The Death Date

chapter eleven

The following day, I drove to Nick's house. While I had severed the letter in half to put an end to thoughts about my father's resurgence, I couldn't help but feel torn myself. I was split in two, each part operating independently of the other, with one half trying hard to forget about his words and the other dwelling on them continually. It made the indifference I had spent years cultivating turn quickly back into hatred.

As I could always count on, Nick was unaware of my internal war. He pecked me on the mouth and handed me a cooler from the fridge when I entered the kitchen, stating some members of the shop would be showing up any minute for their ritualistic Friday night get-together. In about an hour, Nick's house would be crammed with pizza, cans of beer, and the raging sounds of Call of Duty at a volume high enough to make the windows vibrate.

"Gotta go walk Rocco," I told Nick, which gave me an easy out to catch my breath before the party. Walking Rocco was familiar, and it would give me the few moments needed to collect myself before enduring a night of loud, messy chaos.

When I returned from the twenty-minute walk, the regulars from the shop were all inside. Each greeted me in their own way as I slipped back into the kitchen and resumed drinking the obnoxiously blue-tinted cooler. Condensation had appeared on the bottle, and the liquid was lukewarm going down. I didn't mind; it would do the job and my bloodstream would be warm and tingly soon.

Coming back into the living space, I plopped down on the couch beside Nick. He was in the middle of a game with Aquino and didn't budge despite how heavily I collapsed. I wondered if he registered that I was even next to him. His eyes – slate gray and unblinking– were focused on the television, his pink mouth hinged slightly open. Cropped brunette hair caught a streak of light overhead and the hint of stubble peppered his strong chin. Nick was universally attractive; it had pulled me to him in high school. Back then his hair had been long with a bit of curl, and it fell in a way that softened the strong lines of his face. As I reminisced about that younger Nick, that old familiar feeling of having someone to belong to returned as well. Momentarily, my chest swelled. He had been there for me after the accident -- the time in my life that would have been unbearable without someone to lean on But the image fell away, and as I took in the present Nick, the feeling in my chest deflated.

"Bro! What are you doing?! Don't go in there. Are you crazy?" Nick shouted to Aquino who was placed, expression mirroring Nick's, in the chair near the side wall.

Aquino shouted something in return, and Nick's gaze drifted over my form. He did a double take, confirming my earlier suspicions to be true: he hadn't realized I was beside him.

"Hey," he said and flicked his gaze back on the screen.

"Hey."

"Will you get me another beer?" he asked.

I had just finished my cooler and a slight warmness bled through me. I needed another drink. Pushing myself off the couch, I traipsed into the kitchen, grabbed a can of beer and another cooler, and handed the prior drink to Nick.

"Thanks," he said, eyes unmoving.

I decided to sit in the loveseat beside Garrett. He eyed me carefully as I took a hefty dram of my new beverage, nearly draining the entire bottle.

"You alright there, Delia?" he asked.

Licking the sweet contents from my lips, I said, "Fine."

"You sure about that?" His thin brow formed a boomerang on his forehead. "I don't think I've ever seen you down a bottle of alcohol."

"It's a cooler, Garrett." I lifted the bottle before me. "See," I jutted my finger to the label."Four-point-five percent alcohol. Child's play."

Garrett's eyebrows rose another degree, but a small chuckle escaped his mouth. He then shrugged and smacked his beer can against the bottle in my hand, the tinny thud mixing with the loud noise in the room. "To child's play," he said.