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His hands say, if you think you're too good for any of us, you're right. His wrinkled Aglionby uniform says, I belong to them and then I don't. His eyes say, I can make you forget everything for a while.
His mouth says, "Hey princess. Wanna go for a ride?"
***
Blue lights the cigarette with calm hands. Actually, she doesn't have the first idea how to smoke, but sure as hell she won't let Kavinsky see. He looks like he's tried his way through every drug in existence, his skin so pale you can trace the veins under it, his face hollow like a burned-out building. The first drag is sharp and itching in her lungs and somehow satisfying.
Kavinsky watches her. "Your first time, baby doll?" And at first she thinks he means the smoking, then it dawns on her he might be referring to something else. It's so blunt that she forgets for a heartbeat or so that there's cigarette smoke in her mouth and the graceless coughing fit that follows keeps her from a sharp answer.
Kavinsky just grins as he starts the car.
"Do you do this often? Picking up random girls for a bit of fun?" she wants to know when she can breathe again. "All the time, honeybee," he replies, the 'honeybee' dripping poison, and she can't decide if he's being sarcastic or not.
She props her feet up on the dashboard, combat boots scraping at the front shield, to show him she's not here to be polite or play nice. She gave him a chance, he better impress her.
As he smirks at her she gets the idea that he doesn't consider this the worst thing.
Kavinsky changes the music to something so aggressive it doesn't matter if it's sexist because these people clearly hate everyone. It's been a long day at Nino's with a hellish lot of Raven boys, and it's nice to just lean back and let someone else scream out the anger in her stead. She doesn't ask where they're going, he doesn't tell.
Blue remembers how a few years ago, she fell off a tree trying to help a cat that was stuck twenty feet in the air.
Kavinsky reminds her of the bruises she carried around for weeks after. Something that's worth learning about, even though it might not be the textbook definition of beautiful.
This is how Blue Sargent loses her virginity to a boy she didn't even kiss.
***
The first time he closes his hands around her throat, everything in her screams, this is wrong. Her body betrays her with the helpless little noise that escapes her lips. She has no time to ponder this, because now he moves against her and she just stares at him, wide-eyed, not sure if she should be afraid yet.
"You like this, baby girl?" he whispers, his voice dark and hoarse. It's becoming painful to breathe; she tears at his hands, without success - he doesn't move. A slow, excited grin spreads over his face, and, God, he's never been more beautiful, but she needs to breathe -
She kicks her foot against his knee, and he yelps and stumbles backwards. Catching her breath, she doesn't waste any time and lunges at him, the both of them falling to the floor except this time she's on top of him and he's so surprised he just watches her. She pins his hands to the floor, keeping her knees on his thighs so he won't move. "I like this more," she pants and tries out that feral grin she's seen on his face so many times. Laughing surprised, he just looks at her without struggling for a moment.
For once it feels like he really sees her - not as a girl or as someone to do drugs with, but her as Blue, and it seems as if he likes what he sees.
The moment lasts only a heartbeat before he shoves her off him. "Nice try, doll." She could swear there's a hint of trembling in his voice.
***
"He's going to hurt you." Orla is blunt as usual as she catches Blue in front of her bedroom. Blue doesn’t even wonder how Orla knows; she’s been meeting Kavinsky for about two weeks and someone was bound to find out.
"This is none of your business," Blue snaps. Inconspicuously, she makes sure that the bandana tied around her neck is still hiding the bruises.
She starts to close the door when Orla says, "Is this your idea of socializing?" Her cousin crosses her arms and leans against the wall, somehow knowing that Blue won't just leave the discussion unfinished. Blue turns around, heaving an exasperated sigh. "We're not going out, okay? It's not like I'm going to fall in love."
"So what do you do it for? Kissing?"
"Orla," Blue tries to make her voice sound calm, "you may have been able to be a normal teenager, but I'm not, so just let me do this, okay?"
"In fact, Blue Sargent," Orla’s voice is sharp, "I have never been able to be a normal teenager, and if you for, like, just a second stopped pretending to be the only person in this house who doesn’t get quite what she wanted, you'd reconsider."
Blue bites her lower lip as she contemplates how to counter this, but the silence stretches too long until Orla softens. "Look," she says quietly, "we don't always get along, but you're my cousin and I don't want him to break your heart."
This, coming from Orla, is a very emotional sentence, and Blue doesn't know how to deal with it, so she just retorts, "Maybe I'll break his."
Orla shrugs and the last thing Blue hears before she finally closes the door is, "Joseph Kavinsky doesn't have a heart."
***
“Hey, tiny one!” Swan waves at her as she leaves Nino’s. He and Jiang are perched between the bicycle racks, smoking cigarettes. “Join us. Skov’s gonna pick us up in ten.”
“Hi,” she replies. “Join you for what?”
Jiang holds up a bottle. “K sent this for his princess. Seems like someone wants you to get into party mood.”
Blue shrugs, but she sits down with them anyway, accepts a cigarette from Jiang and lets Swan open the bottle. She never daydreamed about drinking hundred dollar champagne, but if she had, it wouldn’t have involved the parking lot behind Nino’s and rusty bicycle racks. Somehow, she likes it that way. For once she gets to know what it's like to be careless around expensive stuff.
By the time Skov pulls up, the bottle is empty.
***
Kavinsky drives her home from school one Thursday because it’s raining. She invites him in and he accepts even though she didn’t expect him too.
“Blue?” Maura’s voice sounds from the reading room.
“Imhomeivegotavisitorwereinmyroom.” She says it too fast and realizes only then she’s nervous. Kavinsky grins at her discomfort. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Sargent,” he calls out just to fluster her further, but she’s more surprised at how polite he sounds. It’s the last word that comes to her mind when describing him.
“Upstairs,” she urges him – too late because Maura already appeared in the doorway.
“Why, hello, young man,” she says, even though Blue is already dragging Kavinsky up the stairs.
“Mom,” Blue warns her.
“You should stay for dinner!” Maura calls after them and Blue knows it’s not an invitation but a threat.
***
“This is wicked.” Kavinsky stands in the middle of Blue’s bedroom, turning on the spot with his arms spread wide. The pang in her chest is half embarrassment and half pride as she tries to imagine how the drooping paper trees taped to the wall and all the self-painted pictures must seem to him.
When he holds out two pills in his flat palm, she shakes her head. “We’re not doing drugs in here.”
“Come one, baby doll.” He slings his arms around her. “It would be marvelous with all these birds on your wall. Did you never try it?”
“I…” Her voice trails off as his hands glide down her body.
Kavinsky shoves her onto the bed and pins her down. “You try to be such a good little girl,” he purrs. “But you aren’t, are you?”
Blue doesn’t fight the mean smile that slides onto her face. “I have some weed,” she relents. “But we only smoke with the window open.”
He undresses her with the joint tucked into the corner of his mouth, and when she’s completely naked, he slips something into her hand. “Put this on.”
This is how Blue lies on the floorboards wearing nothing but a diamond necklace while Kavinsky makes love to her in a daze of weed and smoke.
***
“What do you get out of this?”
They’re sprawled across the Evo’s backseat somewhere outside Henrietta, doors wide open to the glowing red sunset.
Kavinsky shrugs. “Sex. Drugs. Don’t ask dumb questions, baby doll.”
***
For the first time he's sober when they do it.
His eyes are closed; Blue moves her hands, one with fingernails scraping from his neck down to the waistband of his jeans, the other in his hair, feeling how he leans into her touch, the glowing white of his body in the moonlight against her dark brown skin. There's no drug to blame but her, and it's curious how his helpless moans opens something up inside her lungs.
When she lies down next to him afterwards and he's all soft and peaceful, the cruelty of his face replaced by something that might be sadness, she thinks that maybe she knows why he prefers his life doused in high-proof liquids and white powder.
***
She leaves her bike at the edge of the fairground because she prefers it intact. As she makes her way to the gleaming white Evo, the stares are tangible.
They make a curious pair; the substance king who's more explosive than flames dripping into gasoline and the psychic's daughter who may or may not know all your secrets.
It's not exactly a bad feeling.
Kavinsky sits on the Evo's hood like a king on his throne. "Baby doll," he greets her, and she replies with, "Asshole." Her arrogant smirk is matched by his.
"You know about substance party. What did you bring?"
She steps closer until her knees meet the front bumper, leans in and says in a low voice, "It's a fluid and I'll give it to you later. In the backseat."
"That's weak," he retorts, though she can see the thought delights him.
Blue shrugs. "Then I guess you’ll have to take this." She throws a small plastic bag into his lap before climbing the hood herself.
***
It's harder now to pretend there's nothing.
She only holds his hand because they’re drunk and trying to walk straight.
She only tells him to cut down on the coke because it will land him in jail and who will fuck her then.
She only refuses to kiss him because she won't start making exceptions now.
***
He calls her one night. She's perched on the kitchen counter, eating yoghurt, when Calla walks into the kitchen. "It's that boy," she says dismissively. Blue puts the cup to the side and takes the phone from Calla.
"Baby doll," Kavinsky says. The words stopped riling her long ago and she's pretty sure he knows. "Are you free tomorrow? Let's go to the movies." He slurs the words; probably drunk, Blue concludes.
"Umm," she says. Images of couples making out in the last row flicker through her mind. "I like to actually watch movies, you know. I'm not into semi-public fumbling."
"So she's at least kept some of her senses," Calla mutters at this and Blue shoots her a dark look.
Kavinsky laughs, but there's a hint of nervousness to it. "That's okay. We don't have to. Fumble, I mean."
Blue's heart skips several beats as she processes that he may actually be asking her out. "Okay." Her voice sounds quiet and breathy and she turns to the side so Calla won't see her blush.
***
She waits under the building's marquee because it’s raining, her tiny frame illuminated by the light from the showcase window. After ten minutes, she assumes he's late. After thirty minutes, she thinks she can make out Prokopenko’s Golf driving by the movie theater, but she doesn’t know enough about cars to be completely sure. After an hour, she gets back on her dripping wet bike and rides home.
***
She walks straight to the phone/cat/sewing room. As expected, Orla is already perched on the sofa, leafing through a fashion magazine while guarding the phone. Blue hovers in the door, debating whether she can dare to ask if he called.
It takes Orla just one look at her rain-drenched clothes to understand what Blue doesn’t say. She shakes her head.
Blue shuffles out of her dripping rain coat and shoves Orla softly until there's enough space for her to curl up next to her.
"You can say it now," she says quietly.
There’s a soft expression on Orla’s face as she strokes Blue’s hair. "I told you so."
***
Three days later she sees him at Nino's. He looks straight through her to flirt with a tall, curly-haired girl.
She continues her shift unmoved except for a soft tremble in her hands when she refills his soda.
It's better this way.