exactly what she had expected: angry and suspicious. The small room smelled of paint and cleaner, the odor having concentrated
from being closed up. She opened one of the windows and set to silently unpacking the groceries. “Harmony, what’s going on? How did this happen?”

This
.

He said it as though it were something bad.

“Lower your voice, please. The last thing she needs is to hear us arguing.”

“I mean it, Harmony. Who was here
? Because I know you didn’t do this alone.”

“Why? Why couldn’t
I have done all this?” She unloaded the groceries: mostly dry and canned foods, some juice, things that didn’t need refrigeration, and sorted them by where they went. “I’m as capable as you are and you’d know that if you ever let me do a thing for myself.”

Adam
reached across the narrow counter and grabbed her arm. He clenched his jaw and narrowed his eyes to two ice-blue slits. “
Who
was here?”

“No one, all right? Let me go.”
Harmony swung a large can of soup as hard as she could into the right side of Adam’s head, splitting his eyebrow. He let go of her arm, but she could already feel the bruises. “Get out.” Her small voice caught in her throat.

He
reached up to the lump forming on his face and examined his bloody fingers. “You
bitch
. You thankless, heartless bitch.” He was a ball of fiery rage.

Harmony
backed away toward the silverware drawer, her hands shaking. “I mean it, Adam. You get out of here.”

“It was
Lance, wasn’t it? I don’t even want to ask how you repaid him.”

The words stung, more so because on some level they were true. Whether the payment came before or after, she’d done exactly what Adam was accusing her of.

“What if it was? What if I’m tired of us? I never said this was forever, Adam. You don’t
own
me. I’m sick of you telling me where to be and what to say and how to act. Maybe I did sleep with him again. So what?” She braced for the open-handed slap that came in perceived slow motion. Her ear rang and her vision went momentarily blurry. She fell to the floor, holding her cheek, which was hot and almost instantly swollen.

The hit stunned him almost as much as it did her. He stood over her, his mouth bent into a frown, and his eyes welled up with tears.

“Oh my God. I’m so sorry. Harmony, I didn’t mean—”

“Shut up. Just shut up and go.”

“Please, listen to me.” Adam held out his hand to help her up and she slapped it away. It wasn’t her first time being hit by a man, and certainly not the worst.

“Get out of here. I mean it
.” Harmony pulled herself up using the edge of the countertop and her eyes locked on her mother’s.

Charity’s
stare was cold, calculating, and lifeless as she held a long flathead screwdriver to Adam’s right side. “It’s time to go,” she said, advancing the tip.

Neither of them had heard her coming.

The past twenty-four hours since patching things up with Jaxon had Brea feeling like she was living in a parallel dimension. She’d ascended from victim to rising starlet, with Rachael and Amanda conveniently tucked away. For the first time in twelve years, she was somebody at school. What happened in the locker room had stayed there, for the most part, and what little information had leaked was so far blown out of proportion that it had become urban legend with Harmony cast as a knife-wielding maniac.

It wasn’t entirely true, but it wasn’t exactly false, either.

She let people think what they wanted to, mostly because the circulating stories cast her as untouchable and she was about to face the true test. Walking toward the ‘popular’ group, holding Jaxon’s hand, every muscle tightened.

“Relax. Everything’s going to be fine.”

Seeing Becky Clark, the only brunette in the Rachael-Amanda-Becky trio, sitting across from Pete, Brea wasn’t so sure. She shook her long layered bangs out of her eyes and drew a deep breath.

“What if Becky blames me for what happened to
Rachael and Amanda? Even if no one else knows what happened, she does. I’m sure they told her.”

“Brea,
it’s fine. If you sit down across from her freaking out like this, she’ll react. No one’s worried about where Rachael and Amanda are. They know, even if they don’t know why.”

In-school suspension had its own walk of shame. Brea caught a glimpse of
the pajama-clad, unwashed version of Amanda being escorted off the bus by Principal Anderson earlier that morning.

Rachael was nowhere to be found.

“What if Rachael shows up? I mean, she was really pissed.”

“Then I’ll deal with her, okay? The monitors will have her out of here as fast as sh
e comes in. If I know her, she thought about what she did, is mortified, and begged her mother to let her stay home instead of joining the usual suspects. Besides, I’m guessing Harmony put enough of a scare into her to keep her at a distance. It’s fine. Really.”

Jaxon
sat near the head of the table, instantly striking up a conversation with Pete. Brea took the seat next to him, holding the key necklace that had become her talisman—her rabbit’s foot with the in-crowd—and waiting for the first negative reaction.

A couple of looks were exchanged, but
that was it.

Pete snatched a piece of chocolate off the tab
le in front of Becky, who tried to get it back before he scarfed it down.

“Dammit, Pete.
I was saving that.”

Pete smiled and started blabbering something about a playbook.

Becky struck up a loosely related conversation. “Did someone
really
nominate Laura Rosenstein as homecoming queen?” She looked right at Brea when she said it. Jaxon kept his hand on her leg and talked to Pete about plays for the game. “I mean, who is really going to vote for that girl? She’s a freak.” Becky kept on as if she and Brea were old friends.

Brea looked left, then right, and pointed at herself. “Are you talking to me?”

Becky snorted out something that might have been an attempt at a laugh. “Who the hell else would I be talking to? You think
he
cares who makes homecoming court?” She pointed at Jaxon and shrugged. “Well,
maybe
he cares. I mean, he’s probably the homecoming king and I really don’t think he wants red-faced Rosenstein on stage with him.” Laura, who was a nice enough girl, earned the nickname from her particularly nasty skin condition. “But yes, I’m talking to you. I mean, who’s going to vote for her? This has to be the all time low.”

Brea nodded.
Of course Laura being nominated was a joke.
Every year, one of the popular girls nominated the least likely to be crowned homecoming king or queen and stirred up a buzz to make whoever the unlucky soul was think they were a shoe-in for the spot. It was cruel in the deepest sense of the word, and two years before had one girl so upset that her parents enrolled her in private school the week after. The group seemed to know who was the most fragile and had no qualms whatsoever going after them.

“It’s a mean trick,” Brea finally answered, surprised it had never been played on her.

“It is,” Jaxon agreed, “and it’s tired. You throw her name in there?” He accused Becky outright and she smirked. “And they say Rachael’s the mean one.” Brea bristled that he’d defend her and he immediately recanted with an apologetic look. “She’s no angel, we know that—”

“Easy, there. I get it.” The backpedaling embarrassed her. “Anyway, I’m sure she knows better.”

Laura and Brea went to summer camp together for the three years during middle school and though Brea didn’t know her well, she knew her to be self-aware. Her hair was always tangled, her complexion spotty at best, but she knew she didn’t matter, not in the sense that popular girls did. There was no way she’d believe the nomination in a million years, though Becky had no way of knowing that. Of all the girls they could have picked, she’d be the least likely to dance the way they wanted her to.

“What about you, dark horse?” Becky’s dark eyes and pencil-thin grin were hard to read.

Brea shook her head. “I’m not the homecoming queen type.”

Jaxon planted a kiss on the corner of her mouth. “
Never say never. I think we’d look good up there.”

He winked and her
heart raced at the public show of affection.

“You’ve got my vote,” Pete said and gave Jaxon a shot in the arm.

Becky just shook her head.

“
Well, I won’t get my hopes up.” Brea flashed Jaxon her flirtiest smile. She could
be
like them, if she tried, though for years she’d convinced herself otherwise. Her mother’s voice rang out in the back of her mind, telling her it was Harmony holding her back.

Things were easier with her gone, so m
aybe there was some truth in that.

Harmony couldn’t believe Adam had hit her and she hated him for the effect it had on her mother. For as calculating as Charity was in her stealthy attack, once Adam was gone, she crumbled. A week’s worth of intensive therapy had been undone with a single swift action and it took doubling her mother’s sedative to get her to sleep.

Harmony
threw away the Styrofoam Ramen noodle container she’d been eating from. She needed to talk, to work things out in her head, and to see Lance who she couldn’t stop thinking about. She wasn’t looking for a relationship, not really, but she was no good at being alone. She brushed her teeth, changed clothes, and checked on her mother one last time before heading out.

A
breeze blew through her hair and she pulled up her hood to keep warm. It wouldn’t be long before snow covered the ground. Her hands were red and stiff by the time she knocked on Lance’s door.

“Harmony, what are you doing here?”
He answered the door barefoot wearing nothing but a pair of slim fit jeans slung low on his waist.

“Am I interrupting something?” It dawned
on Harmony that she probably should have called.

“No, not really.”

“Can I come in?” She looked around to see if someone else w
as there.

“Yeah, sure.”

She edged past him, lowered her hood, and pulled down her zipper. “What’s all this?”

Colored drawings ranging from dragons to skulls, birds to butterflies, covered his makeshift tattoo station.

“I’m working on a new binder for the shop. You know, for when people come in and don’t really know what they want
inked.”

“Seems something that permanent should mean something, don’t you think?”

“You’d be surprised.” Lance grabbed a t-shirt off his folding chair and pulled it over his head.

“No need to dress on my
account.”

He
gathered a stack of vellum protectors and sat next to her on the couch, organizing his drawings. “How did things go with your mom?” 

“Good, I guess.”
She couldn’t believe he wasn’t responding to her. “As good as can be expected.” She almost told him about the incident with Adam, but thought better of it. He didn’t seem in the mood for deep thoughts. “Thanks for the groceries.”

“What groceries
?”

“The bags on my porch.
You didn’t leave them?”

He shook his head. “
It wasn’t me.”

The sides of his hands were covered in multicolored ink that smeared whenever he left them sitting on the paper too long
and he avoided looking directly at her.

Maybe she’d
expected too much, but he had offered her help. The work he’d done was on his own and they’d had sex before so she wasn’t sure what was bothering him.

“Is everything okay?” she asked.

“Yeah, sure it is.” The fact that he was chewing the inside of his cheek said otherwise.

“I mean with
us
.”

He bristled at the
word.