Shoving those thoughts aside, I reach up and take it. He yanks me to my feet with such force that I stumble into him, my hands on his chest, his amber eyes gazing down at me.
“I’ll …” he starts, but then his voice just trails off and we’re staring at each other again. “Shit, this is weird.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” I choke out, curling my fingers in his undone dress shirt. Chasm’s arm curls around my waist, drawing me close. He nestles his head against my hair, and I realize with a sudden sharp stab of fear what, exactly, it is that’s off about this.
The fact that it isn’t actually weird at all; it feels too natural.
“I like this too much,” he murmurs against me, his arm banding even more tightly around my waist. “It might be an order from the Slayer now, but … what if I don’t want to give this up?”
I have no answer to that question.
Also … I didn’t bring the pin camera nor my phone with us. As comforting as that idea is in so many ways, it also means that the Slayer won’t know what we’ve done. He won’t see that we’ve taken things beyond a kiss.
We’ve just betrayed Parrish in order to save him, and yet we didn’t offer any proof of it all.
Fan-fucking-tastic.
Tess is furious about my being late to fifth period. Apparently, the automated system that calls parents when students are marked as absent goes off about ten minutes into class, sending a text message to the number on file. I, unfortunately, was fifteen minutes late.
Between retrieving my panties, combing my hair with my fingers, and picking grass off my uniform, I’m lucky I made it to class at all. I sat there shaky and disoriented and completely uninterested in anything but the memory of what I’d just done.
Now here I am sitting in Chasm’s sportscar—in the backseat by choice—and wishing that Kimber wasn’t chattering away in the front. Chas gets us all drinks at a drive-thru, his eyes flicking up to the rearview mirror every so often to search for me.
I find that it’s hard to look at him, so I don’t return the favor, staring down at my phone and trying to figure out a way to sort of … let the Slayer know what happened in a way that implies that I’m not aware that he couldn’t see us in the maze.
Are you happy now? That was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
Being honest can’t hurt in this scenario, so I let some of that raw anger flow through me.
You’ve turned me into a cheater. Like father, like daughter, I guess.
The words fly off the tips of my fingers before I can rethink the strategy in actively insulting the man who holds Parrish’s life in his hands. Fortunately, it seems to work well enough.
Has your mother mentioned what happened between us? he asks, and then in comes a request for a video chat.
Fuck.
No!
“Pull over!” I snap, and Chasm startles a bit, jerking the wheel a little as he overcorrects, and then steers us to the side of the road. My seatbelt is off and I’m scrambling for the driver’s side door as Chasm moves out of the way to let me out. “Keep Kimber occupied,” I whisper, stumbling away from the car and answering the call.
Parrish is sitting on the edge of the bed, a bottle of wine in one hand. I’m not sure how he got the cork out, but he lifts it to his lips and swigs some of it as I watch. He seems marginally better today, but it’s impossible to miss the mess that his chest has become. It’s a bloody swath of scars, some of them oozing, some of them dark with scabs.
His beautiful brown eyes are dull and glassy, and the wine bottle seems to weigh about a million pounds as he lifts it to his lush, full lips. As if he can sense me watching him, Parrish lifts his gaze up to the camera. My breath catches and my eyes shimmer with unshed tears.
I betrayed him in the worst possible way today.
I’ve become one of the things I hate the most in the world: a cheater.
With that slow, lazy indolence that I’ve come to love and expect, Parrish lifts a single tattooed hand and flips off the camera.
“Go fuck yourself, you stupid, cowardly prick,” he growls out, throwing the wine bottle at the wall so hard that it shatters. Parrish turns around and crawls back into the bed, yanking the covers over his head to obscure himself from view.
The call ends, and I’m left sitting there on the side of the road, staring at a dark screen.
Chasm comes over after a few minutes to check on me.
“She isn’t an easy one to fool, I’ll give her that,” he offers, crouching down beside me. “Were you able to … did it work?”
