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His shoulders slumped. The fight seemed to go out of him. “I saw the photo of you two online.”
“Of us shopping together?”
Drew let out a hoarse laugh. “No. The two of you sitting out on surfboards, kissing.” He rubbed at his throat. “It was a grainy photo, but I knew it was you who Matty was kissing.”
This was news to me. I looked to Matty for an explanation.
“Ah,” Matty started, his face flaming red. “I forgot to mention that the paparazzi captured the moment we kissed out on the water. Wait,” he said, his attention shifting. “Andy, that’s what set you off? A paparazzi photo of all things? You know that shit’s rarely accurate. I mean, in this case, it was accurate, but still. That was a petty reaction, even for you.”
Drew’s jealousy caused all of this?
“It wasn’t too much work,” Drew said, “to make an anonymous call to the embassy letting them know the statue was a fake. Their reaction to the news gave me the biggest hard on since Ciaran almost let me fuck him a few weeks ago.”
I cringed. I didn’t want that memory flooding my brain. However, he didn’t say that statement to rile me up. Drew knew Matty, who was still amped up, would not take that statement lying down.
Matty lunged forward again. From the corner of my eye, I saw that Drew was gripping the broken stem of one of the wine glasses.
He was essentially holding a glass shank, which could kill Matty.
Everything moved in slow motion and my vision instantly turned red.
I was closer to Drew and I knew what I had to do.
I didn’t consciously remember moving, but one second I was next to the couch and the next I was punching Drew as hard as I could in the temple.
My knuckles stung like a son of a bitch but the asshole went down and stayed down. His eyes fluttered open, dazed, and a small, bubbly groan erupted from his lips.
Matty kicked the shank from Drew’s hands. The glass skittered away on the wood floor, making clinking noises along the way, landing near the bookcase. Thank God we weren’t near Drew’s old book collection. I got faint thinking about blood splatter staining the spines of three-hundred-year-old books.
We stood there in unhurried silence. In the distance, I could hear the hum of Drew’s refrigerator and the ticking of a clock on the mantle. It was close to two in the morning.
I think we were waiting to see if anything else happened, waiting to see if he jumped back up like an unkillable monster in a horror movie.
But this wasn’t a movie. Drew couldn’t jump up even if his life depended on it. Instead, he grumbled, rolled over, and spit up blood. “Fuck,” he groaned to no one in particular.
“Ready to go?” Matty asked me as he approached the door. He grabbed one of Drew’s coats from the hallway closet to wrap up the statue.
“Yes.” Rubbing my sore knuckles, I looked down at Drew. I was ready. Ready to say goodbye. Ready to put this chapter of my life behind me. “This is where we part, Drew. Forever. I’ll be requesting a new counselor for school, too. It’s completely over between us. If you fail to keep your distance, I will call the authorities to press charges. Do you understand?”
Drew grunted out, “Get the fuck outta here, kid,” which was satisfactory enough for me.
I didn’t look back as we left Drew’s apartment.
54
MATTHIAS
There was no way to avoid the stares. Yes, Las Vegas was a twenty-four-hour city and yes, it had its share of strange-looking citizens. Still, as Ciaran and I exited The West Flamingo at two in the morning, there were enough people on the street to gawk at my bloody face.
I guess it wasn’t an everyday occurrence to see someone who looked like they’d just walked away from a mixed martial arts fight. The bulky, wrapped-up statue in Ciaran’s arms only added to the strangeness.
“Dude,” someone called out just before we entered the lobby of The Towers. “Hope the other guy looks worse.”
Ciaran, who offered to carry the wrapped-up statue so that I could text Joan and Filipe, answered for me. “Much worse.”
“Right on,” the man praised just as we entered the revolving doors.
Ciaran, who was in front of me, rebalanced the statue vertically against his chest so he could shuffle forward.
