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Kelsey was…an interesting girl. She was nowhere near as pretty as Ash was, in my opinion, but she was beyond bubbly and talkative and quirky in every way. I could see why Ash liked her so much. She complimented Ash’s more reserved personality.
I didn’t know why she had to come this weekend, why Ash couldn’t convince her to come a different weekend, once Will’s attacker was brought to justice—and once the driver of the hit-and-run was found. Were they the same person? At this point, I had no idea. I was at a loss where that was concerned.
We spent most of Saturday walking around campus, showing Kelsey the sights. We introduced her to our student union—which she said was a rich man’s union, because hers was a small one-story building that had a tiny apparel shop, a place where you could buy textbooks, and a few eateries.
Our campus was beautiful compared to hers, apparently.
It was only that afternoon that I found out why Kelsey had wanted to come this weekend. Why it had to be this particular weekend and not another: Halloween. Halloween was next Monday, and she wanted to go out and party. The minute I heard her mention partying, I gave Ash a look.
We were back in our dorm, safe from the world’s horrors, and they wanted to go out there and party? Right now was the absolute worst time to drink and party and lose their sense of mind. Ash knew it, too. Why else would she meet my look with a defiant one of her own?
Fierce, unyielding. As if daring me to try to keep her here in the dorm room with me tonight.
I knew I couldn’t, and it broke my heart to think about someone trying to hurt her again. If the hit-and-run wasn’t an accident, if someone had purposely tried to hurt her like they’d done to Will…who would stop them from succeeding this time?
“Maybe I should come,” I said, not really wanting to but willing to do anything to protect the pink-haired girl before me. I leaned on my bed frame. Ash stood near the bathroom, gazing in at Kelsey, who was in front of the mirror, applying makeup.
Ash flipped her head to me, giving me an expression that stopped me cold. “No, you should stay here,” she said.
“Yeah,” Kelsey shouted from the bathroom, “no offense, but I don’t want people thinking I’m with you, you know? You’ll only cramp my style—and believe it or not, I do have some style. Not a lot, but enough.”
Ash muttered something quiet to her friend before moving toward me. As she stood before me, she tilted her face up to meet my eyes. She hadn’t started to get ready yet; her eyes were free of makeup and she still wore her normal, holey clothes. “We’ll be fine, Declan,” she told me, trying to make me believe something I honestly never would.
Not now, not after everything that had happened. I knew better than to assume the same thing an optimist would.
I let out a soft chuckle. “I’ll believe that when you do.”
Ash frowned, a strangely beautiful expression on her pale face. I didn’t want to call her out like that, but it was obvious even she didn’t believe they’d be fine. She’d been weird ever since the accident, and for good reason. If what Travis said was true, then someone was after her. Did she suspect who it was? Did she know?
I wondered if she did know, why she wouldn’t tell me or Travis. Or, hell, even the police. There was hardly anything the police could do without more evidence, except be on the lookout for a car that had a human-sized dent in it.
Her thin shoulders rose and fell once with a shrug. “That’s life. You can never really be sure about anything.” I had the feeling her words meant more than their face value, and I stood there in silence, watching as she returned to her friend in the bathroom.
What did she mean by that?
Ash might not be sure of anything, but I was. I knew for a fact I was sure about one thing—her. I knew I needed her; there wasn’t a doubt in my mind how much she meant to me. The world and more. I cared about her more than I did my own self, which might not seem like much, but it was. I’d slowly come back into myself after losing Sabrina, and Ash had made me feel more alive than I’d felt in nearly a year.
For almost a year I’d been a passenger in my own life, watching it go by, wondering why I had to be here and Sabrina couldn’t. Even though we were broken up at the time, her death still hurt me like a knife to the heart.
Kelsey traded places with Ash, and I saw just how dolled-up Kelsey had made herself. Her dark hair was in soft curls down her back, her black eyes lined with thick eyeliner and smoky eyeshadow highlighted in red. Her lips were painted a sleek and vibrant cherry red, matching the shirt she wore—which was very tight, not that I noticed. Or I tried not to, at least. She wore jeans that seemed to have paint splatters on them, along with a pair of black flats.
She was pretty, and a selfish part of me wondered how good Ash would look. Why couldn’t Ash stay here? Let her friend go out and party while Ash and I had the room to ourselves? It wasn’t too wrong of me to want that, was it? Not after what we did yesterday. That was…
Damn it, I shouldn’t be thinking about that while they were still here. I’d only get hard.
“So,” I started, causing Kelsey’s brown stare to snap to me. “What’s your costume?”
“Oh, yeah!” Kelsey snapped her fingers, moving to her backpack and pulling out two…stickers? “Almost forgot the most important part,” she muttered to herself. She grabbed a pen from Ash’s desk and scribbled something on both. She peeled the first one off and stuck it on her chest, right beneath her collarbone. When she turned to face me, I saw what it said.
Hello, My Name is…the Devil.
“Funny, huh?” Kelsey laughed at herself, and I peered around her to see that the other one simply said Hello, My Name is…God. So Kelsey was playing the Devil and Ash was playing God? I wasn’t sure if that was right.
Ash was a wonder, beautiful and entrancing, but wasn’t Lucifer the same? It’d been a while since I’d gone to church, but I was fairly sure the Devil was the kind of person—or angel, technically—you couldn’t trust. Ash, until recently, I thought was trustworthy, but it was hard to put my faith in her when she was clearly hiding something huge from me.
No, out of the two of them, I thought Ash should be the Devil.
Not like I’d ever say that out loud, though.
