Instead, I exhale slowly. “How did you manage to turn her skin blue?”
“Yeah, can’t tell you that. It’s a secret recipe.”
“Is she going to die? Am I going to have to dispose of her body?”
He rubs his chin. “No. But it’s darker than I thought it would be, and to be fair, I didn’t think she’d wash her whole body with it.”
My eyes close. “So, you thought she’d just, what? Wash her face?”
He nods. “Yep.”
He starts to move off the bed, like he’s going to leave, but I stop him in much the same way I stopped Candace earlier. My arm wraps around his waist, pulling him against me. I add the other, just to keep him secure.
Instead of fighting it, he leans into me. He almost nuzzles against my shoulder, his face just about coming up to my collarbone.
My monster approves.
My mouth goes close to his ear. “And you thought you’d wake me up and tell me this?”
“Yep, because when she saw what happened, she was big mad.”
“And how did you know this?” I ask, groaning as the answer comes to me before Neo can give it. “You have a video of it.”
“Umm…” His eyes flash with mischief.
“Neo, you will not release that.”
“Too late,” he whispers, and my arms tighten around him, everything I’m going to have to do to mitigate the damage he did filtering through my mind. But then it snaps back to him when he wriggles against me. “Let me go.”
“No.” I don’t move, just keep him against me.
He sighs. “Wylder.”
“I need to think. You’ve made a mess.”
“I always make a mess.”
“This is…personal.”
He snorts. “Yeah, well, she fucking deserved it.”
My head is pounding. I can barely think straight around the feel of him in my arms. “And did you think about what I deserve?”
Because having to clean this up is going to be a huge clusterfuck. If Neo was hoping to give me a headache with all of this, then he’s succeeded.
“I mean, yeah. I thought about that a lot, actually. You deserve to be happy.”
That’s not the answer I was expecting. The way he says it, with that sass I’ve grown used to…it only fans the angry flames flaring up inside of me.
“Happy? I’m not happy.”
He wriggles against me, and I hold him closer, my nose hitting the side of his hair. He smells like bubblegum. I was never allowed to have that growing up. “Undignified,” my father said.
Much like Neo.
My father would have hated him.
“The amount of shit I’m going to have to wade through because you didn’t think before you acted.”
