Page 49 of I Hate You More

“Jesus, Spencer,” she said. “Is hedying?”

“What? No. No, of course not.” He laughed, and even though the sound was shaky, it went a long way in soothing her suddenly jangling nerves. “I’m sorry. I realize how that must have sounded. It’s nothing as bad as that.”

“Okay, phew.” Caleb wasn’t her favorite of the Wilson twins, obviously, but she still liked the guy. She hardly wanted to see him in an early grave. “It just seemed like it was possible, that’s all. He never goes anywhere except those mysterious dry-cleaning errands, so I thought maybe they were code for the doctor or something. And since he doesn’t have any other dog-training clients, I can’t imagine what would be keeping him tied to a house where he doesn’t have regular access to a bathroom. It’s almost like you’re running a prison or something.”

Spencer’s eyelashes fluttered with so much activity that Ruby took a step closer. “Spencer,” she said slowly, watching for any clues he might let fall. “Have you imprisoned your brother inside your house?”

“Don’t be absurd.” He blinked four times in rapid succession. “Why would I do that?”

“I don’t know. For the same reason you’ve imprisoned him on one side of it?”

“I’m not in charge of him. I just share a house with him. Lots of brothers do that.”

That was true, but she’d never met any brothers who shared such weirdly sympathetic antagonism.

“Your parents haven’t seen him in months.” Now that she’d spoken the words about imprisonment aloud, they were starting to make an eerie amount of sense. “Eva said he doesn’t go out anymore, not even on dates, and I’m pretty sure he’s the sort of man who’d have sex with a lamppost if it flickered seductively at him.”

Spencer snorted but didn’t say anything, so she kept going.

“He only ever eats Top Ramen or food that he steals from your mini fridge. He desperately needs a haircut. He—”

Spencer interrupted before she could reach the clincher. “He steals my food?”

“Um, yes. All the time. And your clothes and your toothbrush—which is super gross, but he says you have the same DNA in your saliva, so it doesn’t matter. And the most compelling argument is that his best friend is a dog. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked in on him holding conversations with Caesar—like weird,longconversations about the most random things. It reminds me of Tom Hanks and that volleyball from the movie where he’s trapped on a desert island for years.”

“Wilson,” Spencer said.

“What?”

“It’s the volleyball’s name. Wilson. Caleb and I always used to think it was hilarious that Tom Hanks named it after us, mostly because we couldn’t imagine a world that was so lonely you had to invent a friend. That was never our problem. Everywhere we went, the other wasn’t far behind.” He paused, a frown flickering across his face before being replaced by his more customary grim line. “He really talks to the dog?”

“The last time I came over, he was teaching Caesar to eat Cheetos off his nose.”

Spencer released a soft curse. There was nothing angry about it. He seemed mostly defeated. For some reason, that felt a lot worse.

“What is it?” Ruby asked. She risked a hand on Spencer’s arm. He felt tense and warm, his latent strength twitching under her fingertips. “What’s wrong?”

“You can’t tell anyone,” he said. “Not our parents, and not Eva or Lawson. It’s not that I think you’ll run tattling to any of them, but Caleb doesn’t want it to get out.”

She nodded her agreement. Considering the way Spencer was looking at her, she’d have agreed to a lot more than silence. Something terrible must be going on. Something dark, something secretive, something—

“The truth is, I’m imprisoning him inside my house.”

A laugh was the wrong reaction to a situation like this, but one escaped before she could help it. She clapped a hand over her mouth, but it was no use.

She was more relieved than she could say when an answering grin spread across Spencer’s face. It was her favorite of all his expressions—this reluctant good humor, this concession that he was human just like all the rest of them—and it quirked his lips in ways that did strange things to her insides.

“I know,” he said, shaking his head. “It sounds ridiculous, but it’s the truth. The next time you see Caleb, take a good look at his left ankle. There’s a reason he doesn’t stray too far from home.”

Ruby blinked. “He’s under house arrest?That’swhat’s going on?” Without waiting for Spencer to answer, she added, “Which model does he have? The OM400? That was always Stepfather Un’s favorite.”

“Stepfather Un?”

Ruby held up three fingers and began ticking them off one by one. “Un. Deux. Trois. My mom and I gave them French numbers so they sounded fancy. What did your brother do? Petty theft? Racketeering? Tax fraud?”

“You seem to know an awful lot about this subject.”

She laughed again. Her formal education might be lacking, but she’d graduated from the school of hard knocks early on. “Stepfather Un was always in and out of jail before he bailed on us, but don’t look so worried. Stepfather Deux was great—he’s the one who taught me how to handle a hammer. I was almost out of the house by the time Stepfather Trois rolled around, so even though he was a bit of a dick, I didn’t have much to do with him.”