Page 59 of Stranger Danger

I can’t help but smile.

“At least your brain doesn’t play musical chairs without telling you.”

His laptop shuts with a quiet click, then I hear his socked feet shuffling over the carpet of our room toward my side. He lifts the edge of the cover and slides in next to me, his thigh squeezed against mine so tightly I can feel the grain of his jeans.

I lean my head against his shoulder and turn the screen to him.

My phone chirps another news alert. I grab it off the charger on my pillow, flicking open the notification.

The police are still patting themselves on the back, thinking they caught one of the killers. Some dude looking for big dick energy “confessed” to Iron Dude and two others that I did. No idea why anyone voluntarily goes to prison just to look cool. But the mayor moved the curfew to midnight instead of 9:00 P.M. so it’s a small win.

Finally, Beckett stops clicking and circles the cursor around Assignment Four.

“This is the Campus Energy Audit project,” he says.

Then he drops the cursor down. “This is the Urban Heat Mapping project. Your uploads are flipped.”

Yay.

At least I don’t have to rewrite an entire project in a week.

He doesn’t move, tapping his finger on the touchpad to highlight the same part of the URL over and over.

Then he deletes the address bar and searches:

bowling

Delete.

movies nr me

Delete.

stuff 2 do near 44170 2nite

The cursor hovers there until the thin line disappears into the white.

Then he deletes that, too.

“There’s a new club that opened next to Wendy’s,” I say. “We can—”

“Are you positive we need to do this?” he interrupts quietly.

Maybe we’re not talking about dates anymore.

I rub my face into his bare shoulder and nod. “Yeah.”

Dave’s house isn’t the kind I would’ve put in my “Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Mo” bracket. It’s not like mansion-huge, but it’s two stories with an attic and a white-picket fence. There are little kid toys all over the front yard and two cars in the driveway. Birthday banners are draped in the trees, big pieces of paper confetti from a piñata on the grass.

Beckett’s perfectly quiet as he climbs up the tree and onto the roof. I pull myself up beside him, cinching the bottom of my pants to my ankles so I don’t accidentally trip and die like I did last time. He grabs something tiny from his pocket and lodges it against the bottom lock of the second-story window.

The ping is so fucking loud that goosebumps crawl down the back of my arms.

He freezes, tilting his head to the side as he stares into the pitch-black window. After a second, he nudges the window open, bit by bit.

I slide in after him, the floorboards creaking under our combined weight. He takes one step forward, and they creak again. My heartbeat echoes in my ears.

Then he holds a hand out to his side, fingers extended in a Wait motion.