I manage a small, empty laugh. “I don’t think normal people have to ask.”
“But we’re not normal, are we?” He lifts his head, and we stare at each other for a minute.
My pulse speeds up, and I have to swallow the fear rising inside me, to remind myself what I do every day.
He cannot hurt me more.
My voice comes out in a whisper. “No.”
That may be true, but I don’t know the right thing to feel at all. I’m just drowning in all of it at once. I’m not wondering if I’m really feeling or just thinking. I’m feeling way too fucking much right now. Anger, hurt, fear, resentment, frustration, shame, love, jealousy, regret… They hit me like a spray of bullets, all of them mangling me until I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel because they’re all mixed up in there at once. I wish it was as simple as Baron makes it sound, that my brain would just pluck out the right one and tell me that’s how I need to feel.
“A normal person wouldn’t let her boyfriend go fuck some other girl right in front of her face,” Baron says, but there’s a question in his words, like he’s guessing at them.
“Royal’s not my boyfriend.”
“Does it matter what you call it?” Baron asks, studying me from behind his glasses. “You love him. Even I can see that.”
“What?” I ask, willing him to take the words back, as if that will somehow make them untrue.
“When we were in that basement, I really wanted you to give in,” he says. “I saw what was happening even if my idiot brothers couldn’t. I think that’s where it turns into a good thing, not feeling the way other people do. They don’t feel with their brains, and it’s like, when they catch feelings, their brains shut off. It’s like when guys say they can only think with one head at a time.”
“What are you talking about?”
“When Royal locked us in the basement together,” he says. “He may have wanted to test you, but I wanted it to work. Not because I wanted to fuck you, but because I saw how you were in his head, so he wasn’t thinking straight anymore. I knew he was falling for you, and I knew you were bad news.”
“But I didn’t fuck you,” I say. “Not willingly.”
“Yeah,” Baron says. “But even now, when you’re supposed to be the ruined plaything he tossed in the trash, he can’t stop pulling you out and playing with you.”
My fingers tighten on the wet ropes of the swing. “You’re the one who told him I wouldn’t be at this party. You must have known he wouldn’t come if I was here. And you knew I’d be here. I think you’re the one fucking with both of us.”
He shrugs. “Why keep you apart? It’s too late. I failed. We all failed.”
“Failed at what? Protecting him from me?”
“He’s been sucked into your orbit,” he says. “You were a passing sun whose gravitational pull was strong enough to pull him out of his solar system and into yours. Now you’re stuck with him. He can’t leave you alone. But I think you know that, Jailbird. I think you knew all along that men like Royal don’t love twice.”
I squeeze my eyes shut and shake my head, as if I can unhear his words. Somehow, maybe because he’s right and we’re more alike than I care to admit, he’s the one who always gets under my skin.
No, that’s not true. Baron doesn’t get under my skin. He peels away my layers of protection like he’s skinning me alive. And then he casually walks by, sprinkling words like acid on my raw, exposed insides.
“No,” I say. “Royal hates me.”
“Maybe,” Baron says. “But it’s the kind of hate that makes a man crazy, that makes him kill a man for hurting you, bail you out of jail at three in the morning even though he’s the one who got you thrown in, haunt the streets at night looking for your ghost when you’re dead.”
“He did that?” I ask, my heart beating hard against my ribs.
“What?”
“Got me out of jail.”
“Who’d you think it was?”
I don’t answer. I remember that night, when I texted Mr. D a hundred times begging him to bail me out. He said he’d do it in the morning, and then suddenly, I was released in the middle of the night. I thanked him for that, offered my fucking body for it. And he accepted that thanks, just like he did for pulling me out of the truck. But it wasn’t Preston at all. It was Royal.
Royal, who said he’d moved worlds for me. What else has he done that I don’t even fucking know about?
“You’ll keep orbiting each other, your own little solar system with only two planets, until you stop fighting it,” Baron says. “The longer you resist it, the more damage you’ll do. Both of you.”