The next two hours of the party passed in a blur. Ellory stayed close to Liam’s side, laughing at jokes she couldn’t rememberand cheering at stunts that needed the intervention of the campus police. Every so often, she would feel eyes on her, but the sensation would fade as soon as she turned around. Farrah had left the party. Beau was playing a drinking game. Liam crowded Ellory against a kitchen counter and kissed her with a mouth that tasted of vodka shooters and weed. Even though she’d been drinking nothing but soda, she felt drunk on his attention.
Ellory retouched her hair and makeup in an upstairs bedroom, her skin slick with sweat. There was a vanity mirror here, plus a desk that was laden with abandoned beer cans, makeup-remover wipes, and a snapped nail file from those who had used the room before her. Under the lights, her dark skin glowed and the bags beneath her eyes looked deeper, like gathered shadows at the bottom of lit basement stairs. She should have gotten Farrah Mayhew’s number before she’d left, or at least asked her more questions. Maybe she could get her info from Liam on their way home, but that might invite unwanted questions.
She blotted her lipstick with a tissue, frowning into the mirror. Or maybe she could demand answers from Hudson, since he’d already done her work for her.
It always came down to Hudson Graves in the end.
Ellory nodded a greeting as she passed another woman stumbling in with a mascara wand held aloft. But she had taken only two steps when a sudden flurry of cool air through the hallway drew her into another room. This open bedroom was dark and sparsely decorated, but sheer curtains ruffled in the same breeze that offered her scant relief from the heat of the party. She should have gone back downstairs—where she’d left Liam in the kitchen playing bartender, even though the only mixed drink in his repertoire was a rum and coke—but she felt like a cartoon animal following a scenttrail to a freshly baked pie on a windowsill. There was nowhere to go but forward. There was nothing to see but what lay at the end of that trail.
Hudson Graves glanced back at her from a balcony railing.
“Of course,” they said as one.
With his back against the handrail, his face was cast in shadow and impossible to read. The sky was the silver blue of a swordfish, stars like spilled glitter across the dark. This hidden balcony was barely large enough for three men of Hudson’s size, but it was perfect for the two of them; she placed her hands on the railing with almost enough room between them to open an umbrella. Out here, the music was muted, and the night was cold. Hudson smelled of lager and shea, with the underlying musk of long-dried sweat. The glass door occasionally rattled, but a pleased sigh fell from Ellory’s lips as the chill wrapped around her sweaty body.
Somewhere, she heard the sharp cry of an owl.
“There are owls on campus?” she asked almost without meaning to. Trees crept like burglars toward the fraternity, trapped beyond the white-gold circle of the porch lights, but everyone else was inside. Her shoulders tightened. “Is this frat part of—”
“I’ve been to parties here before, and I’ve never seen anything strange,” said Hudson, before she could work herself into a panic. “I think there have always been owls by Warren. Owls and crows. Hummingbirds and robins.”
Releasing a slow, meditative breath, Ellory chanced a look at him. Beneath his peacoat, he wore a mint-green collared shirt beneath a black sweatshirt with the Capricorn constellation in gold on the front. Under it were the words AMBITIOUS, RELIABLE, and HONEST. He’d paired it with herringbone slacks in a shade of paper-bag brown. He looked like he’d been on his way to a poetryreading and instead stumbled into this frat party. She half expected him to have brought a book.
When her gaze returned to Hudson’s face, she caught him studying her outfit with mild amusement. She curved her body toward him, her hip against the railing, and raised her eyebrows challengingly. “Enjoying the party?”
“I needed a break,” he said. He lifted a Keystone Light to his lips, throat bobbing as he emptied the can. Then he pitched it through the narrow crack in the glass door, where it clattered somewhere out of view. “Enjoying your date?”
She turned back to the empty yard. “I needed a break, too.”
Hudson made an understanding noise, which took away some of her shame at the admission. She’d spent the whole night feeling like she wasn’t havingenoughfun, going through the motions of a part she was the understudy for. If she’d asked, Liam would have been happy to leave with her, and maybe that was why she hadn’t asked. He was making the effort to draw her into his world, while she hadn’t even let him set foot in her dorm. Sometimes, the curve of his smile made her stomach swoop like she was at the apex of a roller coaster. Sometimes, it felt like she was just passing the time until they both got bored.
But Hudson didn’t need to know that.
“I met Farrah Mayhew downstairs,” Ellory said. “She said you’d talked to her about her uncle Malcolm.”
“Are we just going to ignore how we left things, then?”
Ellory had never thought of Hudson Graves as awkward, but a muscle in his jaw ticked as they fell into silence. It was like he was unsure what to say to her when they weren’t at each other’s throats. There was something impossibly endearing about it. She couldn’t tell how much he’d had to drink, but it had clearly taken a hammerto those walls he lived behind. He was an exposed hermit crab, and she felt, suddenly, that she could either watch him die or build a new protective shell around the softness he was showing her.
His hands were in the pockets of his coat, his face turned away, but she could feel him watching her in his peripheral vision. Waiting for what she would do next.
Most of the time, she existed in a state of rage, some of it directed at him. After she’d gotten over her hurt, she’d felt a certain relief at having a concrete excuse to push him away. No part of her school year had been normal, but he made her volatile, until not even she knew what her next move would be. It was exhilarating, but it was also exhausting.
She was tired of feeling angry. At him, anyway.
“I shouldn’t have said some of those things,” Ellory admitted. “But I meant others. I need to be able to trust you, Graves. I’m already questioning everything. I don’t want to question this.”
A light flashed in the gloom. Hudson pulled his phone from his pocket, the screen facing her. She caught the name—CAIRO—before he squinted down at it, frowned, and let it ring out. “I know Liam told you. About my brother.”
“He told me that youhavea brother,” Ellory corrected.
“Cairo’s older by six years. I’m the only member of the family he still speaks to, and even then, barely.” He returned his phone to his pocket. The curtains swayed back and forth, shifting the chiaroscuro of his face. That muscle ticked again, like he was uncertain how much he wanted to tell her but certain he wanted to be heard. Ellory held her breath, held perfectly still. Then: “I don’t blame him. If I could get away from us, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”
“Yeah?” Ellory said, instead ofI’m sorry. “Are they all as bad as you?”
Hudson chuckled at that, though it was a low and bitter sound. “Worse.”
He sank to the floor, his back still against the railing, his legs sprawled before him. Ellory almost joined him, but she assumed it was the cover of darkness and the illusion of privacy that had him baring his soul. She didn’t want to take those security blankets away.
