leaps when I catch sight of someone walking along ahead of me, and I slam on my brakes. It’s Sterling, holding a bottle in one hand. He holds his other between my headlights and his eyes, and when I turn them down, I see a look on his face I’ve never seen before.
His eyes are somehow wild and frozen at the same time, and when I turn on the dash light so he can see me, too, his look doesn’t brighten. His bowtie is undone, hanging loosely around his neck. His manic eyes fade to a dull grey, and suddenly he looks tired, like he doesn’t have the energy to deal with me.
I’ve seen that look before: in the eyes of the staff at Windfall, or my mother’s eyes even looking back from the mirror. I want to scream at him—ask him how dare he scare me like this—but that’s not what someone needs after dealing with my father. And so, I take a deep breath and do my best to put my feelings aside.
“Hey there, sailor,” I yell, hoping he’ll find it funny.
Sterling doesn’t reply. Instead, he starts toward the passenger seat of the car, which I lean over to unlock for him.
He sinks into the bucket seat with a grunt, not meeting my eyes.
“Are you okay?”
Sterling holds the bottle of booze in his lap protectively, his face a mixture of revulsion and anger.
“Yeah,” he mutters. “I’m not sure I want to talk about it.”
“I won’t make you.” I’m not quite sure where to go, with the conversation, or with the car, but I turn on the engine anyway. “Where to?”
“I don’t want to be around people,” Sterling says through gritted teeth.
“Does people include me?” I ask, trying to keep my tone neutral, but praying he doesn’t say yes. Does he know how much it would break me for him to say yes?
He stays silent for an unnervingly long time, and I start driving towards campus. I’ll drop him off and wait for this to blow over. I have some experience avoiding the storms my father causes. After a couple of minutes he finally responds. “It’s not your fault. I just...don’t want to be reminded of how all those rich assholes look at me. And where the fuck can I get away from that in this fucking town?”
“I know a place,” I say absently, thinking of Little Love.
We drive in silence for about ten minutes, and by the time the Jag’s tires begin crunching along the gravel drive leading to the Little Love parking lot, Sterling has stopped staring at the bottle. I park as far down the lot as I can, about 50 feet past the nearest car, right in front of a log barrier designed to prevent cars from sliding down the steep slope behind it.
“This is Little Love. When I was in high school, and no one had parents out of town, this is where we had our parties. There’s a bigger version in Nashville, but this one is closer.” I pause to see if he wants to say anything, but he just looks out at the campus, dotted with its beautiful old buildings. I can’t even tell if he hears me. “Anyway, no one will bother us here. Do you want me to leave?”
“How do you not kill him?” Sterling says, and I’m still not sure he has heard anything I said.
“My father has a way of pulling you into his world. He owns everything, controls everything. And he uses all of it, all of the time, to get what he wants. You either let him, or you learn how to break out of his world.”
“I don’t want to break out of his world. I want to destroy it.”
If it had been said by someone else, or without so much sincerity, I might not take it seriously. But I’ve never seen Sterling like this. For the briefest of moments I wonder if he should get drunk, just for tonight, just to help him let go of whatever happened. But I know that’s the cheap way out, that it will just create more problems.
“I know that feeling. Believe me.”
He looks at the bottle in his hands and twists off the cap. My heart sinks as I wait for him to take a swig. Instead, he inhales deeply, savoring the smell.
“You haven’t tried to stop me from drinking,” he says, somewhere between confusion and accusation.
“Part of me wouldn’t blame you,” I murmur. “You have to remember, I’ve