Beyond Reason

Chapter 15: Secret safe

~Joey~

Okay, I'm nervous.

I've been going back and forth this whole night, wondering if I'm going into this conversation calm and collected, or if I should just blurt everything out and watch for his reaction.

I think I'm over thinking. For all I know, Keenan might not even be mad at me. He might not even have noticed...yeah, I'm definitely not over thinking. He knows and I'm going to have to deal with this.

"You okay?" Heather asks, looking at me over the rim of her cup. She has to yell so that I can hear her over the loud music.

"Yeah, why?"

"I think I'm going to have a drink."

I widen my eyes with excitement. "Seriously?"

She nods. "Yeah. One beer. I'm having so much fun."

"Okay, sure!" I pull my phone out of my pocket as she heads to the coolers to her her alcohol. The time icon at the top says it's almost nine, so I start moving slowly to the edge of the party until I break out.

We arrive at the same time, and he looks the same as before, in his tank and sweatpants, except his black hair is noticeably more tousled like he's run his hands through it several times. I don't know if this is weird, but I think it looks good on him.

"Hey."

"Hi. How'd you get my number?" He asks.

"Vincent," I answer simply. He nods and mutters an okay, an eerie silence descending on us both. I know that by standard, I didn't particularly do anything wrong, but I know it, and from the way he's looking at the wall instead of me, I know he knows it too. "Um. Can I...talk to you?"

"Isn't that what you're doing?"

I sigh and lower myself to the space between the two walls. He remains standing, but when I look up at his face, he caves and sits beside me.

"I'm sorry."

He tilts his head to one side. "For what?"

I know he's just trying to conceal his hurt by playing dumb, but I power on anyway. "What I did was rude." I start, deciding to keep things blunt and honest. "You being there wasn't the reason I wanted to leave."

"Wouldn't blame you if it was."

"It wasn't! I can explain," I quickly say, wanting that assumption out of his head immediately. If I didn't already have that conversation with my friends, I wouldn't have given a damn who walked in to see me talking to Keenan. But I was trying not to seem like I didn't care about anything they said. I do realise that in the process, I made Keenan feel like I was ashamed of being seen with him. "It's just that they...I mean we got talking earlier today, and somehow, you came up in conversation. I mean, I'm not saying it's your fault, I just..." I sigh and throw my head back against the wall because this is harder to do than I expected. I can't start breaking down my entire thought process up until that moment, but I also need him to know that it wasn't my intention to react like that. Eventually, I decide to just leave defense out of my agenda. "It doesn't matter why I did what I did. I shouldn't have treated you like that and I'm sorry."

He folds his lips together and nods his head slowly. I can practically see him thinking, like he's processing what I just said—or didn't say, rather. "Did the conversation include me dealing drugs?"

"It's complicated."

"They told you things and you're not sure whether to believe them or not, but you also don't want them to know you're not totally on their side."