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iii. Fake Flowers
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Parties often meant people sticking to you like glue. There was sugar on Blair Cameron's lips because Sage sneaked vodka into his trunk and he had a box of those strawberry-vanilla gumdrops that melted in your mouth and left the traces on her cherry-bubblegum lipstick. She wanted to redo it, but she forgot the tube at home and grabbed her pack of cigarettes instead.
The Glossier tube rested on her desk next to a pot of fake flowers, plastic she found in a kiosk she didn't even remember. There was a candle next to it, but it was empty and she hid bags of weed inside so her father wouldn't see it. Or Rose, when she went in her room to collect all the dirty laundry she tucked inside her cloth-bin under the windowsill. Anyway, the fake flowers often felt real because the plastic was thin and they swayed with the wind that penetrated through the chasm in the bottom of her window, which she always kept open because she hated the heat almost as much as she hated her own reflection. There was ruined makeup on the nightstand because she threw the palette across the room two nights ago, and deleted her ex-secret-lover's number.
Sarah was laughing with Topper near the fire, sat on a log while Scarlet was cluelessly flirting with Kelce on the other side of the beach. Then, there was Sage Okamoto with his hands on her neck when he spoke, like her skin was a magnet and he couldn't fight it. And she didn't push him away because he smelled like vodka and Tom Ford's Tobacco Vanille eau de parfum and she craved that hint of sweetness roe her natural bitterness.
Blair Cameron loved Sage Okamoto. It didn't matter that he was a drug dealer or that he was an acute disappointment to his parents. Rafe liked him and so did her father, because he always wore expensive clothes and smelled like Cuban cigars though he doesn't smoke (he was just a drug addict). And, just like her, he was stuck in the doll-box, transparent-screen and didn't know how to get out. She sometimes had a feeling he didn't want to, finding solace in the way people bent to his will. He was nothing like JJ Maybank, he ate people for breakfast. But he played it off as though they ate him and maybe Blair loved him so much because she was just the same and her only way of admitting it was flocking with the half-brother of her own's drug dealer (which she met at that damn trailer, by the way).
She was drunk, and maybe she was pretending to be a lot more dizzy than she actually was. Because Blair was in no way a lightweight, but she nearly drowned a whole bottle and there was a funny taste in the back of her mouth. And she craved cigarettes so fucking much.
"You smell good," he muttered. She knew he meant it in an innocent way, but a shiver ran up her spine.
Blair looked up at him through her lashes and sighed. "That's because the perfume I brought you is rubbing off on me," she said. Her breath smelled like sticky beer and his own liquor. And his hands on her neck weren't helping her sober up the slightest.
