I should wait in silence. Maybe light up. Play fucking Candy Crush on my phone. Anything but dial the number of a pretty little rich girl. I shouldn’t even know her phone number, but my mind’s like a fucking bulldog when it wants something. It knows the numbers forward and backward, as sharp and strong as her shining eyes or the freckles across her nose.
“Hello?” Her voice is clear and soft. Beautiful like her. She’s a sparkling pond, and I’m black ink. The only thing I’m good for is ruining her.
I’m silent a long time. Long enough I expect her to hang up.
Then she says something that makes my heart stop. “Stone?”
How the fuck does she know it’s me? It’s been five months. And how does she know my name? “Have you been talking to the cops?”
“Detective Rivera was waiting for me when I got home. My parents had called him when—”
When we went on that little joyride last spring. A little kidnapping. “He told you about me?”
“Not much. Your name. And he asked me about…” Her breath shudders over the line. “He asked me about a lumberyard.”
The fear in her voice burns me. She might as well be flame. “And you remembered the dust on my arms, didn’t you?”
There’s a rough sob. “Tell me you didn’t do it.”
“That would be a lie, princess. And I don’t lie to you.”
In the silence I can hear her breathing. I can hear her wondering. “I wish you would,” she says finally. “I wish you’d lie.”
I know what it’s like to pretend. I’m done with that, though. “We don’t have anything between us. Not promises or nice words. This is all we have. The naked truth.”
The word naked hangs over the phone line, hard and weighty as a rock. I didn’t mean for the words to be sexual, but as the seconds of silence tick by, they become that way. As if I expect things from her. More than a kiss or a touch. As if I’ll make her fuck me.
“That makes it sound like I’ll see you again,” she says breathlessly.
Is she still afraid of me? She should be, after what Rivera told her.
“Probably. And I’ll make you drive me around. I’ll keep you until I’m done with you, but I won’t make you fuck me, understand? That’s a promise.”
“He said you’d kill anyone to stay free. That you have nothing to lose.”
“Yeah, that just goes to show he doesn’t know shit about me.”
“So that…wasn’t you? At the lumberyard?”
I hate the hope in her voice. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t kill. I said I have something to lose.”
“Oh.”
I would kill for my guys, no question. To protect them. For revenge. Even as I think about it, the picture of her smile forms in my mind. They aren’t the only people I’d kill to protect.
“I can’t answer every question. I can’t tell you everything.” It would put her at risk as much as me. If Rivera thinks he can use her as leverage, he won’t hesitate. “But I can promise not to lie.”
There’s silence, where I can hear her thinking.
I know whatever she says next will be her test of me. A test I’m suddenly desperate to pass. I’ve never gotten close to a girl. Never wanted to. Quick fucks when my body needed a warm, wet place. That all changed the night she witnessed me killing someone. The night I let her live.
There are a thousand incriminating questions she could ask me. A million sins I’ve committed, both things I did on purpose and things that were done to me before I even understood.
“Will you hurt me?” she finally asks. “If you see me again?”
And I breathe a silent sigh of relief, because this is one question I can answer. “Never,” I tell her, my voice dropping with promise. “I’d cut off my hand first.”
I may not know how to date a girl, how to make love to her, but I damn well know how to protect someone. I’ve been doing that since I was old enough to fight. It was only ever supposed to be for the boys in that basement with me, but somewhere along the way, she burrowed into my dark heart.
Was it when she stood up to me in her torn party dress?
Or when her brown eyes softened looking at me across the front seat of her car?
I’ve become obsessed with her. With the shape of her eyebrows. The feel of her skin. I’m stalking her in a way that would make her run straight to Detective Rivera for help if she knew about it.
There’s this Instagram video where she’s in a floppy hat and little orange shorts, blowing bubbles at her friend Chelsea. You can’t see Chelsea—she’s holding the phone, backing away, wanting to protect her phone from the bubbles. Brooke is happy, eyes shining, coming at her with bubbles, a brightly feathered bird captured midflight in all its glory. The clip’s all jerky, and both of them are laughing and kind of screaming, but it’s the good kind of screaming, not the bad kind.
I watch that fucking thing over and over. Forty-six seconds.
I don’t have an Instagram or Facebook account or anything—none of us do. Because what the fuck do we want with that? But we use fake accounts for researching people and casing places. It’s great for knowing where people are or when they’re on vacation.
Or seeing what Brooke is doing.
It’s a hot night, and I really want her to be in those shorts. I need to imagine her like that, breathless and laughing and so goddamn beautiful it makes my chest ache. “Where are you right now?”
“Why?” she asks, suddenly on guard—I can hear it in her voice.
I stare across the park at the moths swirling around a streetlight, around and around and around like idiots. “Because I want to know, that’s why.”
“In my bed,” she says, hesitant. “Reading.”
“What do you have on?”
A longer pause this time. “I don’t know. Just a T-shirt.”
“That’s all?”
“Why are you asking?”
“Because you make me feel like there’s something to fight for.” The words come up out of some dark, twisted part of my soul. They feel both too raw and perfectly right.
There’s a long pause. Then, “Panties,” she whispers. “That’s what else I’m wearing.”
My cock is hard as steel, hearing her say the word panties. “What color?”
“Blue,” she says, sounding breathless, her voice husky. I’m attuned to that kind of shit, with people’s voices. While other kids were learning to ride bikes, we boys were listening for signs of heat-roughened voices in the adults around us.
Like fucking rabbits, alert to every threat in the jungle.
“They’re both blue,” she says. “It’s a sleep set.”
“A sleep set,” I say, as if it makes perfect sense that you’d change into a special outfit for sleeping. I just pull off my shirt and leave on whatever jeans I wore that day. It means I’m ready to fight at any time of night.
I like that she has special sleep clothes. I like to think of her relaxed. Safe.
“What kind of blue? Light or dark?”
She makes a little humming sound. “I’d say…azure.”
Azure? What does that even mean? I can’t tell if she’s fucking with me or being serious anymore—that’s how far apart we are. “Is azure light or dark?”