you're too young & eager to love (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
impertinences) wrote2018-08-09 03:03 pm
impertinences) wrote2018-08-09 03:03 pm
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Companion piece! Or at least a piece from Haven's POV when her and Luke are teens and stuff is ~happening~.
“... I say I want you inside me and you hold
my head under water, I say I want you inside me and you split me open
with a knife.
I’m battling monsters.” - Richard Siken
Luke looks at you when he thinks you don’t notice, but you’ve started to catch and hold his gaze. He’s been looking at you like this for years now - from the corners of his eyes, from beneath his eyelids, from the back of a room, from across a crowd - and you used to grant him his solitude, used to think he was being protective, but not anymore. Now, you stare at him until he has to look away.
You want him to know: you’re just waiting to eat the heart out of him.
You started wearing mini-skirts in junior high because Lilly Painter told you that your teachers were more likely to pass you on your tests if you sat in front of their desks and crossed your legs real slow. You stopped wearing a bra by tenth grade because you realized Mr. Anderson at the corner 7-11 would let you buy cigarettes without an ID if you leaned over the counter and ignored how he stared. By fifteen, you keep your hair long and free and don’t ever dye it like all the other girls because some of the policemen like to wrap their hands through its buttery length while they drive you home from the latest party they’ve crashed. Those are the men who never give you a ticket or take you in to the station, who know to drop you off down the road from your house on Acorn Street to avoid Sam Elders meeting them at the curb. You’ve spent most of your short life like this - learning how to use what you have to your greatest advantage, and since the Elders have never had much, you’re a quick learner.
You don’t think it’s a pity. You don’t think you have anything to be ashamed of. You know the church ladies gossip and you know they think you’re destined to be one of the town’s lost causes, pregnant by sixteen and lucky to work at the laundromat after dropping out of school, but you’re not worried. You smile at them when you pass by, dismissing the way they cluck at your naked legs and threadbare shirts.
The thing is, you’re well aware of how striking you can be. And that’s part of the problem, or at least that’s what your daddy’s been saying ever since you started menstruating and sprouted hips.
But you also know that Rockland County doesn’t have many options. It’s a town built on blue collar workers, one high school shipping off boys to the military or the local businesses and girls to the altar or the diners, with the stench of pig slaughter defining the class differences. The girls in this town are good for two things, and ain’t one of those things ever been their smarts. They’re expected to breed, to bear the burden of a man’s weight and his knuckles, to suck cigarettes until their lips turn thin and wrinkled while they stand over a hot stove and fry eggs for hungry mouths. The girls ‘round here, it don’t matter how pretty they are because that prettiness doesn’t last but a few years. Life has a way of burning it out of them.
They could fade, but you learn to appreciate your looks because they give you an angle - your daddy always said that there wasn’t a man strong enough to avoid the charms of a beautiful woman, and at least your mamma had the decency to pass down her perky tits and round thighs before she disappeared without so much as a second glance - but being a rose in a garden of weeds doesn’t feel like a real victory. It’s easy pickings. Convenient, but easy. You have to remind yourself that you weren’t raised to look a gift horse in the mouth.
It works, until Luke starts watching you. Really watching you.
Then, you want to chase.
Jaime Holster is a coked out quarterback who failed senior year intentionally after he realized he wasn’t getting a scholarship, which really meant he wasn’t getting out of Rockland. His father is the town mechanic, and the idea of spending his days in a garage stinking of oil and grease fills Jaime with panic, so he throws outdoor parties on most weekends to help him abide the feeling. Anyone can drink at Jaime’s - it’s a breeding ground of variety, all the lines compartmentalizing each high school clique blurring to oblivion once there’s enough beer to soften people’s attitudes. The cheerleaders hang on punks. The ROTC grunts feel up the skirts of math nerds who won’t glance at them come Monday. The stoners argue about philosophy with the theater kids. Even Mickey, the youngest and newest of Rockland County’s finest, pretends that he doesn’t wear a badge and passes out red solo cups brimming with foam from the keg.
The only one who doesn’t seem to belong at Jaime’s is Luke. He shows up late, dragging his plain Jane girlfriend behind him, holding a beer he won’t drink much. They stand in the corner of Jaime’s backyard, whispering to each other in their casual way, and you want to pull Betty’s frizzy hair and snap her head back, force her face out of the tender spot between Luke’s shoulder and his neck.
Instead, you flash a smile as sweet as sugar and wave to them from across the pit of dancing bodies. Luke lifts his chin at you. Betty wiggles three fingers in the air, an awkward gesture.
In a crop top that reveals the hard length of your stomach and cut-offs so short that the curves of your ass hang out, you are the epitome of a Rockland girl. You wear ankle boots in case you have to make a run for it and to avoid problems with the muddy patches in the yard. You wear your hair up to make it harder for people to grab. You don’t look fifteen at all. Betty does though, and she’s Luke’s age. She looks every inch the prudish, stuck-up twat you think she is because who wears knee-length skirts in August?
“How many is that?” Luke asks once you’ve cut a path to them.
“Not nearly enough.” You twist to the side when he tries to take the cup in your left hand. The beer keeps sloshing over onto your fingers whenever you move too quickly. “Betty, tell my brother to get you a beer. Then we can dance.”
Betty smiles at you and shakes her head. “No thanks. My mom will murder me if I come home smelling like beer. She doesn’t even know I’m here.”
You make a cooing noise, the kind you might make to a baby, and look back to the center of the yard where everyone is dancing. Luke sighs like he’s weary. He sighs like that a lot. Betty says something about finding a bathroom and untangles herself from your brother. You recognize an opening when you see one, so you slip under his arm, the weight of it familiar across your shoulders. He settles in against you, the two of you watching the crowd.
“I don’t know why you bother,” you mumble, flicking your head so your ponytail smacks him across the face.
“She’s nice.”
“I meant coming to these parties, but yeah, sure, okay. She’s nice.”
“Someone has to keep an eye on you.”
“Why? You worried I’m going to turn into Lilly?”
Luke raises an eyebrow. “What’s wrong with Lilly?”
“She thinks anal sex counts as practicing safe sex.”
Your brother chokes on a swallow of his beer, coughing. He’s watched Lilly Painter grow up with you. The two of you used to play with Barbies in your living room with Luke making boxed Mac & Cheese in the kitchen.
“Ask Jaime. He’ll tell you all about it,” you say with a shrug of your bony shoulder, the gesture lifting Luke’s arm.
“I’ll pass.”
“Don’t be such a prude. Anal's the new in thing.”
“Haven.” Luke says your name like it's torturous for him. He stares down at you, and you look right back up.
“What?”
You let unspoken thoughts hang in the air for a moment before you hit him in the chest with the back of your hand, rolling your eyes. “I’m just kidding.”
Betty is making her way back, stepping carefully around discarded cups and broken bottles. You slip from under Luke’s arm, his hand trailing down your spine before you dart back towards the dance pit. You grab Lilly’s wrist as you pass her, pulling her into the fray, and you don’t have to turn around to know Luke is watching.
Later, you fuck Jaime Holster in the front seat of his pickup, your knees straddling his waist, the steering wheel jammed into the small of your back, his hands fumbling at your tits.
You fuck Jaime Holster in the front seat of his pickup because Luke has parked your dad’s truck beside Jaime’s in the gravel driveway. Jaime had tried to get you into his bedroom, but you’d taken him from the deck to the front porch to the pickup, slow and steady and guiding his swaying steps all the time. As soon as you’d crawled into his lap, he hadn’t minded.
If you turn your head to the right, cheek pressed to Jaime’s shoulder, you can stare straight on through the passenger side window.
Betty screams.
It’s high pitched and reedy and every bit the cliche you hear in horror movies. It makes your ears ring. Or maybe that’s a side effect from being torn out of the truck, your knees hitting gravel, an elbow connecting with the car door. Your thighs are sticky and you’re flushed, breathing unevenly, but you wiggle your shorts back up your legs before the crowd starts to form.
Betty is still screaming, and you want to tell her to shut the fuck up. You put your hands on your knees, pitched forward, and through the curtain of your hair you can see Luke half in the cabin of the truck, one hand fisted into the collar of Jaime’s tank, his other arm rearing back, flying forward, rearing, flying, rearing, flying, like a piston. Jaime’s face rolls back against the seat, and there’s blood everywhere. You think you can hear him gurgle something, like a name, or a plea.
You try to say your brother’s name, but it comes out as a whisper.
By the time some of the boys from the party pull your brother away, Jaime will need thirteen stitches and dental surgery.
Luke’s knuckles bleed the entire way home. He curses when he grips the steering wheel too tightly. Betty sits with her hands knotted into fists on her lap. She stares at Luke. You stare out the window, red-eyed, pressing your forehead against the cool glass. Nobody says anything until Luke pulls into Betty’s driveway and only then it’s Betty mumbling a weak goodbye, promising to call him tomorrow, saying he really should see a doctor. She waits for a moment outside of the truck, expecting some acknowledgement, but walks off with her shoulders hunched once she realizes Luke isn’t going to say anything.
You stay silent the whole way home, watching as the roads and the crab grass become more and more familiar.
When Luke pulls into the driveway, he slams the truck into park and turns off the ignition but doesn’t move. The knuckles of his good hand are white, pounding the steering wheel in a dull staccato rhythm.
“I made him use a condom,” you say like that’s what you think he’s waiting to hear.
Luke grinds his teeth so hard you think you can hear it. You fight back the urge to smile. You really do. But there’s still a bit of beer in your blood and the air in the truck is hot with humidity and you’ve got an ache low in your belly and there’s something kind of funny about this whole scenario, something that just strikes you as hilarious, although you wouldn’t be able to explain why if anyone asked. Luke looks at you through the fall of his hair, his mouth pressed into a tight line, his eyes a little wild, and you laugh.
You cup your hands over your mouth, trying to hold it back, but your laughter bursts forth in an obnoxious bray. You could have cried. You’ve been fake crying since you were four; you can flip it like a switch. If you cried, he would sigh his weary sigh and bite down his anger and smooth your disheveled hair back from your face with his good hand and he’d let you tuck against him like a bird in a nest once you get to bed. But you’ve played that card before. This time, you want a different ending.
So you laugh. You hold your hands over your mouth to make it seem like you didn’t have a choice, but you did.
“Fuck you,” he spits out, snarling at your laughter.
That makes you laugh harder. You’re shaking with the force of it.
“You think this is fucking funny?” Luke’s yelling now. He looks a bit like your father when he feels this exasperated. The same knitted eyebrows. The same flaring temper. He grabs your arm, his fingers dimpling your skin, and the pain of it cuts the last of your laughter from your throat.
“Hey!” You try to yank free, but he jerks you forward, so your face is close to his and half your body is now in his personal space.
His eyes scan your entire face, searching for something, and you don’t look away. You watch him watching you and you know what he wants, you’ve known for a while now, and it’s okay, it’s natural, it’s just Luke, who doesn’t ever mean to hurt you, who bandaged your scraped knees when you were little, who always lets you have the last icecream sandwich, who beat a boy to a pulp for doing to you what he’s always wanted to. You know your brother - he won’t ask, he can’t bring himself to, and you recognize his shame as the thickness in the air between your bodies, the same uncomfortable tension that’s been sprouting up whenever you’ve been alone for months now.
“I want to,” you tell him, your lips dry and your voice quiet. His fingers are still digging into your arm.
Luke looks like you’ve slapped him. He swallows and starts to let you go, the tiniest shake of his head symbolic of his desire to deny, but you push forward until you’re kissing him with too much teeth and his hand goes from your arm to the back of your head, fingers knotting against the base of your skull.
He’s murmuring against your mouth, eyes screwed shut as though he’s in pain, and you realize he’s saying your name. Over and over. Like a mantra or a curse.
When you reach over and palm his jeans, you can feel how ready he is. You unsnap the top button and pull down the zipper, reaching into his pants to free the hard length of him. You kiss him the entire time, moaning against his mouth, not minding that he won’t open his eyes, that he keeps his head back against the seat, his bad hand holding tight to the door handle like he’s about to flee at any moment. You wrap your hand around his dick and pump, twisting your wrist each time you stroke over the head. He’s slick already and hot in your palm and you find a rhythm that is rightfully hard. His hips jerk beneath you.
It doesn’t take long. You can’t imagine how pent up he must be, but the sound he makes when he comes is anguished and low and needy.
You lick his bottom lip, like a signature, before pulling away, wiping your sticky hand on the side of your leg and against your shorts.
Luke’s still breathing hard. He opens his eyes, but he won’t look at you. He tucks himself back into his jeans before opening the door and climbing out of the truck.
You sleep on the couch, and in the morning you don’t talk about it. Luke will tell your dad that he got into a fight with Jaime, but he won’t say why. He’ll watch you as you scramble eggs and hum along with the radio. You’ll smile at him over the rim of your glass of chocolate milk.
He’ll smile back.
“... I say I want you inside me and you hold
my head under water, I say I want you inside me and you split me open
with a knife.
I’m battling monsters.” - Richard Siken
Luke looks at you when he thinks you don’t notice, but you’ve started to catch and hold his gaze. He’s been looking at you like this for years now - from the corners of his eyes, from beneath his eyelids, from the back of a room, from across a crowd - and you used to grant him his solitude, used to think he was being protective, but not anymore. Now, you stare at him until he has to look away.
You want him to know: you’re just waiting to eat the heart out of him.
You started wearing mini-skirts in junior high because Lilly Painter told you that your teachers were more likely to pass you on your tests if you sat in front of their desks and crossed your legs real slow. You stopped wearing a bra by tenth grade because you realized Mr. Anderson at the corner 7-11 would let you buy cigarettes without an ID if you leaned over the counter and ignored how he stared. By fifteen, you keep your hair long and free and don’t ever dye it like all the other girls because some of the policemen like to wrap their hands through its buttery length while they drive you home from the latest party they’ve crashed. Those are the men who never give you a ticket or take you in to the station, who know to drop you off down the road from your house on Acorn Street to avoid Sam Elders meeting them at the curb. You’ve spent most of your short life like this - learning how to use what you have to your greatest advantage, and since the Elders have never had much, you’re a quick learner.
You don’t think it’s a pity. You don’t think you have anything to be ashamed of. You know the church ladies gossip and you know they think you’re destined to be one of the town’s lost causes, pregnant by sixteen and lucky to work at the laundromat after dropping out of school, but you’re not worried. You smile at them when you pass by, dismissing the way they cluck at your naked legs and threadbare shirts.
The thing is, you’re well aware of how striking you can be. And that’s part of the problem, or at least that’s what your daddy’s been saying ever since you started menstruating and sprouted hips.
But you also know that Rockland County doesn’t have many options. It’s a town built on blue collar workers, one high school shipping off boys to the military or the local businesses and girls to the altar or the diners, with the stench of pig slaughter defining the class differences. The girls in this town are good for two things, and ain’t one of those things ever been their smarts. They’re expected to breed, to bear the burden of a man’s weight and his knuckles, to suck cigarettes until their lips turn thin and wrinkled while they stand over a hot stove and fry eggs for hungry mouths. The girls ‘round here, it don’t matter how pretty they are because that prettiness doesn’t last but a few years. Life has a way of burning it out of them.
They could fade, but you learn to appreciate your looks because they give you an angle - your daddy always said that there wasn’t a man strong enough to avoid the charms of a beautiful woman, and at least your mamma had the decency to pass down her perky tits and round thighs before she disappeared without so much as a second glance - but being a rose in a garden of weeds doesn’t feel like a real victory. It’s easy pickings. Convenient, but easy. You have to remind yourself that you weren’t raised to look a gift horse in the mouth.
It works, until Luke starts watching you. Really watching you.
Then, you want to chase.
Jaime Holster is a coked out quarterback who failed senior year intentionally after he realized he wasn’t getting a scholarship, which really meant he wasn’t getting out of Rockland. His father is the town mechanic, and the idea of spending his days in a garage stinking of oil and grease fills Jaime with panic, so he throws outdoor parties on most weekends to help him abide the feeling. Anyone can drink at Jaime’s - it’s a breeding ground of variety, all the lines compartmentalizing each high school clique blurring to oblivion once there’s enough beer to soften people’s attitudes. The cheerleaders hang on punks. The ROTC grunts feel up the skirts of math nerds who won’t glance at them come Monday. The stoners argue about philosophy with the theater kids. Even Mickey, the youngest and newest of Rockland County’s finest, pretends that he doesn’t wear a badge and passes out red solo cups brimming with foam from the keg.
The only one who doesn’t seem to belong at Jaime’s is Luke. He shows up late, dragging his plain Jane girlfriend behind him, holding a beer he won’t drink much. They stand in the corner of Jaime’s backyard, whispering to each other in their casual way, and you want to pull Betty’s frizzy hair and snap her head back, force her face out of the tender spot between Luke’s shoulder and his neck.
Instead, you flash a smile as sweet as sugar and wave to them from across the pit of dancing bodies. Luke lifts his chin at you. Betty wiggles three fingers in the air, an awkward gesture.
In a crop top that reveals the hard length of your stomach and cut-offs so short that the curves of your ass hang out, you are the epitome of a Rockland girl. You wear ankle boots in case you have to make a run for it and to avoid problems with the muddy patches in the yard. You wear your hair up to make it harder for people to grab. You don’t look fifteen at all. Betty does though, and she’s Luke’s age. She looks every inch the prudish, stuck-up twat you think she is because who wears knee-length skirts in August?
“How many is that?” Luke asks once you’ve cut a path to them.
“Not nearly enough.” You twist to the side when he tries to take the cup in your left hand. The beer keeps sloshing over onto your fingers whenever you move too quickly. “Betty, tell my brother to get you a beer. Then we can dance.”
Betty smiles at you and shakes her head. “No thanks. My mom will murder me if I come home smelling like beer. She doesn’t even know I’m here.”
You make a cooing noise, the kind you might make to a baby, and look back to the center of the yard where everyone is dancing. Luke sighs like he’s weary. He sighs like that a lot. Betty says something about finding a bathroom and untangles herself from your brother. You recognize an opening when you see one, so you slip under his arm, the weight of it familiar across your shoulders. He settles in against you, the two of you watching the crowd.
“I don’t know why you bother,” you mumble, flicking your head so your ponytail smacks him across the face.
“She’s nice.”
“I meant coming to these parties, but yeah, sure, okay. She’s nice.”
“Someone has to keep an eye on you.”
“Why? You worried I’m going to turn into Lilly?”
Luke raises an eyebrow. “What’s wrong with Lilly?”
“She thinks anal sex counts as practicing safe sex.”
Your brother chokes on a swallow of his beer, coughing. He’s watched Lilly Painter grow up with you. The two of you used to play with Barbies in your living room with Luke making boxed Mac & Cheese in the kitchen.
“Ask Jaime. He’ll tell you all about it,” you say with a shrug of your bony shoulder, the gesture lifting Luke’s arm.
“I’ll pass.”
“Don’t be such a prude. Anal's the new in thing.”
“Haven.” Luke says your name like it's torturous for him. He stares down at you, and you look right back up.
“What?”
You let unspoken thoughts hang in the air for a moment before you hit him in the chest with the back of your hand, rolling your eyes. “I’m just kidding.”
Betty is making her way back, stepping carefully around discarded cups and broken bottles. You slip from under Luke’s arm, his hand trailing down your spine before you dart back towards the dance pit. You grab Lilly’s wrist as you pass her, pulling her into the fray, and you don’t have to turn around to know Luke is watching.
Later, you fuck Jaime Holster in the front seat of his pickup, your knees straddling his waist, the steering wheel jammed into the small of your back, his hands fumbling at your tits.
You fuck Jaime Holster in the front seat of his pickup because Luke has parked your dad’s truck beside Jaime’s in the gravel driveway. Jaime had tried to get you into his bedroom, but you’d taken him from the deck to the front porch to the pickup, slow and steady and guiding his swaying steps all the time. As soon as you’d crawled into his lap, he hadn’t minded.
If you turn your head to the right, cheek pressed to Jaime’s shoulder, you can stare straight on through the passenger side window.
Betty screams.
It’s high pitched and reedy and every bit the cliche you hear in horror movies. It makes your ears ring. Or maybe that’s a side effect from being torn out of the truck, your knees hitting gravel, an elbow connecting with the car door. Your thighs are sticky and you’re flushed, breathing unevenly, but you wiggle your shorts back up your legs before the crowd starts to form.
Betty is still screaming, and you want to tell her to shut the fuck up. You put your hands on your knees, pitched forward, and through the curtain of your hair you can see Luke half in the cabin of the truck, one hand fisted into the collar of Jaime’s tank, his other arm rearing back, flying forward, rearing, flying, rearing, flying, like a piston. Jaime’s face rolls back against the seat, and there’s blood everywhere. You think you can hear him gurgle something, like a name, or a plea.
You try to say your brother’s name, but it comes out as a whisper.
By the time some of the boys from the party pull your brother away, Jaime will need thirteen stitches and dental surgery.
Luke’s knuckles bleed the entire way home. He curses when he grips the steering wheel too tightly. Betty sits with her hands knotted into fists on her lap. She stares at Luke. You stare out the window, red-eyed, pressing your forehead against the cool glass. Nobody says anything until Luke pulls into Betty’s driveway and only then it’s Betty mumbling a weak goodbye, promising to call him tomorrow, saying he really should see a doctor. She waits for a moment outside of the truck, expecting some acknowledgement, but walks off with her shoulders hunched once she realizes Luke isn’t going to say anything.
You stay silent the whole way home, watching as the roads and the crab grass become more and more familiar.
When Luke pulls into the driveway, he slams the truck into park and turns off the ignition but doesn’t move. The knuckles of his good hand are white, pounding the steering wheel in a dull staccato rhythm.
“I made him use a condom,” you say like that’s what you think he’s waiting to hear.
Luke grinds his teeth so hard you think you can hear it. You fight back the urge to smile. You really do. But there’s still a bit of beer in your blood and the air in the truck is hot with humidity and you’ve got an ache low in your belly and there’s something kind of funny about this whole scenario, something that just strikes you as hilarious, although you wouldn’t be able to explain why if anyone asked. Luke looks at you through the fall of his hair, his mouth pressed into a tight line, his eyes a little wild, and you laugh.
You cup your hands over your mouth, trying to hold it back, but your laughter bursts forth in an obnoxious bray. You could have cried. You’ve been fake crying since you were four; you can flip it like a switch. If you cried, he would sigh his weary sigh and bite down his anger and smooth your disheveled hair back from your face with his good hand and he’d let you tuck against him like a bird in a nest once you get to bed. But you’ve played that card before. This time, you want a different ending.
So you laugh. You hold your hands over your mouth to make it seem like you didn’t have a choice, but you did.
“Fuck you,” he spits out, snarling at your laughter.
That makes you laugh harder. You’re shaking with the force of it.
“You think this is fucking funny?” Luke’s yelling now. He looks a bit like your father when he feels this exasperated. The same knitted eyebrows. The same flaring temper. He grabs your arm, his fingers dimpling your skin, and the pain of it cuts the last of your laughter from your throat.
“Hey!” You try to yank free, but he jerks you forward, so your face is close to his and half your body is now in his personal space.
His eyes scan your entire face, searching for something, and you don’t look away. You watch him watching you and you know what he wants, you’ve known for a while now, and it’s okay, it’s natural, it’s just Luke, who doesn’t ever mean to hurt you, who bandaged your scraped knees when you were little, who always lets you have the last icecream sandwich, who beat a boy to a pulp for doing to you what he’s always wanted to. You know your brother - he won’t ask, he can’t bring himself to, and you recognize his shame as the thickness in the air between your bodies, the same uncomfortable tension that’s been sprouting up whenever you’ve been alone for months now.
“I want to,” you tell him, your lips dry and your voice quiet. His fingers are still digging into your arm.
Luke looks like you’ve slapped him. He swallows and starts to let you go, the tiniest shake of his head symbolic of his desire to deny, but you push forward until you’re kissing him with too much teeth and his hand goes from your arm to the back of your head, fingers knotting against the base of your skull.
He’s murmuring against your mouth, eyes screwed shut as though he’s in pain, and you realize he’s saying your name. Over and over. Like a mantra or a curse.
When you reach over and palm his jeans, you can feel how ready he is. You unsnap the top button and pull down the zipper, reaching into his pants to free the hard length of him. You kiss him the entire time, moaning against his mouth, not minding that he won’t open his eyes, that he keeps his head back against the seat, his bad hand holding tight to the door handle like he’s about to flee at any moment. You wrap your hand around his dick and pump, twisting your wrist each time you stroke over the head. He’s slick already and hot in your palm and you find a rhythm that is rightfully hard. His hips jerk beneath you.
It doesn’t take long. You can’t imagine how pent up he must be, but the sound he makes when he comes is anguished and low and needy.
You lick his bottom lip, like a signature, before pulling away, wiping your sticky hand on the side of your leg and against your shorts.
Luke’s still breathing hard. He opens his eyes, but he won’t look at you. He tucks himself back into his jeans before opening the door and climbing out of the truck.
You sleep on the couch, and in the morning you don’t talk about it. Luke will tell your dad that he got into a fight with Jaime, but he won’t say why. He’ll watch you as you scramble eggs and hum along with the radio. You’ll smile at him over the rim of your glass of chocolate milk.
He’ll smile back.