Page 59

What the fuck? He didn’t know. He couldn’t know. I’d covered everything. Hair. Hands. Clothes. My voice.

He thought some masked lunatic had stalked him through the woods and wrestled him onto a dock. And apparently Darius D’Angelo had decided this was the appropriate moment for confusing life choices.

Typical.

His fingers brushed the bottom of the mask and I snatched his arm, only allowing him to pull the plastic up past my mouth and nose. Nothing more.

Something shifted in his eyes. Interest. Jesus Christ.

I slammed both of his wrists against the boards above his head, and Darius sucked in a breath. Every smart thought left my body as his gaze dragged over me, then back to the mask and its opening.

“Alvy...” He seemed hesitant. But pliable too.

I lowered my face, his mouth now inches from mine. He started to pull away, the fear encircling him and that denial raging hot in his lust-filled eyes. I could feel it between us, though. And so, instead of letting him push away from me…

“Fuck it.” I kissed him.

It wasn’t graceful like when we were kids. It wasn’t soft and sweet. It was vicious. A kiss that claimed the man underneath me and that fear inside him.

Finally.

CHAPTER 14

The kiss lasted exactly long enough for me to forget how to breathe. Alvin’s mouth was hard against mine, angry and familiar and everything I had spent my entire life pretending I didn’t want. His hands held my wrists above my head. The mask pressed against my cheek. His breath burned between us. And for one impossible second, I kissed him back. Because I wanted to.

Then reality reared its ugly head. I peeled my mouth off his, and Alvin went still above me. The silence between us was worse than any accusation.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I accused anyway.

His eyes watched me through the mask. I couldn’t see all of his face, but I knew that expression. I’d known it since we were kids. That infuriating confidence. That reckless little spark that said he’d already decided how this ended and was waiting for the rest of us to catch up. Waiting for me to catch up.

I yanked one hand free and shoved him. Hard. Alvin stumbled sideways, caught off balance by the edge of the dock. His arms windmilled. Then he went over. The splash cracked through the night.

I sat up fast and peered over the ledge. “Alvin?”

The lake swallowed him. Black water rolled beneath the dock, moonlight breaking apart across the surface. I stared at the place where he’d disappeared, waiting for his head to rise. It never did.

“Alvin!” I scrambled to my feet.

This wasn’t funny. He’d pulled stupid stunts my entire life. He’d hidden in closets, jumped out of showers, once convinced me there was a dead body in the trunk of his dad’s car. If you knew Pastor Carter, it wasn’t completely out of the realm of possibility.

But he always laughed. He always surfaced.

I dropped to my knees and leaned over the edge of the dock. “Alvy!”

The water moved beneath me. No mask. No hands. No obnoxious voice calling me an arsehole in a terrible British accent after he’d spent the summer watching too much BBC.

My stomach dropped. I dove.

The lake closed over my head, cold enough to punch the air out of me. For a moment, everything was dark and directionless. Then my body remembered what it had been trained to do.

Kick. Reach. Look. I opened my eyes and scanned the water. The moonlight barely reached beneath the surface, but I saw a pale flash near one of the dock posts.

Alvin. His hoodie had dragged him down. He was motionless, the plastic mask still covering his face. I swam towards him and grabbed the back of his clothes.

He didn’t fight me. That was what terrified me. Alvin fought everything. People. Rules. Gravity. His own common sense.

I hooked an arm around his chest and kicked for the surface. The mask slipped crookedly, and I ripped it away as we broke through the water.