Page 60 of Final Drive

“I know. It’s two in the morning and he’s going to come apart, so I wanted you first.” Tyler looks up at me. “You’re the only one who can keep him from doing something stupid.”

“Me?”

“You’re the only one he respects enough to listen to when he’s already angry. Everybody else he just runs over.” Tyler shrugs. “You don’t back up, and you don’t lie to him.”

I don’t have anything to say to that. Gray and I have never been close, not the way Eli and I are, not the easy way Zane is with everybody. There’s an understanding, though. If Gray weren’t captain it would be me, not because I want it but because I could do it. The difference is that Gray needs to lead. I only need to keep what’s mine standing.

“There’s one other thing,” Tyler says.

He opens a map.

I lean closer.

“Kinsley and Quinton have both been tagged around the athletic complex late at night. Different days, different accounts, but there’s overlap.” He points to a cluster near the football fields. “Mostly here.”

“How late?”

“Midnight to five, usually.”

I look at the timestamps.

“Jackson.”

“I’m looking.”

“That’s not permission to go over there.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“I know.” He shuts the map. “Which is why I’m telling you to leave it alone until we tell everybody.”

“Send me all of it.”

“Jackson.”

“Send it.”

He studies me for a second, then reaches for his energy drink and remembers it’s empty. “Fine. But if you go anywhere near Quinton tonight, I’m waking Eli.”

“Then sleep. You look like hell.”

“Thanks. So do you.”

I take my phone out to the back porch and let the cold get at my head. The sky’s going gray at the edges. In a few hours everybody will be up and we’ll have to work out how to handle this without taking ourselves apart in the process.

Right now I let myself have it. The anger and the fear underneath it and the flat refusal to lose any of these people.

Reese. Eli. Even Gray, with all his edges.

They’re mine, and Quinton Whitmore is about to find out what that means.

I go back up and lie down beside Eli, and it’s no good. I last maybe ten minutes before I’m staring at the ceiling again. He shifts beside me, reaching across the mattress in his sleep until his hand finds my arm, and that should be enough to keep me there.

It almost is.

Then I see Quinton’s hand around Reese’s arm again.

I ease out from under Eli’s hand and stand.