True (True Believers #1)(52)
Author: Erin McCarthy

In this case, however, it was statistically likely that the worst-case scenario would become reality, and the idea of Tyler sitting in prison for twelve months was something I couldn’t even allow to enter my brain for more than a half second or I would go insane.

“I just want you to be realistic,” he said. “There will be a punishment of some kind—there is no question about that.”

Dad of Doom. Geez.

“What do you want for Christmas?” I asked him, in arguably the most obvious attempt to change the subject in recorded history.

“For my daughter to not be dating a drug dealer.”

Subtle. Dad brought it full circle. Foiled at my own game.

Irritated that he insisted on referring to Tyler as a drug dealer, I told him I had to go, and he didn’t even attempt to draw out the conversation.

Team Macintosh was experiencing in-house fighting.

***

My roommates were suitably horrified and sympathetic in a way that was much more satisfying. They took Tyler’s side and called his mother nasty names, which I appreciated because then I didn’t have to be the one who said them. It seemed morally cleaner that way.

“What was jail like?” Kylie asked Tyler as we sat around playing beer pong on Sunday night, though I was fake-playing because I had an early class.

It was a tactless question, but she was that girl—she never realized she had said something rude until after the fact.

Tyler was drunk. I’d never really seen him loaded, and wow, was he wasted. Like slurring words, stumbling, glassy-eyed, shit-faced drunk. Before the beer, I had seen him take four shots of Jack Daniels in a very short amount of time.

“It was like watching two unicorns f**king,” he told her. “All glitter and jizz.”

“What?” she asked, frowning in confusion. She looked to me for guidance, but I had no idea what he was talking about.

Tyler and Nathan seemed to think this was very funny and tried to fist bump, only missed. This made it even funnier.

“You guys are weird,” Jessica said, attempting to put her hair into a topknot, but only succeeding in creating a sloppy bun.

Nathan’s roommate Bill was back in the apartment and he was almost as drunk as Tyler, mentioning that he and his girlfriend had broken up the day before. “I don’t ever drink,” he told me for the fourth time. “I’m so f**ked up.”

When people say it isn’t all that fun to be sober when everyone around you is drunk? They are one hundred percent correct. I was tired and I felt impatient with the conversation, or really lack thereof. It made sense to me that Tyler needed to blow it out, given what had happened on Friday, but I felt the opposite. I just wanted to crawl into bed and sleep for about three days to avoid the reality of the situation, not drink myself into a fuzzy stupor.

I was clearly in the minority.

After another hour, I realized there was no way we were getting back to the dorm unless I drove Tyler’s car, and even that seemed unlikely since I wasn’t sure I could shoehorn a drunk Jessica into the car without help. And no one in the room was in any position to assist me in anything other than making me feel good about my ability to pronounce my Ts and Ss.

It was decided that Jessica could share Bill’s bed, and Tyler and I would sleep on the couch. Which meant that I was crammed against the back cushions in approximately twelve inches of space, while Tyler snored loudly, out cold. Every time he moved, he pulled the blanket off me, and I was in and out of a restless sleep, cold and stiff.

Which was why I was actually awake when he rolled toward the coffee table and vomit shot out of his mouth.

Holy crap. I leaped over him and ran for the kitchen wastebasket. Angling it under him, I held it, stroking his head while he heaved over and over. “It’s okay,” I told him, adopting a soothing voice I used on agitated stray animals that needed grooming. “You’re okay.”

“Fuck,” he said finally, wiping his mouth and falling back onto the couch, his eyes watering. He gave a weak cough.

I tied off the trash bag to minimize the smell and got him a damp paper towel. I swiped it across his face. He grabbed it from me, annoyed. “I got it.”

He turned his back on me, and I was forced to take the edge of the couch, which was worse than the interior I soon discovered. I woke up on the floor twice before rousing Tyler at seven in the morning.

“Tyler, I need to get to class. Can I borrow your car?” I whispered.

He jerked awake and looked at me like he’d never seen me in his life. He groaned and rubbed the top of his head. “God, I feel like ass.”

“I put water and aspirin on the coffee table. Where are your keys?”

“My pocket.”

He made no move to retrieve them for me, so I went under the blanket and dug into the pocket of his jeans. The only acknowledgement I got was a brief opening of his eyes, then nothing. I knew he was hurting if he didn’t use the opportunity to point out how close my hand was to his penis and how much closer still it could be.

I checked on Kylie and Jessica, but Kylie waved me off and Jessica never even woke up, despite my shaking her gently. She was snoring loud enough to wake the devil, but it didn’t seem to be disturbing Bill, who inexplicably was sleeping with his glasses still on his face.

For some stupid reason, instead of feeling grateful that I wasn’t hungover like the rest of them, I felt lonely. Like I had missed out on a mutual experience.

Or maybe I was just acutely aware that Tyler was stuffing his emotions down his throat alongside the beer and not leaning on me the way I would like him to. It bothered me that he hadn’t shared with me that he and his mother had fought over his Thanksgiving trip to my house. I had waited for him to explain what had happened, but he hadn’t, and that hurt my feelings.

Ironic, considering I had never been one to share the majority my thoughts with other people.

***

It snowed again on Tuesday, and Kylie and Nathan had the brilliant idea to go sledding. We only had two sleds, but it seemed like a great way to continue to ignore Tyler’s hearing, which had been set for mid-December at the tail end of exams week. There was a substantial hill behind Nathan’s apartment, so Tyler and I went to his mom’s house to collect the two sleds he was sure were in the garage. I wasn’t thrilled to be going to his house, because I was kind of scared of his mother after hearing she had thrown such a fit about Jayden and Easton coming to my house, but she was sleeping on the couch.

Jayden and Easton were in their bedroom, playing video games that Tyler had rented from the library for their ancient gaming system.