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She looked at me through heavy-lidded eyes, but not the sexy type—more like the “I had a big night and can barely keep my eyes open” type—then wiped her mouth on the back of her hand, nodding slowly.
“Yeah sure. Anytime.” We both knew that wasn’t going to happen. I had a strictly “one and done” rule. Besides which, I highly doubted the sex had been memorable enough for either of us to want to go back for a second helping. Definitely not for me, anyway. “Mind if I freshen up a little?” She nodded toward the bathroom.
“No of course not. I gotta head out in ten, though.” The inference was clear—there was no way I was about to leave her in my room alone while I was gone.
What I’d told her had only been a partial lie; I did have practice, but the reason I’d pushed her off my dick had nothing to do with wanting to avoid a roasting from Coach, and being made to run laps of the field, and everything to do with whatever had been slid under my door while she gave me head.
As Teddy/Eddie/Georgie padded across to the bathroom, I hauled myself out of the bed also, and headed toward the front door. As I got closer, I realized what I was looking at.
“A Polaroid? Who even uses those these days, except like twelve-year-old girls at sleepovers?”
“Firstly, I don’t even want to know how you know what twelve-year-old girls do at sleepovers, or anywhere, for that matter. Secondly, that’s your take out of this whole thing? What fucking planet are you even on?” It was something I’d found myself wondering often in the time I’d known Fox, and I genuinely still didn’t feel like I had an answer.
He looked at me like I was out of my mind. “What am I missing here?” His tone suggested that he thought there was nothing, but he couldn’t have been more wrong.
“Well, the entire fucking point, for a start.” Xavier snapped tersely. Actually, I was surprised how calm he was being in the face of Fox’s apparent willful stupidity. There was a time in the not-too-distant past where he would have had to be talked down from the ledge in order to refrain from tearing Fox limb from limb, no questions asked, in the exact same situation.
“Love”, or whatever the hell it was he was doing with Rocky, was taking his inner psycho down a notch, which I appreciated. That wasn’t to say that it wasn’t still there. It was, bubbling away under the surface, but it seemed to take more provocation to push him over the edge these days. I mean, the guy still had way less chill than average, but it was definitely an improvement on before. Though to be fair anything was an improvement on before.
“Bear wouldn’t have sent out a Code Black just for some regular drama. It means it’s fucking serious. Now look again.” Xavier was exactly right.
Code Black was Cygnus’s shorthand for “drop whatever the fuck you’re doing—whether that was abandoning a piss mid-stream, or bailing on dinner with the president—and get to the meeting point immediately.” Nine times out of ten, that meant getting to Xavier’s room, and today was the same.
Fox turned his gaze back to the photo, and the rest of us turned our attention to him as he brought it closer to his face, squinting to try to decipher what he was seeing.
“It looks like one of the wooden floor tiles at The Swan Club…,” he offered hesitantly. Xavier nodded.
“And...?”
“And...” Fox squinted at the photo again. “And some black drapes... Oh. Oh. Shit!”
“And welcome to the party. Jesus. For someone whose IQ is higher than all of ours put together, that took way too fucking long for you to figure out.” Xavier was right, on paper, at least, Fox was smart as balls—hands down the most intelligent dude I knew. Not always the most practical, though, clearly.
“Holy shit. So if this was from that night, and none of us took it—” he paused as though waiting for someone to confirm or deny, but Xavier shot him a look that suggested he was about to rip his balls from his body with his bare hands, and Fox hurried on with his train of thought. “—there are only two other possible explanations. Either it was one of the cygnets, or someone else. A guest, or other third-party who shouldn’t have been there, but was, and who now knows a bunch of shit they really shouldn’t.”
“Bingo, bango, and the not-so-quick sly Fox is back in the game.” Xavier’s sarcasm was legendary, and no amount of love or sex was ever going to change that.
“Holy. Motherfucking. Shit.” Fox was clearly still in shock, the same way the rest of us had been minutes earlier.
“Well, I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that it wasn’t one of the cygnets. I mean, they know that no cameras, phones or any other kinds of recording device are allowed at any Cygnus event, and they know the consequences if they infringe the rule. They were also all searched on the way in.
“More than that, though, I think most of them would be too shit-scared to risk the outcome if they were found to have betrayed Cygnus in this way. So then we have either an attendee of the party, or an interloper.” Fox rubbed the furrow in his brow.
“Yeah, I agree.” Kane nodded. “No way one of the cygnets would be suicidal enough to do this—plus, they have only marginally less skin in the game than we do, so they’d be risking their own necks if any of this shit got out. I’d like to think that we have more sense than to co-opt someone that dumb. So it was a guest, or some other fucker.”
“Okay, but the guests were all searched, so unless they had a camera in a “cavity” somewhere”—we all snickered—“then there’s no way they could have done this.”
“Which leaves an intruder,” Drew picked up Kane’s train of thought. “But we had the place on lockdown, so it should have been impossible for anyone unauthorized to get in. But okay, let’s say for argument’s sake that a rogue person did get in, but now they want us to know they were there? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Well, whether it makes sense to us or not, something clearly happened, or else we wouldn’t be sitting here now. So rather than flounder around questioning the logic, let’s work out how the fuck we’re going to find out who, what and how the hell whatever it is that happened even occurred.” Xavier’s tone was so sharp, it could have cut through granite.
“Oh thank you, great leader. If only the four of us could be so smart as to come to the same conclusion. What would we do without you? It’s a wonder we can even wipe our own butts. Meanwhile, you’re brushing over the most obvious and most important question, which is why? Why would anyone want to be there?” The sarcasm in Drew’s response was bound to have Xavier’s blood boiling.
I whipped my head toward said fearless leader, just as he jumped from his seat, turning to face Drew, his fists curled and the telltale vein at his temple throbbing. Shit.
“I’m not brushing over shit, but if you speak to me like that again, an undertaker will be brushing leaves over your grave.” So yeah, that chilled thing was a minor improvement, not a total personality transplant.
“That so? I’d like to see you fucking try.” Drew was up and out of his seat equally quickly, his bulky frame towering over Xavier’s. The love-hate-love thing he had going on with his girl Kik had also marginally taken the edge off of his own sometimes-volatile temper.
