Whispered Darkness by Jessica Sorensen Page 0,18
his brow at me. “You want me to sit here and tell you stuff about me?” he asks dubiously.
I nod. “Yeah, I do, unless you don’t want to.”
He chews on his bottom lip, sucking on his lip ring. “It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s just that … a lot of it isn’t very pretty.”
“Neither is a lot of stuff about me,” I say, “so I won’t judge you.”
“I beg to differ on that. You’re a good person. You always have been.”
I frown. “You think too highly of me.”
“No, I don’t. I know there’s some bad stuff—there is with everyone—but there’s also a lot of good stuff.”
I want to ask him what that good stuff is and how he knows it exists, but that’s not what this conversation is about. It’s about finding out who Kingsley is now, after years of me cutting him out of my life.
“I know you’re heroic,” I say, causing him to roll his eyes. “You swam into a sinking truck to save me, so don’t roll your eyes. Own your awesomeness.”
He shakes his head but humors me. “You should also know that I used to get high a lot down by that lake, and if the accident had happened a handful of months before, I may have been too high to swim out there.”
His words may be hard to hear, but at least he’s being honest with me, even though I can feel that he doesn’t want to.
“Would you have still tried to save me, if you were high when it happened?”
He nods without zero hesitation. “We both probably would’ve died, though.”
Words he said to me that night that we were together in the sinking truck pour through my mind. “You’re strong. I know you are. And I need you to do this, because I’m not going to leave without you. If you don’t go, I don’t go.”
He said it because I was too scared to swim out, and he meant them; that much I know. What I don’t know is how in the hell I was ever even able to look at Foster when someone like Kingsley existed. How did I not see him? How could I be so blind?
Not anymore. I want to know all about him, see all of him, if he’ll let me.
“You said you’ve been doing drugs since you were thirteen, right?” I ask, and he reluctantly nods. “How hard did you get into them?” When wariness floods his features, I add, “You don’t have to tell me. I’m just trying to learn about all the stuff that happened between now and the day I decided to be a stupid idiot and stop being your friend.”
He scratches the side of his neck. “If you really want to know …” He sighs, lowering his hand. “I was into some pretty hard drugs for a while. Porter and I both were. In fact, we were probably high on something almost every single day for years.”
It hurts to hear, like a knife slicing open a wound. I look down and realize the wound is indeed bleeding again, red staining the white bandage wrapped around it.
Why does it keep doing that? Why won’t it heal?
“Is that how you two became friends?” I ask, focusing back on Kingsley. “Because you both liked to get high?”
He shakes his head, fiddling with the leather band on his wrist. “Nah. Porter may get on my nerves sometimes and likes to act like everything’s a joke, but he can actually be a decent guy. He’s never judged me, and I’ve never judged him, which was the main basis of our friendship. But we also both come from shitting home lives, so there was kind of an understanding there. Plus, we like a lot of the same stuff—tattoos, piercings, music. Porter’s really into art, and I like photography.”
“That makes sense, I guess,” I say. “I didn’t know Porter was into art.”
“Yeah. He designed a lot of my tattoos.”
“How many tattoos do you have, anyway? I’ve always wondered, because there was a year there when it seemed like, every time I saw you at school, you had a new one. And a new piercing. I think you took a few of the piercings out, though.”
He’s looking at me so funnily that I start to wonder if maybe tattoos and piercings are a touchy subject. I don’t know why, though. Then he says, “You noticed that?” and it starts to make sense. Because what I think he really wants to ask