Page 15 of Victory at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys 5)
“But not enough to keep me,” Oscar finishes finally, tossing the pack of smokes onto the counter and then removing the cigarette from his sharp and dangerous mouth with two fingers. He stares down at me, and I feel like I can hear it, the pounding of his heart. His signature cinnamon smell grabs me by the throat, pun intended. “We have to make some moves—and quick.”
“Do you know where Callum is?” I ask, and Oscar goes very still, like a vampire who’s forgotten what it feels like to breathe. That’s a scary thing to witness, watching someone turn into a statue of ink and blood and bullshit.
“No,” Oscar breathes darkly, and Vic sighs, reaching out to take the smoke from Oscar’s fingers. As if this is one of Callum’s choreographed dances, Oscar’s hands find their way to my hips. In an instant, his breath is stirring my hair and my eyes are closing of their own accord. “The last I saw of him, he was outside the school, chasing someone.”
“Shit,” I grind out, because I don’t like the sound of that. I don’t like it at fucking all. “Chasing who?”
Oscar gives a slow, simple shake of his head, and I grit my teeth in anger. Not at him. At myself. At Prescott. At the world in general. Callum Park should be at, like, fucking Juilliard or something, not chasing down Nazis during a school shooting.
See if the other boys come home, Bernie. Then call Ophelia. Make her put you in touch with Maxwell. If he has Callum, or he knows what happened to him, he’ll tell you. He’ll do that because he’s a monster, and monsters always recognize other monsters.
And their weaknesses.
The Havoc Boys are my strength, but they’re also my weakness. My life force and my demise. My rise and fall. Fuck.
“I was worried about you,” Oscar says, and a quip hops right to my naked lips, the ones that feel foreign because they’re not covered in brightly tinted wax, brilliant jewel tones of stolen color that represent so many different things. It’s part of my armor, that lipstick, that color, those opinions. Because if I can tell you what lipstick I’m wearing and why, then I don’t have to answer all those other pesky questions that a person can pose: who are you? what do you do? where are you going in life and why?
“I was worried about you, too,” I say, my eyelashes fluttering as Oscar takes my face in inked fingers and then swiftly drops his mouth to my lips, tasting like mint and cucumber water. I bet they gave him that to loosen him up, to make him feel less like a prisoner and more like a friend. But people like us are not their friends. And they’d best remember that.
Oscar draws back from me slightly, looking me right in the face from a distance that’s both physically and emotionally close. Right now, in this moment, I know he can see every single part of me—bad stuff as well as good.
“We need to call Ophelia,” Oscar says, turning his head away sharply, like the level of intimacy between us in that kitchen is too much for him. He keeps touching me, and I remember my question from the ski lodge: do you want me to keep touching you?
He confirmed it.
Look, I’ll give credit where credit is due: he was marginally better after that night. Of course, that was only two nights ago. Trauma does, of course, accelerate things. Emotion. Trust. Those tight bonds that hold you together when the whole world is trying so desperately to tear you apart.
His hold on me is endless and eternal; it isn’t unbreakable because the possibility of being broken was never even an option. It just is. A fact. As sure as the moon rises.
I swipe a hand over my face to clear the poetry. Jesus, give me a traumatic moment, my fingers buried in some sister-fucker’s eye sockets, and endless amounts of blood, and I start thinking my everyday thoughts in purple prose. What I was trying to say is: I’m glad that Oscar’s back. Because I love him. And I know that, in his own special secret way, he loves me, too.
“I visited Ophelia,” Vic says, surprising me. He hadn’t mentioned that until now. To be fair, we haven’t been here for all that long. Two or three hours, tops. Most of it spent speaking with our crew via text or phone—oh, and that quickie fuck in the bathroom. “She was with Trinity, at a restaurant in one of those fucking tree neighborhoods.”
I smile at that, but it’s a sad smile. It’ll remain that way until I see the other boys. Callum, in particular. How is it that we just got Aaron back and now Callum is missing? That doesn’t seem fair, does it? In books and movies and shit, isn’t it always the girl who gets kidnapped and spirited away? Patriarchal bullshit, to be sure, but I’d trade my life for any one of these boys in an instant.
