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“You’re notbotheringanyone, Bailey.” Rory says my name again in a way that makes it feel like more than just a word. “You could stay here instead, if you wanted. We’ll be your friends for the night.”
Now Idolook at him. My eyes find his, and I search his face for the mocking, taunting look I expect to find there.
But I only find amusement. Easy amusement, without the cruel edge that I’d expected. He waves his fingers at me, still leaning on Phoenix’s leg as I look at him. “I bet you have pretty eyes,” he adds. “Not that I can see them that well in the dark.”
“He’s harmless, by the way,” Phoenix states lazily, nearly cutting off his friend. “He’s just trying to rile you up.”
“Maybe,” Rory shrugs. “Maybe I’m just tired.” He glances up, then back at me. “I just got here too. And I’m pretty sure I had to ask your friends where my tall, dark, and scowling boyfriend was before he took pity on me and loomed out of the shadows.”
I can’t help but snort, though I see Phoenix’s quick look of irritation from the corner of my eye. “He’s always been like that, you know,” I find myself saying, tilting my head toward Phoenix. “Literally ever since I wassix.”
“Yeah, he had a stick jammed up his ass early,” Rory agrees sagely. “I’ve been working on—”
Phoenix sighs and gently, almost affectionately, curls his fingers in Rory’s hair. “They’re missing you,” he says to me, eyes locked on mine and not letting me look away. Hell, I don’t evenwantto, for all his eyes look like yawning pits of black in his face. “If you don’t go now, they’re probably going to call the cops to send out a search party.”
I expect malice in his words. I expect pain or frustration, based on past events. But he’s just…talking to me. Like a normal human being who might be either cracking a joke or just trying to get rid of me.
Either way, I get the message. I nod once, taking a step back with no intention of using the path to get to my friends. “It was nice meeting you,” I tell Rory, who gives me one more lazy wave as his face skims closer to the apex of Phoenix’s thighs.
“You too,Bailey,” he informs me sweetly, eyes glittering. “Don’t be a stranger to our bench.” Phoenix shakes him a little for that, almost like a misbehaving puppy, but I don’t stick around for longer than it takes for me to realize my skin is prickling, goosebumps rising along my arms demanding me to rub my hands against them to dissipate the uncomfortable sensation.
Without giving things a chance to get worse or better, I ignore the shivers and cut into the short, mostly dead grass. My steps crunch as I walk up the hill the quicker, steeper way instead of following the path that leads past their bench.
Within minutes I reach the meetinghouse, its roof covered in lights and both bathroom signs replaced with Halloween-themed ones instead. There are no sides of the building, save the ones that house the small bathrooms, and only wooden pillars hold the arching roof up above a myriad of picnic tables sitting on a concrete pad that’s cracked with age.
The moment my feet scuff in the gravel surrounding the pad, Nic looks up from where she sits on a table, eyes expectant in the dim light. “Bailey,” she greets, not getting to her feet. “It took you a while. Everything okay?”
“We thought you might have fallen asleep. Or found another cat to take home,” Nolan admits with a small, half-smile of his own. He crosses from one picnic table to another, hopping between them like he isn’t afraid of misjudging and smacking the concrete below hard enough to break a bone.
I know I would have been.
“Yeah,” I say, slumping onto the picnic table across from Nic. “I’m okay it’s just…” From here, it’s easy to see Phoenix and Rory, and they haven’t moved from their bench. “I thought they were you.” I point to where I mean, both of my friends glancing down curiously.
“And I bet that was incredibly awkward,” Nolan comments, coming to sit down next to me. “That’s Phoenix’s boyfriend, right? The brown-haired guy?”
Brown hairisn’t enough of a descriptor for Rory’s thick auburn hair that brushes his ears and threatens to curl if it gets much longer. But I’m also not going to sit here and wax poetic about Phoenix’s boyfriend, so I just shrug.
“I think so. I saw them kissing the other day. On the sidewalk.” My jaws click shut, because I’m definitely not about to tell them I was stalking Phoenix through town, with suspicions of him being a murderer. After all, there’s paranoid, then there’sthatlevel of paranoid that will get me a nice new pair of grippy socks.
And I hate socks.
My fingers curl and I tap them against the wood, the breeze picking up around me once more to stir my hair around my shoulders. “Things feel weird this year,” I say, not knowing who I’m really saying it to. “I mean, it feels like there’s more to things than Emily’s death.”
“About that.” Nic looks up, biting her lip. “They’ve officially ruled it an accident.”
My brows jerk upward, and I look at Nic incredulously, wondering if I’ve heard her right. “An accident? But you said—”
“And Mom still thinks it’s a load of crap that they’re doing that,” Nic goes on. “Mom says they’re making a mistake. But she can’t overrule what the coroner said.” She shrugs one shoulder at me and fishes a box of gum from her pocket to pull out a silver-wrapped strip before offering the package to me.
I take one absently, still processing her words. “An accident? Even though her fingers were broken like that?” Slowly I unwrap it, looking down at the silver paper before popping the gum into my mouth and shoving the trash into my pocket. “Is your mom sure?”
“No,” Nic admits. “No one is. And I think… Well, I’m pretty sure no one in this town wants there to be a murder, you know? I think they’re using any excuse they can to label it an accident.”
What she says makes more than a little sense. I rub my arms over my hoodie, leaning back on the picnic table. “Maybe I’m just going crazy,” I sigh, unable to keep my gaze from drifting to the two men on their bench down the hill from us.
They’ve moved in closer, and I swear they’re kissing again. “Do they not care we’re sitting here?” I mumble out loud, feeling the beginnings of the warmth of embarrassment in my cheeks. I certainly wouldn’t be sitting there making out in front of people I know from school.
Though, the party from the other night crosses my brain and I cringe internally, feeling like the pot calling the kettle black, or whatever the saying is.
