Page 126 of Lethal in Pink

The group’s energy carries the hour. Logan is recounting a clinic horror story involving a Labrador and a tennis ball that has the table howling. The law student—Eliza, her name is Eliza, I’m ninety percent sure—is doing a pitch-perfect impression of our property professor that involves a lot of dramatic pen-waving. The crypto bros have moved on to arguing about whether AI will replace lawyers before it replaces traders, which is objectively the most Blackthorn conversation possible and exactly the kind of meaningless noise I need right now.

I laugh when something lands. Talk when I’m spoken to. Keep the weight locked somewhere behind my sternum where it doesn’t show on my face. Amiyah’s knee finds mine under the table and stays there, and when she looks at me—really looks, the way she does when she’s trying to read the lines around my eyes—I give her the version of my smile that’s practiced enough to pass for real.

The trip to the beach was always the plan for after the sugar run, a collective consensus formed over group chat hours ago. We load back into our cars, leaving downtown behind for the coastal stretch where the air turns salty and bright.

The sand is already baking under the midday heat, scorching under my bare feet, gritty between my toes. The water is the particular shade of blue-black where the sun hits the chop, and when the first wave hits my ankles the cold is sharp enough to make me hiss. Someone shrieks. Someone else shrieks louder. The sound dissolves into laughter, carried off by the ocean wind.

The volleyball materializes from someone’s trunk—deflated slightly, the kind of ball that has seen better decades and several regrettable parties—and the game that follows has no rules, no teams, and no respect for the concept of personal space. It’s just bodies in motion, sand flying, the ball arcing through the air in trajectories that defy both physics and intention. Logan spikes it directly into the face of one of the crypto bros. The crypto bro takes it personally. Chaos ensues.

Amiyah is in a tiny black bikini that she produced from her bag like she’d been planning this all along, and she’s laughing—really laughing, the kind that comes from somewhere deep and unguarded, her head thrown back, her blonde hair coming loose from its clip in waves that catch the sun. She dives for a save, comes up covered in sand, and the sound she makes—half triumph, half outrage—carries across the beach and lands in my chest like a hand on a doorknob, turning something I’d locked tight.

I watch her for a beat too long. Long enough that she catches me looking, and instead of the sharp eyebrow raise I expect, she holds my gaze for one second, two, her smile softening at the edges into something quieter. Something that looks almost like worry, though I might be projecting. Might be seeing my own fear reflected back at me in the glare.

I am not going to let today be ruined by some rich piece of shit in Seoul I cannot control right now. I have a few weeks left. I am going to finish them. I am going to walk across that stage in a cap and gown I paid too much for and accept a degree I worked too hard for, and then I am going to deal with whatever comes next with both eyes open and my shoulders square.

Chapter forty-six

Jae

Evidence markers of a crime committed by people who really, really love Taco Bell currently litter Amiyah’s coffee table. Fire sauce packets lay scattered about. Crumpled wrappers form a small, sad mountain range between my veterinary pharmacology notes and an abandoned Chalupa shell that, at some point, lost its structural integrity. Color-coded Post-its cling to the edges of Amiyah’s Constitutional Law text, each neon tab labeled with the kind of precision that suggests she color-coordinates her breakfast cereal. The entire surface has been colonized by the particular chaos of two people who started the night with finals prep and ended up letting the drive-thru win.

Amiyah sits cross-legged on the blush-pink sectional, her own casebook open in her lap, her blonde hair pulled into a messy bun that somehow still looks intentional. Her voice carries that specific melodic quality she adopts for study nights—warm, focused, each sentence measured and clear.

“The Court held that the zoning ordinance constituted an unconstitutional taking because—” She pauses, her pen hovering over a line of text. “Because it effectively deprived the owner of all economically viable use of his property.”

I nod like I’m absorbing every word. I am not. Under my veterinary pharmacology text, which I have opened to the exact page describing drug interactions in canines, sits a well-loved volume of Attack on Titan that I am currently three chapters deep into. My right hand turns a page of manga. My left hand makes a casual, well-practiced grab for the open bag of cinnamon twists sitting beside her hip.

Her hand intercepts mine without her eyes leaving the casebook. The swat is quick, precise, and utterly choreographed—the kind of muscle memory two people develop when they’ve spent enough evenings on this exact couch that the theft and the defense have their own rhythm.

“Mine,” she says, still reading.

“You got the last one.”

“You got the last four.”

“That’s not mathematically possible.”

“Finish your notes and maybe you’ll understand basic arithmetic.”

I retrieve my hand, grinning, and turn another page of manga.

My phone buzzes on the cushion beside me.

I glance at it with the laziness of someone expecting a meme from Kiho—probably a cat with a broken-English caption he thinks is hilarious. What I get instead is the digital equivalent of a fire alarm.

The screen fills with texts. Not one message. A rapid, breathless thread, each bubble arriving before I’ve finished the last, the frantic pace of a man who has finally decided that tonight, right now, is the moment it all comes out.

My fork goes still. Chalupa suspended halfway to my mouth, sauce dripping onto the wrapper in my lap.

Kiho: Did you ever figure out who that was on the roof?

I blink at it. We’d talked about this, briefly, a few weeks back—a figure I’d seen on a rooftop near my building one night, dismissed as nothing because Los Angeles is full of people doing weird things on rooftops.

The next message arrives.

Kiho: The taser. You told me about the taser. The pink compact with rhinestones.

My jaw tightens. I had told him about the taser. In excruciating, regrettable detail, because at the time it had been funny—a story about my girlfriend electrocuting me during foreplay and then having the best sex of my life afterward.