You’d think I straight-up punched the guy.
“What are you doing?” he asks me, his tone of voice a subtle warning.
I ignore him. I do not have the headspace to deal with … whatever this is.
“Just shut up and show us the rabbit,” Chasm snaps, tossing his own phone onto my nightstand. We head into Parrish’s room, and I take a quick moment to comb over it, searching for a spare iPad, a Kindle, whatever. I have no idea how extreme the Slayer’s hacking skills are, but I’m not willing to risk it.
“We found a hidden camera,” I blurt as soon as Maxx closes Parrish’s door. With his back to me, I can see the edges of those angel wings tattoos peeking out near his shoulders. He turns around to look at me with his brow raised. The thing is, to explain this, I have to … explain everything.
“We had sex today,” Chasm adds unhelpfully, sitting on the edge of the bed and yanking one of his dress shoes off.
If I were Tess, I would describe Maxx’s face like this: The world was rended and remade in an instant. Everything he knew became dark, twisted, like a clone of the life he once lived but one that was birthed wholly from shadows. He understood that his friends had little other choice, but he did not envy them the heavy decision that they’d had to make.
I bite my lower lip and X notices, his nostrils flaring slightly.
“I assume there’s good reason for that?” he asks very, very carefully.
This somehow feels as difficult a conversation as the future one I’ll need to have with Parrish, as if the stakes are that high. When we went hiking, Maxx confided in me that he was a virgin. At the time, so was I, a fact that I also chose to blurt out.
“The Slayer demanded I act on my feelings for Dakota,” Chasm says, wording the story in just such a way that he really does come across as the villain. He glances casually up at Maxx and then shrugs. “And that she allow me to do so.”
“And you thought fucking during the school day was the prime place to start?” Maxx asks with a harsh, dry laugh. He reaches up with his right hand and rakes his fingers through his wavy hair, his eyes closed in frustration. To be quite frank, he looks like he’s within an inch of losing his shit.
“We tried kissing,” I start, rushing to explain before Chasm makes this any harder for me. “But we were in the bathroom, and the Slayer still knew about it. Well, there aren’t any cameras in there, Chas didn’t have his phone, and mine was buried inside my pocket. We never spoke aloud about what exactly we were doing. Yet he knew anyway. Then I remembered the circumstances of how I actually got the heart pin: someone left me a note that said princess and then tucked it in my drawer. Tess never brought it up, and she certainly never calls me princess. It was the Slayer. That fucking pin is a camera.”
“That’s a pretty big jump of logic to make,” X says, opening his eyes. They bore into me, demanding the truth. Is there something to it, like in the shape of his eyes? The pretty soft striations of moss and billiard green in his irises? Or is that citrusy, grassy smell of his like a truth serum?
“Maybe. But it doesn’t hurt to be cautious. Let’s just assume that all tech—and that stupid heart pin—are his eyes.” I’m doing my best to steer the subject away from the actual ‘having sex’ portion of the equation, and luckily, it seems to be working.
“There could be cameras all over this room,” Maxx explains, gesturing loosely with his hand. “All over the house. It’s clear that the Slayer has no problem getting in and out of this place without being seen and without triggering the alarm.” He lifts up an arm toward me in placating gesture. “But I do agree that the pin could be a spy cam; he can’t possibly plug the entire world with hidden cameras.”
“It’s too late now,” Chasm says, unbuttoning his dress shirt the rest of the way and tossing it aside. Without breaking stride, he rises to his feet and moves past me, his right arm brushing across my back and making me shiver. I glance over to see Chas prowling through the top drawer of Parrish’s dresser.
He goes still all of a sudden, curling his fingers around the edge of the drawer and closing his eyes. His inked body is rigid, his muscles stiff with tension.
“Fuck, I’m sorry,” he says all of a sudden, letting his head hang down. “I just need a minute.”
I find myself rooted to the spot, gazing at Chasm’s back and wishing I could go to him, throw my arms around him, hug him close and promise that everything’s going to be okay. But there are no cameras in here—at least, I don’t think so—and that means I’d be holding Chasm just for me. For him. And it would have nothing to do with Parrish.
