“Kenley, what’s happening?” Finn asks, rubbing my back. “Tell me what’s going on.”
I wipe my mouth and look at him. “Text the guys. I need to tell you something.”
I’m fine until we get right in front of it—it being the play cottage in the woods behind Rose’s house. I smoked my first joint here. Reconnected with the guys. Kissed them all.
I also almost died here.
But it’s not Monica’s place. It’s ours—or it’s become ours over the last few months. Ozzy’s fingers thread through mine.
“You okay?” he asks quietly. Finn and I picked him up and although I didn’t tell him anything in the car, he knew something was wrong.
Not by a fucking long shot.
“Let’s get inside, it’s cold.”
Ezra holds open the tiny door and I duck, bending to get inside. Finn’s in an armchair, worriedly tugging at his hair. Ozzy and I take the miniature couch. Ezra closes the door and sits in the empty chair.
“What’s such a big deal we’re all skipping school?” Ezra asks. “Not that I have a problem with that.”
Finn’s eyes flash at me. “Tell us.”
He only knows that the lingerie freaked me out—that it wasn’t from him or the other guys. The truth sticks in my throat and they all watch me with apprehension.
“Before the police declared
Rose’s death a suicide and we were still trying to figure out what happened to her, I did a little more research on her SugarBabies account. I found out she’d been communicating pretty consistently with a guy that goes by the handle BD.”
“Big Dick?” Ezra asks, shaking his head.
Ozzy chimes in, “Big Daddy?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t really care,” I say, hands nervously twisting in my lap. “I decided to see if I could lure him out—try to get some information from him. I created my own account.”
“You what?” Finn asks, shoulders tight.
“At first, I didn’t do anything with it. I forgot about it, really. But then one day I saw that he’d sent me a message.” I swallow, refusing to look at any of them. “And we started communicating.”
“Jesus, KK,” Ezra mutters.
Ozzy rests his hand over mine, calming them down. “Did you find out anything?”
“No. Not really. The whole thing made me very uncomfortable. I got the feeling he has a method, like easing girls into trusting him—getting them to reveal private information--which I didn’t do,” I add quickly. “Everything I said was made up.”
“Did he try to meet you?” Ozzy asks.
“No. And I cut it off anyway.” I look into his blue eyes. “Not after you and I, you know, took our relationship to the next level. It seemed wrong.”
“It seemed wrong because it was wrong,” Finn says. “What the hell, Kenley? How could you do something so dangerous and not tell us?”
“Dude, chill,” Ezra says to Finn.
Finn glares at me. “Tell them the rest.”
Ozzy and Ezra share a questioning look.
“When I cut it off, I cut it off. I messaged him one last time and I didn’t even open the app after that. I thought it was over and done with, but after Monica tried to hurt me,” I look around the cottage. It’d happened right here. I can still taste the bitterness of the pills in my mouth. “And I got out of the hospital, I got a lot of flowers and cards and messages. One of those was a vase of fresh flowers with a card, signed by BD.”
I pull it out of my pocket and hand it over.