We’re at a stop sign. I call the house number, getting voicemail, like I knew I would. I leave a message, saying that Chelsea and I are done with the museum but I’ll be later than expected because she wants my opinion on a prom dress at Macy’s.
I feel his eyes on me as he takes the phone from me. “Chelsea,” he snorts. As if that’s stupid or something. He opens the back of it and pulls out the battery.
“What are you doing?”
“Three guesses.”
I focus on the road. “What do you want?”
“A burger. What are you going to have?”
He says it like we’re a couple on a regular night, stepping out for a burger.
But we’re not. I say nothing. He can pretend all he wants—I don’t have to participate.
I catch sight of a cop car up ahead. My pulse speeds. I grip the steering wheel. We draw nearer to the cop. To the exit.
My abductor doesn’t seem the least bit nervous. Casually, he reaches over and flips on the blinker, brushing my arm. A shiver goes through me.
His voice is casual. “Would suck to be pulled over riding with the guy you covered for, wouldn’t it? After lying to your parents like that? Things would really look bad then.”
When I glance over, he’s smiling that beautiful, devilish smile I remember so well from the first night. I feel like a fish, and this guy, he drove a hook deep into my gut. And he can pull it whenever he wants.
It’s about more than the fact that he forced me to lie.
It’s about how tightly he held me in the river that night—every muscle wet and straining with the refusal to let go.
Nobody has ever expended that kind of intensity on me. Perverse as it seems, it was something real after all the fakeness of the party. After the fakeness of my entire life.
The feeling of hating him and clinging on to him was like nothing I’d ever experienced. Like clinging to a leaky life raft even though it’s going to drown you.
Clinging to your killer, that’s a powerful and horrible kind of intimacy. I used to think of intimacy as chocolates and roses and sweet whispered words. But it can be blood and violence and darkness, too. That’s something they don’t teach you in school.
It drove a hook deep, deep into me.
The sensation of him has lived under my skin for the past seven months. The feeling of his fingers digging into my shivering flesh. The way his wet shirtsleeves clung to his bulging biceps. The hard intensity of his gaze, fixed firmly on the moon, like he couldn’t bear looking down at me while he killed me. How severe and sure his grip became each time I struggled. The musical swash of the water against our bodies, a soundtrack to the most twisted dance ever.
And then he let me live, even when I could ID him so easily.
It felt like something beyond chocolates and roses and sweet whispered words. Something more genuine, somehow.
It’s completely crazy—I know.
And I can never tell anybody, not even Chelsea. That’s almost the worst part of it.
“My treat,” he adds. Like this is a date.
I veer into the drive-through lane, heart thudding.
“Careful,” he commands. “Prom’s coming up. Saw the sign on the school. You going?”
“None of your business.”
“I’ll decide what’s my business or not. You’re mine, and that includes you answering every single question I ask—with the truth. You do everything I say and tell me what I want to know, and I won’t hurt you, got it?”
You’re mine. There’s this tightness in my belly. It’s not right. I hate you I hate you I hate you, I think at him, repeating it like that might make it true.
“Now, are you going to this prom shit or not?”
“Probably not.”
“Why not?”
I look over at him, wondering how much he knows about prom. “I’m not old enough. It’s for seniors. I can go if a senior asks me, but…”
“But what? No one asked you?”
He sounds a little indignant about that, and it makes me smile.
I think about Zach’s fumbling kisses at the party last month. I’d liked him for so long, but his kisses had seemed as fake as my sweet-sixteen party. Kissing me like a prereq to some blow-off course he has to take. The way he touched me felt like the air-kiss version of touching. Like he wasn’t really there.
Maybe I wasn’t really there.
Zach asked me to go to prom with him and another couple, but I lied and said my parents thought sixteen was too young for prom, and that I’d promised to go to the movies with Chelsea. Then I’d asked Chelsea to go to the movies, just to make the lie true. Zach is the perfect boyfriend in every way, but everything with him feels empty.
Ever since the night of my sweet-sixteen party, nothing has felt real. Except the man in my passenger seat. He feels real.
“Let’s get the usual,” he says when we get up to the speaker thing. “Order two of the usual.” He has the gun out of sight, but it’s still there.
I glare at him. “We don’t have a usual.”
He lowers his voice. “Order. The. Usual.”
Chapter 8
Stone
Brooke orders two burger combos with Cokes. The burger combo—that’s what I got her last time. I know better than to think it’s a big deal that she remembered our usual.
I make her drive back to Big Moosehorn Park. I show her where to drive and the parking area I want us at.
We get out of her SUV. It’s a nice enough set of wheels—a Lincoln Navigator. Red like cherries.
It’s a warm night for April, but the ground is still cool and damp. I lead her to a grassy bluff a ways off the trail, near a few large trees. It overlooks the river where we were that night. No doubt she remembers that, too. “Here.”
She looks confused.
“Wait,” I say, laying out my leather jacket. “The ground is still a little wet.”
“I'm not sitting on your jacket.”
I give her a look. That’s not how this goes. I know she understands that, even if she fights me sometimes.
She sits.
I settle in beside her.
I eat my burger, but that’s not what this is about. It’s more about watching her eat. About doing the things from last time. Messed up, I know. I try not to think about it too hard.
It’s been a fuck of a month. Grayson got convicted. They’re moving him to a prison out of state—far away from us. They won’t let him have visitors or even communicate with the outside world. I’d lay down my life to protect him, but now I can’t even see him.
We’re all going crazy. Sometimes I can barely sleep.
The worse things are, the more I think about that night with her last September.
To escape the worry and the rage, just for a moment. To lose myself in that good feeling I had with her.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about fucking her, too. I’d be lying if I didn’t think about how it felt to hold her in the river that night. The way she trembled, this girl I had total control over. I could destroy her or save her. I could kill her or fuck her or do anything at all.
She didn’t tell.
She kept our secret.
I was fairly sure she would. Still. It got me in a way that’s hard to explain.