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The echoes of screaming and whining girls reverberate throughout the Howard household, and in a flash of hot pink from both her swimsuit and the reddened hue of her skin, Cassie is gone, dragged upstairs by her and Lexi’s mother. Lexi listens to her sister’s sobs carry up the steps as Nate stalks past her, towels in hand and moving slow and calculated, like a horror movie villain. It sends a quiver down Lexi’s spine when she catches his and Cassie’s eyes lock before they break off into their separate ways.
She plops down into the chair near the front door and lets out the most exasperated sigh she’s ever sighed in her life, pushing out all the pent up stress she’s been harboring in her lungs all week. She wishes she doesn’t have to succumb to the label of “pessimist” at the ripe age of 17, but she’d thought this at the beginning of the night, and she’s thinking it now—she knew something bad was going to happen tonight. Lexi, if not anything else, was an observer, and could see as clear as day that something was wrong with her sister for the past few weeks. Whatever it was was sure to surface like a zombie’s arm breaking through dirt and crawling across a cemetery once Cassie got enough alcohol into her.
Lexi likes Maddy, Kat, and even BB the few times she can understand whatever bizarre stuff she was saying through puffs of her vape pen. But as much as the girls welcomed Lexi with open arms at group hangouts, she can't shake the feeling that they were Cassie’s friends, not hers. In most situations, she still feels like the obnoxious little puppy dog of a sister, trailing behind Cassie wherever she went at most social functions. She supposes she has Rue and Jules as her own friends, but even they live off in their own little lover’s world despite Lexi having known Rue for longer.
She stares up at the ceiling fan whirring around above her as the commotion begins to settle down outside, panicked shouts lulling to normal speech. Lexi can’t see them from where she’s sitting, but she pictures Nate wrapping a shaken Maddy up in a towel, his soulless eyes scanning over her nearly nude body.
The image of Fezco’s bruised and bloody fist connecting with Nate’s face over and over intrudes her thoughts. She remembers the look of pure fiery rage shifting to shame once as he glanced at her and promptly exited. Lexi shivers.
They’ve been texting every day since that night at his store once they cleared up who Faye was and why Cal Jacobs had come in like a one man SWAT team. Fez asks about her day at school and if she’s learned anything cool, Lexi asks him about the store and Ash and what he does during the day besides work. He tells her about how he people-watches at the store and reports back to her with the interesting characters that come and go, she sends him the music she’s listening to and one-liners from her play. And then, they divulge into everything and nothing all at once, and Lexi can’t recall a time she’s texted this much before, so much that her hands ache from being frozen in the position of holding her phone and her eyes drying from looking at its glowing screen under her blankets in the dark.
The tips of her fingers start to itch, and she knows what she wants. She pulls out her phone.
lexi:
hey :) sorry to bother you rn, are you busy?
She smiles when it only takes him two minutes to respond. Who would have thought the local drug dealer would be a quick texter outside of his business, let alone to someone as gawky and unnoticeable as Lexi?
fezco:
not at all
whats up?
lexi:
chaos, haha
just needed to get away from all the drama happening at the moment. i hope that’s okay?
fezco:
of course it is
lexi:
we’re just throwing a birthday party for maddy at our house. i’m sure you know maddy?
anyway it got out of control. my sister drank herself into a coma and puked in our hot tub with everyone inside
not to mention your best friend showed up too
fezco:
who?
oh
jacobs? lmao
ngl i hate the thought of him at your place with you
is sis doin alright?
lexi:
yeah, i didn’t expect him to show up. i don’t think him and maddy are back together again but it looks like they’re heading in that direction
and honestly who knows? she’s been acting weird for the past few weeks. idk how to help her
She pauses, and then adds:
lexi:
i’m just exhausted.
Almost immediately, her phone buzzes against her thigh.
fezco:
i’m sorry
u shouldn’t have to deal with all that shit
wyd rn?
lexi:
it’s alright. thanks for listening :)
and nothing, besides waiting for my mom to come back downstairs after she’s done cleaning up cassie i guess
fezco:
not to pull u away from ur function or whatever
but id love to come pick u up if ur down
tell me more about this in person
A surge of butterflies blossom in Lexi’s gut. She glances at the clock on her phone. It’s 11, totally pitch black outside save for the dull street lamps lining their little suburb and the glow from TV screens inside the open windows of people’s homes. It’s not like her mother keeps track of how late she and Cassie stay out, and she’s been out far later than 11 before. But Lexi’s always the planner, the human bullet journal, never leaving to do something spontaneous on a whim.
Her phone lights up again.
fezco:
plus i just miss u and wanna see ur face
hope thats not weird of me to say
She corrects herself. Those weren’t butterflies before, they were caterpillars. The butterflies are now fully grown, slamming against her to get out, threatening to force themselves out of her throat. Lexi sneaks a glance at the backyard where the girls are huddled away from the hot tub with Nate looming over them. Her mother hasn’t come down yet, and she decides then and there that no one will miss her.
lexi:
i’ll be ready in 15. let me know when you’re on your way. i’ll bring cake :)
Lexi manages to slip into her room to change into a simple short sleeve button-up top and skirt without being noticed by her mom or Cassie, the latter of which stood in the shower in their shared bathroom, still in her swimsuit, as water washed her sick and tears down the drain.
Her hair is still smooth and straight from how she styled it for the party, and Lexi likes the way it cascades down her shoulders and back like a chestnut waterfall. She decides to leave her party makeup as it is, nothing of a drastic departure from her everyday look, but enough to embolden her, to make her feel daring and pretty and ready to get into a boy’s car and get away from here.
She waits on the curb of her driveway with a tote bag holding a tupperware of a big slice of Maddy’s strawberry and vanilla birthday cake slung over her shoulder. When she sees Fez’s car pull up with him inside, half-smirking and eyes lit up like blue lanterns, she thinks she may ascend up to the stars, which were uncharacteristically out tonight, sparkling over their sleepy town like glitter thrown to the wind.
“Lexi Howard,” he greets as she opens the door and takes a seat. She recognizes Kendrick Lamar’s “Swimming Pools” softly playing from the speakers.
“It’s just Lexi, Fez,” she giggles. “You don’t have to use my whole government name every time.”
“Why not?” he shrugs coyly. “It’s a nice name.”
She glances down at the console between them and bites the corner of her lip, suppressing a smile that wants to break across her face. “Yeah, right.”
“You look nice,” he tells her, also glancing down once she looks up at him and catches his gaze. “Uh, I like your hair like that.”
Instinctively, she reaches up to push a strand of it behind her ear. “Thanks. It’s just straight, nothing special, but thanks.”
“It's still nice,” he murmurs. She could take out one of the forks from her tote and pierce the tension in the air right now.
“So,” she says. “Where are we going?”
A smile tugs on his lips. “I got an idea."
Lexi’s window is rolled half down as Fez drives, the cool Southern California wind sweeping through Lexi’s hair. The night is quiet for a Saturday, and she imagines that if the whole town shuts off their appliances and holds their breath at the same time, they might be able to hear a symphony of chirping crickets in the distance. She looks over at Fez and admires the way his face is only periodically lit up by the amber street lights. Orange lights, blue eyes, contrasting colours bouncing off one another like a watercolour portrait of hot and cool.
“You saved me tonight, you know,” Lexi says, voice raised slightly over the wind. “I thought I might have suffocated in there.”
“It’s no problem,” he replies. “Just hope I didn’t interrupt nothin’.”
“Of course not. Do you really think I’d rather be sitting around bored out of my mind when I could be spending time with you?”
It surprises her, how bluntly she says it, and she can tell from the subtle lift of his eyebrows that it surprises him a little too. But she’s in a car with a boy who plays the role of knight in shining armour without making her feel like a helpless victim. A boy who she could walk straight into and get wrapped up in forever, whom she would never want to retreat from.
“I meant it, ya know,” he says after a pause.
“Meant what?”
“That I wanted to see your face.” He flashes her a smile, and it’s small, but she fears it will come back to completely destroy her in her dreams from now on.
Her breath stutters and she’s grateful for the howl of the wind seeping into the car. She thinks he probably hears it anyway.
He directs his eyes back to the road, but somehow it still feels like they’re burning into her. They drive beneath a large underpass, and she rolls down the window even more, laughing wholeheartedly and loudly when the wind whips through her tresses. Fez looks back to her and feels his breath lodge in his throat at the sight of her hair tangled and floating as though she were underwater.
Driving around aimlessly with Fezco has rapidly become Lexi’s new favourite pastime. She doesn’t care that she’s only done it this one time, it’s more than enough for her to put it at the top of her list. They unwind through the nooks and crannies of East Highland for nearly half an hour. It’s funny, Lexi thinks to herself. These are streets she’s known her whole life, the same trimmed grass and gray houses that have stayed the same as she gets older, but sitting next to Fez on this night, it’s like she’s in a brand new town, seeing its surroundings for the first time.
Eventually, they pull into a wide, vacant parking lot next to a brightly lit baseball diamond. If she were alone, she’d think it were ghostly and sinister, like the perfect place to murder an unsuspecting young girl like herself. But the thrill of Fez’s eyes on her and the warm tingle his laugh sends through her makes her feel invincible, and instead, the empty lot could be a playground for all she knew.
They get out of the car and sit on the hood. Fez leans back against the windshield, and Lexi pulls out the tupperware of birthday cake and forks. She places it between them, and they take turns scooping bites out of it.
“Sorry I didn't bring you somewhere nicer,” Fez says. “I realize now, it's kinda creepy lookin’.”
“What are you talking about?” Lexi replies, licking a dab of pink frosting off of her fork. Her stomach tightens when she notices him glance down at her lips. “You came and got me on a whim. I don’t need us to go anywhere fancy. I’m happy just to, um, you know, be with you.”
His smile is bashful, and before he can open his mouth to reply, Lexi adds, “unless you brought me out here to kill me or something.”
Fez breathes out a laugh through his nose, shaking his head in disbelief. “I'mma dealer, but I've got morals and dignity and shit.”
She laughs. He brings up a bite of cake to his lips, then pauses and looks her dead in the eye. “Plus, I'd never wanna kill a pretty thing like you.” Fez closes his lips around the fork and pulls it out almost clean, traces of icing left behind, and Lexi feels like the concrete below the car is spinning.
She clears her throat. Don’t let yourself get this fucking horny right now, she tells herself. “Pretty, huh?”
He sits up slightly on the windshield, and how the hell can his eyes look so impossibly, vividly blue under all this darkness and glimpses of artificial light? “I said what I said."
Lexi has to look away, because it’s an overwhelming feeling, being called pretty by someone even prettier, when all she’s known for most of her life were scraps of attention, leftover petals from her sister or her friends. But here’s Fez, giving her a whole damn fresh bouquet of sweet names and an offering of escape.
They’re down to the final bites of cake as they talk about what happened at the party, how Cassie’s been lashing out at her more frequently over the tiniest things, how she wakes up at 4 a.m. and uses up all the hot water, how Lexi loves her so much anyway and wants to pry her brain open like a textbook so she can find out what’s wrong. She doesn’t realize she’s getting emotional about it until after she’s done recounting the events of tonight’s massacre, and a heavy sense of unease settles over her.
Fez watches her thoughtfully, nodding along and never interrupting her. "You think her and Jacobs got something goin’ on?”
Lexi nearly chokes to death on her last bite of cake, launching her into a coughing fit.
“What?” she wheezes. “Seriously? You think so? No…no way. Really?”
Fez shrugs. “I dunno for sure, I don’t know her like that. But she was all up on him when I beat Jacobs’s ass on New Year’s, actin’ all worried, even more worried than the short one. His ex or whatever. And now, you're telling me she’s paranoid and drinking and shit when he comes over.”
Lexi stares at him. “Fez. I’m not sure if you’re a genius or out of your mind…but I think I’m leaning more towards the former.”
“It just seems fucked, I guess."
“If that’s true, I need to do something to help her."
“Hey,” Fez’s voice is gentle, like he’s setting her down on a soft surface. “I know you love your sis, but you can’t be takin’ everyone’s problems all on your own. Gotta let yourself feel your own shit too sometimes.”
She knows this spiral of thoughts isn’t going away any time soon, and the thought of Cassie in the hands of a terrifying enigma like Nate makes her want to simultaneously slap her sister across the face and wrap her in a giant bear hug. But she quickly comes back to where she is, remembers the cake and the open parking lot and the boy right next to her, and shelves it away for another time.
“You’re so intuitive,” she tells him. “I feel like you have a third eye or something. You know and sense things that others don’t pick up on right away.”
He looks amused and intrigued by this observation, and Lexi can’t help but giggle at his expression. “You think? Guess I have to be, most of the time.”
“Yeah,” she nods, understanding his line of work likely requires him to be on his toes at any given time. He’s able to sniff out danger from hundreds of miles away like a guard dog, and in the same moment, he can turn around and share a kitschy birthday cake with a girl who loves theater and hyperpop and sticking her nose into various books. The duality of Fez, Lexi thinks.
Time ceases to exist. Lexi shot her mom a quick text just before leaving the house, saying she was going over to Rue’s to pick something up and she’d be back later. She isn’t surprised her mom hasn’t even opened the text yet, or if anyone’s even noticed she was absent. But it doesn’t matter now, because her phone is in the cupholder in Fez’s car, and clocks and watches and anything that has the ability to tell the concept of time is gone, and she’s standing in front of the car with Fez while she watches him light up a blunt, and there’s nowhere else she’d rather be.
The small flame from the lighter illuminates the dark forest green of Fez’s sweater, much like the one he wore when they first met, and Lexi is mesmerized by the way his eyelashes cast long wispy shadows down his freckle-dusted cheeks. The chain around his neck glints in the flicker, and Lexi wets her lips.
“You mind?” he asks, blunt moving up and down between his lips as he speaks.
“No, not at all,” she says. “Is your tolerance, like, crazy high?”
He shrugs. “Pretty much. This won’t do nothin’, really. I'll still be able to drive.”
“Why even start one then, if you know it won’t do much?”
She sees his Adam's apple bob as he swallows, and it makes her want to place her lips and teeth in that exact spot. “Helps with nerves.”
Silence. “You’re nervous?”
He doesn’t respond, only glances down at the ground as he inhales, but Lexi notices the faint smile tracing his lips, and he blows a cloud of smoke past them.
“What if I’m nervous too?” Her voice is small. It doesn't feel like her own coming out of her.
“You want?” he offers the blunt to her, held between his index finger and thumb. It’s somehow an adorable gesture, like a child sharing their toys.
She doesn’t know what it is that makes her do it. Maybe it’s the way the white lights coming from the baseball diamond behind them shine just enough to cast soft shadows against his face, highlighting the scar along the side of his head. Maybe it’s the stream of smoke drifting from the blunt between them that tangles into the night sky, acting as some sort of invisible wall that Lexi wants to push down. Maybe it’s the way he’s been looking at her all this time with the most earnest, attentive expression, like she’s someone worth paying attention to. Like she matters to him. Whatever it is, it moves her on its own accord, and she takes a step towards him. Up close, she can see her forehead is at level with his nose, and it makes her palms itch.
“Not that way," she says. “Let’s try another way.”
His eyes search her face, until understanding clicks in his brain, and Lexi swears she sees his pupils dilate. He inches forward until he’s close enough to feel her light breaths against his chin. Fez, without ever tearing his eyes away from hers, takes a long, slow drag from the blunt, pulling the hazy smoke down into him, and Lexi parts her lips. Fez drinks in the way her eyelids flutter shut as he presses his mouth to hers, gentler than a feather floating through the air and landing on a pillow. Slowly, as sure not to send her into another coughing fit, he pours the smoke into her from his own lungs, bringing his free hand to place under her chin and angle her perfect, perfect face up towards his better.
The soft sounds of Lexi inhaling shouldn’t be as electrifying as they are, but Fez feels it, feels the rush of heat and arousal shoot through him like a new kind of drug he’s never experienced before. And then, once she’s taken it all in, she releases it back out into the barely existing space between them. Fez watches it shroud her in cloudiness, and for a moment he fears she might disappear, an illusion performed by some sort of sick magician out to get him and leave him high and dry. But the smoke dissipates and all he sees are her half-lidded brown eyes, shining a muted caramel colour underneath the faint fluorescent lighting.
Silence hangs in the midnight air like a pendulum. He’s the first one to speak.
“Like that?” Fezco’s voice is hoarse, like sandpaper.
“Yeah,” she breathes. “Like that.”
Lexi pushes up on her tiptoes and presses her lips against his, properly this time, full and languid and not feather-light in the slightest. There’s still a lingering hint of strawberry icing on both of their mouths, and Fez doesn’t care that he’s throwing a perfectly good blunt to the concrete, because he needs both hands free to wrap one around her waist and the other to cradle her cheek. She gasps into his mouth and throws her arms around his neck, desperately, like she’s afraid he’ll float up away into the smoke.
They break apart with a wet, almost embarrassingly loud smacking noise. They catch one glimpse of each other, and Lexi thinks Fezco with blushy cheeks and a brow furrowed from desire might be the most viscerally stunning thing she’s ever seen, a punch straight to her gut in the best way possible, an ache she’d invite over and over again.
Fez reels her back in, catching Lexi’s bottom lip between his and marveling at the way her hair slips through his fingers like silk. The scratch of his beard against her chin makes it feel like warm water is being poured down her back, goosebumps rising on her arms and legs and on the nape of her neck.
His hands come to rest on her hips, big, firm hands as strong and hot as iron, and the way so much of his grasp covers the expanse of her hips with his fingertips brushing the small of her back sends a flood of fervor between Lexi’s legs. Fez can’t help himself, needs to fold Lexi into himself, tongue brushing past the pillows of her lips and meeting hers, drawing a sharp gasp out of her. One of her hands smooths down the planes of his back, and even through his thick sweater he feels every movement of the blazing trail as though she were touching him naked. She reluctantly pulls away with a soft pop, gasping for air like she’s a newborn taking her first breath of life, but she doesn’t step back, face still hovering close to his, nose tips brushing and panting warm on his face.
“Fuck.” Fez lets out a short strangled laugh out when he says it, like he can’t believe any of this is real and he needs to be pinched. “I've been wanting to do that for a while.”
“So have I,” she whispers, grazing her lips against his. A low pitched hum escapes her when Fez soothes his thumb across her cheekbone so sweetly and tenderly. Lexi nuzzles into his palm. “I think we should…maybe keep doing it?”
His mouth is back on hers in an instant, swallowing down her muffled moan where he can store it down inside of him forever. “Yeah, let’s do that,” Fez manages to get out in between kisses. Lexi and Fezco, standing underneath the early morning darkness, tucked away in a concrete corner, drown themselves in each other’s kisses until they both see stars beyond the ones hanging above them.