There was no way she was letting Seth Brubaker undo all her good work. If she was going to kill him, she was going to have to do it tidily. Maybe get a bath of acid ready first, to dissolve him in. Or hire a wood chipper to chop him into pieces.
Both seemed like pretty good ideas.
But maybe not quite as good as just refusing to open the door to him in the first place. After all, he had no decent reason to be here. And she had every reason in the world to never want to see him again. He was responsible for the most devastating series of events of her high school life.
In fact, they were so devastating that they still haunted hernow, at the big old age of twenty-seven. She found herself lingering on the bright brilliance of having been friends with him for most of their childhoods. Defending each other from the Jerk Squad who had tormented them. Then the brutal sting when he had gotten too hot and cool for the likes of her, somewhere in the middle of high school, and started hanging out with the very boys who’d stuffed her into lockers and called the two of them losers for liking cringe things.
And of course anything had been cringe to Jason Kirkpatrick and his buddies. So everything had become cringe to Seth, too. Starting with the things Cassie and he had treasured together, the things they had shared, and ending with that fateful incident.
All of which made it perfectly justifiable to ignore his now insistent knocking.
Hell, maybe she could even pretend she wasn’t home. The door was thick and nothing but wood. And she’d been in the basement for the last hour, so he couldn’t have seen her silhouette through any downstairs window.Stay quiet and he’ll just go away, she told herself—which seemed like a reasonable thing to imagine.
Only then he started hollering. And even more bizarrely, it wasn’t her he was hollering for.
“Adeline, are you there?” he called out, and Cassie’s stomach seemed to drop three feet.That was her grandmother’s first name. A name that she herself had barely spoken aloud. In fact, she wasn’t sure sheeverhad. The woman was Gram or Granny to her, and nothing else. So what the heck was Seth Brubaker doing, using it like that?
He’d hardly known the woman. Even back when Cassie and he had still been friends and hung out at her house together—which had not been often, the occasional bout of board-game playing or begging for milk and cookies aside—he’d always called her Mrs. Camberwell.
Because he’d been a polite dork. Instead of the asshole big shot he grew into.
“Come on, Adeline, open up,” he said. While Cassie stood on the other side of the door, horrified. But also completely baffled.And in the end, it was the baffled part of her that won. It made her grab the door’s handle and fling the thing open before she could think any further about it.
Though she wished she had, once it was done.
Now not only was she abruptly face-to-face with her mortal enemy; she was face-to-face with him while being the absolute worst possible version of herself. Most of her dark hair was almost gray with dust. And she’d made the mistake of covering the rest with a red scarf—one that she’d found at the bottom of a box labeled “garbage.” She looked like a reject from a Rosie the Riveter photo shoot. Doubly so when you factored in the overalls she had foolishly chosen for this cleaning spree. They were far too short in the legs, and so worn you could probably breathe on them and make a hole. And even worse: they were very tight over her butt.
Which wasn’t a problem to her.
She loved how that clinginess made her curves look.
But the trouble was, she knew he didn’t feel that way. Oh yeah, she knew his feelings on that all right. And she had zero desire to hear any of those feelings ever again. She didn’t even want to be reminded with some sort of surreptitious glance down or pointed lip curl. Because if that did happen, she knew she would most likely do something very inadvisable.
Like try to attack him somehow.
Even though attacking him was never going to turn out well for her.
The gawky boy she had known looked even cooler and tougher now than he had during those final high school years. His shoulders were the size of boulders; the hand he had on the door resem bled a shovel. And, oh god, the clothes he was wearing. He had on an actual leather jacket. Over an honest-to-goodness Henley. Paired with boots that looked like he’d killed a biker for them.
And all of this was before she even laid eyes on his annoyingly handsome face.
Because even though she hated the very sight of it, even though it turned her stomach, even though she would have done anything to have back the boy with the too-big-for-his-mouth braces andthe milk-bottle-bottom glasses, she had to admit: it was handsome. That jaw like the side of a knife; those wide-set, caramel-colored eyes that seemed constantly starved for something you didn’t want to consider.
And thatmouth. How did he have a mouth like that? His upper lip was as plush as a peach. However, his lower was almostmean. It made him look like he was three seconds away from murdering you at any given moment—but in such a soft and seductive way that you’d be really happy about it when he did.
And then just in case all of that wasn’t enough, there was his hair. That black hair, stalking angrily over his eyes and swirling in thick waves across his jaw and forever settling in a perfect swoop just above his broad brow.Like a raven’s wing, she’d once thought, back when it had been thicker and shaggier and less immaculately coiffed.
And she’d been allowed to have such thoughts about it. Heck, she’d been allowed to touch it back then—and without so much as a second of worrying about the consequences. Because her milk-bottle-best-friend wouldn’t have had any consequences to dole out. He hadn’t seemed to even know what consequences for things like affectionwere. He just wanted to play Mario Kart or watch horror movies until they screamed themselves hoarse.
But that boy wasn’t coming back. This man had shed him, like a skin he no longer needed. And he’d discarded her along with it. In fact, the only sign that he’d been that boy was the slightly crooked incisors he’d been unable to completely fix. The ones she saw when his mouth dropped open, the second he clocked that it wasn’t Adeline on the other side of the door.
“Cassie,” he said, in a voice she’d never heard from him before. It was so faint it barely qualified as a voice. It was more like he’d just let out a slightly heavy breath. As if he’d seen a ghost, she thought—which she supposed was true, in one way.
He had pretty thoroughly murdered her in high school, after all.
She just hadn’t completely died. She had kept going, with all the dead parts stored inside. And now she had to somehow pretend those dead parts weren’t there. Even though that was much, much easiersaid than done. It took almost every ounce of effort she had just to look him in the face, never mind be cool and calm and collected while she did. Then somehow she was supposed to say something to him, without her voice shaking all over the place?Impossible, she thought.
Until suddenly it was just happening. Words were blurting out of her.
