Your Fault (Culpable Book 2)

When Jenna told me how the races were going to go, I was scared, and when I saw Nick’s car on the starting line, ready to take off, I ran toward it, forgetting the consequences, and got inside. Nick looked at me, first with surprise, then with fury. Terrified, I looked at his feet and reminded him what we were there to do:

“Step on the gas, Nick!”

With lightning reflexes, he tore off and caught up to the other cars before I even knew it, destroying their initial advantage.

“I’m going to kill you! Do you hear me?” he shouted. We were almost into the city, and I knew I needed to be quiet and let him concentrate.

For a split second, he looked over at me and shouted, “Put on your damn seat belt!”

After flinching, I did as he said.

I was going to pay for this, big-time, I knew, but I needed to be there with him. This race wasn’t like last year’s. It didn’t matter how many times I told him not to do it; Nicholas made his own decisions and sometimes left me out. Well, this was my decision: If he was racing, I would, too. If he put himself in danger, so would I, and I couldn’t care less what he had to say about it. I’d deal with the consequences later.

“I told you to go,” he screamed, punching the steering wheel. He was livid, but I was, too, and I wasn’t about to back down. This wasn’t the way to do things, and I wanted him to know that if he was still in that world, I would be, too, and if me being there helped him leave it behind, then it was worth the risk.

“Yeah, but I chose not to,” I said, staring at the road. His jaw clenched, the veins popped out in his neck, and I was so scared, I shrank back in my seat.

When we reached the first curve, my feet moved as if I were stepping on the pedals. I was enjoying myself so much, my body was pure adrenaline. I wished I were in Nick’s seat, gripping the wheel and showing him how damned good I was. Even if things had gone to hell last time, I had won; there was no denying that.

Nick was good, but at that moment, all I could see was a guy who hadn’t stopped to think about how much what he was doing could hurt us. No matter what happened, Nick kept turning back to the dark side, and when he did, he dragged me down with him. He had supposedly quit racing and doing all those things that reminded me of my father, but there we were, and I hated myself for doing something that could have destroyed my family—and loving it.

My brain disconnected from those problems and focused solely on the cars in front of us. In front, not behind. We were losing.

“You need to speed up, Nicholas.”

The vein in his neck swelled even more. I bit my lip; I was so nervous.

“I can’t believe I’m going a hundred with you in the car.”

This is a competition, goddammit, not a walk in the park!

“Well, this car can do two hundred, so step on it, or we’re going to lose.”

“Shut up!” he shouted.

I closed my mouth and left him to his own devices. My hands were quivering. By the time he hit 120, he had nearly caught up to the others. Lion was in the lead, the other two just in front of us. Either we took them on the next curve, or we’d never be in the lead. I prayed for Nicholas to get it right. If we lost, he’d kill me; he’d claim it had all been my fault.

But then things changed suddenly, and I watched with horror as we pulled ahead of one guy only to see other cars on the road. They must not have cut off the traffic in that section, so suddenly we found ourselves in the middle of a bunch of regular drivers. I didn’t like this at all; I didn’t want someone getting hurt… This wasn’t supposed to happen.

“Shit!” Nick hissed, hitting a curve and trying to dodge two cars that were going forty. With spectacular control, he veered past the car in third place. I couldn’t help but cheer.

Lion was the one person in front of us, and even though second place also got a portion of the purse, the competitive side of me wanted to win. Nicholas aced the next curve—I had to give him credit—and I had to press my hand into the dashboard to keep from getting jostled. We were hot on Lion’s tail, close but not close enough… I shouted when Nick pulled into oncoming traffic to pass a truck that deafened us with its honking. Not even I would have risked that, but it did help us get ahead. If we could shoot past him at the next intersection, we’d win.

“Come on, Nick! You’ve got to pass him!” I shouted.

He looked at me, fuming, and just then, with only a few feet to go until we reached Lion and his brother, the needle on the speedometer dropped from 140 to 75.

“What are you doing?” I shrieked, incredulous, turning to him and watching with horror as Lion put distance between us.

“I’m teaching you a lesson,” he responded, gunning it again, but it didn’t matter—Lion had just crossed the finish line.

Indignant, I took a deep breath. “I can’t believe it… We could have won!”

“That money’s for Lion. We just needed to take first and second. The order didn’t matter,” he said as we crossed in turn.

He screeched to a halt, and I prepared myself for whatever he had to say to me, but then flashing lights caught his attention, and he turned to look out the back windshield just as the sirens started echoing. His expression transformed completely.

“No fucking way!” he said, hitting the gas again, speeding up quickly, breaking every traffic law known to man before pulling onto the next exit. Honking horns and shouting pedestrians made it impossible to hear. Only then did I start to realize what was happening.

Nick’s phone rang.

“Pick it up,” he ordered me, his eyes on the road. “It’s in my left front pocket.”

I bent over and reached inside, pulling it out.

“Put it on hands-free.” He grunted.

I did, and an unknown voice resounded inside the car.

“Dude, the cops are here. They’ve got us. This is bad!”

“What the fuck, Clark? You told me this was all taken care of!”

“I know, I don’t know what happened. Somebody must have snitched! You need to get off the road ASAP!”

“Where’s my bike?”

There was nothing but racket on the other line. Apparently the cops had shown up at the empty lot where the race started. We were in a better spot than the rest of them, but I was so scared, I couldn’t think straight. All I saw was danger, and I told myself Nicholas was stupid for going there. He should have listened to me; we should have left—both of us.

“Toni took it to the spot. You know what to do. If you hurry, I don’t think they’ll catch you.”

Nicholas grabbed the phone, which was lying on my leg, hung up, and smashed it against the dash.

“Nicholas…” I said, terrified. “They can’t catch us.” If they did, the consequences would be terrible. I might get kicked out of school, and he already had a record—things could be even worse for him. Maybe even his father would struggle to get him out of it if they wound up arresting him this time.

“They’re not going to catch us,” he said softly. He stepped on the gas and pulled onto a road I’d never been down. He seemed to know where he was going, and I just sat there praying for a way out. The patrol cars were onto us, I knew that because I could hear the sirens, but they were too far away to catch the license plate.

We kept going. Then Nick turned down a side street, and soon we reached a long line of warehouses and garages. Then, finally, we found ourselves on a muddy driveway that led to a building with the number 120 on the outside. A rolling door automatically went up, and he pulled inside, next to the motorcycle I’d seen in our garage.

“Get out,” he said, and I was too scared to disobey.

I saw a bunch of crates and old furniture inside. It must have been a storage space of the Leisters’ that Nick used on occasions like this.

He quickly grabbed a canvas sheet off a table and covered the car, lifting a cloud of dust that nearly blinded me and made me cough as I walked away. I felt him behind me. He grabbed my waist, turned me around, and pushed me into the car.

“Now you better do everything I say, Noah. I’m dead serious,” he said, rage oozing from his every pore. “If it weren’t for your bullshit trauma, I’d leave you here so you’d finally learn to keep out of my goddamned business.”

I blinked several times, surprised by his harsh words, wanting to cry. Even if he was right, he was the one who’d gotten us into this situation. He had been the one who’d decided to go back to that world. I swallowed my pride and nodded because I knew the most important thing just then was that we not get caught.

He pulled me over to his motorcycle. There was only one helmet. He pushed it down onto my head. As I briefly met eyes with him, I had no idea how to interpret what was going on in his mind. He got onto the bike, and I climbed on behind him, bending over and wrapping my arms around him before we took off into the cool night.

With every minute we spent on the road, my anger grew. I couldn’t believe I was sitting on a motorcycle, running from the police, putting up with his tantrums when he had been the one who’d done all this. I felt my hands tense on his firm stomach, and his body answered back, maybe in spite of him. He took one hand off the handlebars and grabbed mine.

What is this supposed to mean?

Ten minutes later, he rounded a corner and stopped at a gas station.

“Don’t move,” he ordered me without looking back, hopping down and going inside to pay.

I didn’t miss my chance. I got off, threw the helmet to the ground, and ran off, not wanting to even look at him.

“Noah!” he shouted. I heard him coming up behind me, and when I looked back and saw him, I ran even faster. I didn’t want to see him. I didn’t want him to touch me, to shout at me. All I wanted was to be as far away from him as possible.

That night, it was he who had crossed the line, not me.

I ran until I reached the back of a building under construction. I pulled on the door to the fence and snuck inside. Nicholas couldn’t squeeze in if he tried, so I stopped, and when I heard him outside, I looked through the grating and saw his eyes looking out of control.

“Come out.”

“No.”

He grabbed the fence and started shaking it. He was angrier than he’d been in the entire year we’d been going out.

“You think I can’t climb right over this fucking fence?” he challenged me. It was obvious he’d already thought about it.

“And what are you going to do once you get over it, Nicholas?” I asked, raising my voice and feeling my body tremble from the cold. The adrenaline was draining, and Nicholas’s words were resounding in my skull.

He stopped for a moment. I guess he didn’t know.

I rubbed my arms with my hands. I was freezing, I wanted to go home, and I didn’t want him to take me there.

“Fuck, Noah!” he shouted, finally exploding. “I told you to leave! You never do what I say! They could have caught us today, we could be in a fucking cell right now, and I’d be going crazy thinking about what might happen to you!”

“Did it ever occur to you that you’re not the only one who gets to call the shots in this relationship? That I worry about you, too, and that I’m tired of you lying to me and leaving me out of things?”

“I know how to take care of myself. You have no fucking idea!”

I opened my eyes wide. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“I don’t know how to take care of myself?” I roared, walking close to the fence. “What the fuck do you know about taking care of anyone? I’ve taken care of myself and my mother since I was five years old! All you’ve done is get drunk, take drugs, and fuck around with criminals even though everything in your life was served to you on a silver platter!”

Nicholas stepped back, obviously surprised by what I was shouting, but I couldn’t control it. I had been afraid for him that night, afraid for both of us, because he had risked it all, every single thing we had, everything I had never even dared to dream I could have.

“I’m trying to protect you! But you won’t let me,” he responded, evidently hurt.

I brought my hands to my head. “Maybe you’re the one I need to protect myself from,” I whispered, in tears, shocked to be expressing aloud things I had kept to myself for months. “You keep saying you’re going to change, that you’re going to stop doing all this, but then you don’t, Nicholas!”

He looked at me, like he was unable to believe what I was saying.

“At least I try! I left it all for you, I tried to be better, but you put yourself in danger on purpose. You don’t trust me, you don’t tell me things, and you think I don’t know?”

“Are you talking about my ‘bullshit trauma’?”

He sighed and closed his eyes, and when he looked at me again, I knew we had crossed a line. “I didn’t mean to say that.”

I laughed mirthlessly. “But you think it.” I turned around and walked off.

“Noah, come out of there, please,” he begged as my fears piled in my chest and tears welled in my eyes and I could do nothing to stop them.

“Fuck!” I sat on the ground and wrapped my hands around my knees, burying my head there so he wouldn’t see me cry.

“Noah!” he shouted desperately, and I heard the fence shake as he kicked it. “Come out!”

I lifted my head and looked at him. He appeared frantic, but so was I, because I had so much inside me that I hadn’t said, and I wasn’t sure he’d love me the same if I let it all out. Everything he did just made me retreat deeper inside myself.

“I don’t want to be near you right now!” I shouted with all my might. “You’re hurting me!”

Pain distorted his features, and his arms jerked on the fence as he tried to climb it. I stood up. This was madness.

“And you hurt me, goddammit!” Unable to get over the fence, he kicked it again. “I’ve given everything I have for you, absolutely everything, I opened up to you…and now you say I’m hurting you?”

I wasn’t going to explain things to him. If he couldn’t see the damage he’d caused, then there was no point in it.

“Just go!” I hissed, grabbing a brick and throwing it as hard as I could toward the fence. But it hit the ground before it reached it. “If we can’t make this work, Nicholas, then you should go.”

He turned around and cursed, and after a few moments, he turned back to face me.

“Look, I’m sorry, okay? I really am. I was an asshole, but I freaked out when I saw you at the race. I was so mad, I still am, but I also know that if I hadn’t gone there, we wouldn’t be in this situation right now.”

“What do you think it felt like for me to see you there, Nicholas?”

“I know, okay, I get it… But, please, I can’t stand this distance between us. I need you to come out.”

I took a deep breath and wiped away my tears. “We haven’t solved anything. You know that, don’t you?” I said in a near whisper.

He stood there looking at me, and his expression was enough to make my feet decide for me. I walked toward him and came out through the cracked gate. He pulled me in, wrapped his arms around me, squeezed me as if it hurt him physically not to have me next to him. I breathed in the scent of his body, and my heartbeats slowed instantly. How could he be my sickness and my cure at the same time?

“You stood me up,” I reproached him. I couldn’t shake off that disappointment.

“I wanted you to be as far from me as possible.”

“You told me once we weren’t made to be apart from each other.”

“And we aren’t. I was a jerk. It’s not worth it. It’s not worth racing if the outcome is me losing you.”

I was going to answer, but just then, we felt a vibration. Nick took out his phone, and I waited while he picked up.

“Easy, Lion,” he said, then swore to himself. “Yeah, yeah, I can get her out, don’t worry. Give me twenty minutes, and I’ll be there.”

I felt a jab of fear when Nick put his phone in his back pocket and looked at me.

“They arrested Jenna.”