Davis holds his hand out. “Give me your phone.”
“I can transfer them to you over Bluetooth.”
“Do you know how to fully delete files so that the internet as a whole has no record of their existence?”
Would you look at that?
He’s fully frustrated.
I didn’t think that could happen. In all of the pictures I’ve snuck of him over the past year, he’s always wearing the same expression.
Always.
But I have managed to visibly exasperate him.
Guess this answers a lingering question I’ve had for a while.
I am, in fact, the reason all of my past relationships haven’t worked.
Or possibly every last man on this planet simply sucks.
Actually, thinking about my history with men—Nigel, the boyfriend I was dating the first time I came to Shipwreck, the gaslighters, the thieves, and the narcissists—yeah, I’m pretty sure every man on this planet simply sucks.
“Please give me your phone.” Davis’s words are slow and calm, not unlike how I speak to irrational patients at work sometimes.
“Will I get it back?”
“Yes.”
“Before or after you get a copy of the pictures so that I don’t have to go make another excuse to see Pop?”
He doesn’t answer.
I’m starting to get used to that.
It’s starting to annoy me too.
“Tell me why, again, you wanted to see Thorny Rock’s—aah umph.”
Huh.
I’m inside the camper now, and the door’s shut. “Well. This isn’t getting weirder by the minute. Also—hey! How did you get my phone?”
He lifts it over his head, and since he has a few inches on me, I can’t reach it as I stand there, going up on my tiptoes on the creaky vinyl flooring inside the small, enclosed space that smells vaguely like curry chicken.
He swipes to unlock my phone with it angled just right for face ID, and then opens my photo app.
Okay, that takes talent.
Anytime my friends ask me to take a picture, their camera and photo apps are always in different places and I have to search for a while.
Not Davis.
He justknew.
“Are you actually a spy? I’ve heard the rumors. The job at the nuclear reactor is a cover story, isn’t it? It makes sense. You being there when someone was breaking into my museum despite me not seeing you at all the rest of the wedding, fake weddings with an untold number of women—including your sister—clandestine meetings at secret trailers in the woods, abnormal abilities with electronics, you never smile, no one knows if you’re dating anyone—oh my god, that’s what your previous fake weddings were about, weren’t they? You were on missions.”
The man doesn’t acknowledge me.
