Page 86 of Final Drive

“Still here.”

“You’re crying again.”

“I’m aware.”

“All right.” His hand spreads out over my sternum. “Cry, then.”

We stay locked together while the light on the wall goes orange. Five bonds now, and I can pick out every one. Jackson burns low behind my ribs. Beckett flickers at the edges. Zane pours in gold. Eli runs still and deep.

Bo runs under all of them, and every one of them is quieter for it.

Downstairs the front door bangs open. Zane’s voice comes up through the floor first, Tyler’s under it too quiet to make out, and Cameron’s boots still on the porch steps behind them both.

A cabinet door bumps shut in the kitchen.

“Bowl in the sink,” Zane announces. “She ate. Everybody relax.”

Then everything down there stops at once.

“They can smell it,” I say.

“Mm-hm.”

“They’re going to be unbearable.”

“Beckett will be. The rest of ’em will manage.”

I laugh, which shifts his knot, and I stop laughing.

It’s full dark by the time we come downstairs, and all six of them are in the living room pretending they haven’t been waiting. Zane opens his mouth, and whatever he had lined up dies when he gets a look at my face.

“Sit down,” I tell them. “All of you.”

Bo takes the arm of the couch beside me. Gray’s car still isn’t in the drive.

“I’m going to tell you what Quinton said to me in that stairwell,” I say. “All of it. And then Tyler’s going to tell me how much of it is true.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Tyler

Reese talks for nineteen minutes.

I know the number since I check the mantel clock when she starts and again when she stops. I’ve never once decided to do that. Nineteen minutes to lay out a conversation that took maybe five. She goes slowly. She backs up twice to correct herself. When she gets to the part where Quinton put his fingers under her chin, Jackson stands and walks into the kitchen and stays gone.

Nobody interrupts her. That alone is unprecedented in this house.

She’s on the couch with Bo perched on the arm beside her, in one of his shirts with her hair still damp, and there’s a bite at the back of her neck that shows every time she turns her head. Neither is what I can’t stop looking at. What I can’t stop looking at is her left hand. She keeps pressing her thumbnail into the seam of her jeans, same spot, over and over.

“And then he said he’d see me in class,” she finishes. “Since we still have a project to turn in.”

Beckett makes a noise.

“He’s not wrong. It’s forty percent of the grade and it’s due a week from Friday.”

“You’re not going back in that room.”

“I’ll deal with it.” She looks at me. “Tyler.”