Boys of West Denton ✓

chapter thirteen

Harris

I'm changing shirts in my room when a sudden knock on the basement window has me nearly jump right out of my skin

There's only one person who knocks on my window. I nearly head straight to open it, but I decide to make him wait, choosing instead to slip into the fresh yellow T-shirt I just took from the dryer. It's warm, and after having just dried off from my shower, it's like the hug I didn't know I needed.

Then I walk across my room and pull open the blinds.

Liam crouches in the window well before me, his shaggy hair a mess around his face. He has dark, sunken eyes and cheekbones so sharp, they make his face look hollow. He's truly a haunting figure, just there in his little $uicideboy$ sweatshirt and baggy jeans, staring right at me, looking half hyper-focused, half completely phased out.

I take the screen off and open the window. He immediately puts his legs through and slides himself in, landing on his feet just as he does every time. I've seen him make the jump hammered beyond reason too many times to count. "Hey," he says, "you've been awful quiet today."

"What do you mean by that?" It kind of bugs me that he just came right in, but I can't exactly blame him, seeing as Liam's arrivals at my basement window are routine now.

"Dunno." He shrugs. "You just usually text at least once, even to see if I didn't die the night before. Nothing."

"You were with Eli Wakeman," I point out. "I figured you were taken care of." Everyone knows that Eli keeps strictly sober. He's also straight, with a girlfriend at UMN Twin Cities, meaning he probably just took Liam home out of some kinda civic duty bullshit. Which, yeah, good on him. Seriously.

Liam shrugs again. I kind of hate it when he shrugs a bunch. Honestly, sometimes, I anti-hate Liam. I can't get enough of him. But other times, every single little thing he does bugs the shit out of me to such an extent that I think I could go right ahead and strangle him, Homer and Bart Simpson-style.

"Whatever," I tell him. "You're alive, aren't you."

He grins. His teeth are yellow, stained with nicotine from years of cigarettes and vaping. I do my best to keep my teeth clean and white, especially after my mom found out about my little habit a few months ago. We tried our best to break it, but I still sneak them when I'm with Liam. Which, really, is frequent enough that it's less so a thing I do sometimes, more so "I'm still very much addicted." What my mother doesn't know won't kill her.

"You're in a sassy mood today," he says, reaching out to pick a piece of fuzz off my shirt. When he suddenly leans in to try and kiss me, I can smell the faintest trace of alcohol on his breath. If he's here just for sex—which, right now, I feel like he is—he's probably more under the influence than I realize.

His lips are right in front of mine, but I lean back instead of forward. "Are you high?" He doesn't smell super strongly of alcohol, but knowing him, he's on something. Maybe he's cross-faded. He gets super horny when he's crossed.

"Come on, you know this isn't about that," he says, reaching out to try and grab my forearm. "I just missed you is all."

His palm is rough yet damp against my skin; his eyes are wider than usual, his smile a little too lopsided. It's the same expression he made at Elana Doorsey's New Year's party when he tried to lock the door of her basement bathroom. Liam's inebriated state had been funny before that—I was so high that I said to the guy standing next to us, "Oh my God he is so high, look," and then took a picture of Liam and showed it to him. Neither of us should have been as fucked up as we were; it was an obvious recipe for disaster.