Текст книги "Cam Girl"

Автор книги: Leah Raeder

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

Something hardened inside me. I rode her fingers, groaning when she pulled out and ran her palm against my pussy, wanting so badly for the pressure to burst. When she slid in again I raised my whole body to hers, her nipples grazing mine, her skin slick. Our lips brushed, her hair feathering my face. Then she pulled out and released my throat at the same time.

“God, fuck,” I said. Head rush, sick and giddy. “Make me come. Stop fucking torturing—”

She stuck her wet fingers in my mouth.

I gasped, which made it easier for her to slide deeper. After the initial shock I closed my lips around them. It’d been so long since I’d tasted myself. Warm and clear, a slight tart sweetness. So fucking feminine.

“How does it taste?” she whispered. “You always tasted so good.”

I pried her knees open with my own. Brought my hand to the heat between her legs. Ran a fingertip inside as I swirled my tongue around her fingers. She groaned.

“You’re so pretty with me in your mouth.” She slid in farther. “Do it, baby. Suck me off.”

I stared up at her. Light struck part of her face, the chiseled jaw, the ridge in her throat.

And for a wild moment, I thought of Blue.

Not in her place. Not the way she feared. But as her. This androgynous girl with her hand in my mouth, telling me to blow her.

Holy fuck.

I licked her fingers and pulled them out, kissed the tips, took them in again, my eyes on hers. The other hand stroked her clit. Ellis cupped the back of my head like a boy would. We tangled together, legs linked, my wetness spreading as I rode her thigh. Every time I sucked her in and looked up plaintively, she rocked into my hand, hard. It made my head spin. This felt like fucking a guy and a girl at the same time. This felt crazy. All around us was a watery haze, shadows wavering, wisps of light floating like jellyfish in the thick, fluid air, and I had the sudden sense that I was actually under the waterline, my mouth full of ocean. The struggle for release was like fighting a drowning. I could feel it so close, dry air and clarity just overhead. Her body wound with mine, her nipples stiff against my breasts, her wet soft skin unbearable against my pussy. I intensified as I would with a boy, showing him how badly I wanted his cock. Deep-throating him. Her. Ellis made a fist in my hair. Force me, I thought, force me, fuck my mouth, and she did, her fingers thrusting to the back of my tongue, but I was a good girl with a well-trained gag reflex and I took it like a pro. Ellis heaved against me, saying, “God, God,” and I kept giving it to her steady and rode her leg and came, pure air breaking over me, my head above the surface. She took her hand from my mouth. I inhaled, oxygen drugging my blood. That first crystalline breath. Ecstasy.

We curled against each other, panting. I stared at the ceiling, the play of reflected light. Lifted an arm and slid my hand up the wall to feel it. Air, just air.

Ellis looked at me through mussed hair, mouth swollen, squinting. So lovely. I touched her face, slid a hand through her hair and ruffled it.

“What do you see?” she said.

“You.” I twirled a lock around my finger. “My prince.”

Her eyes half-shut, as if looking at something bright. “I wish I could draw. I wish I could show you how you look to me. You’re so beautiful, Vada.”

My heartbeat echoed in my fingertips.

We kissed for a while, soft and slow, pausing to touch each other, to run skin against skin, lace fingers, look at ourselves entwined. I couldn’t tell the taste or feel of my own body from hers. It was all one thing, just us.

When she shivered I pulled the quilt up and Ellis nestled in my arms. I love you, I thought, watching an imaginary zodiac spin over the walls. I love you more than anything. I’m sorry I ever made you doubt that. Because this feels right. It’s the first thing that’s felt completely right since the night our lives tore apart.

This feels like breathing again.

I woke in a stillness flocked with velvet shadows in tones of cornflower and mauve. Ignored my phone and the chill and leaned against the headboard, the sheet twined around my chest, watching Ellis.

Light sleeper. She stirred soon after, her shoulders peeking from the sheets. When she blinked I ran a finger across her collarbone, eliciting a shiver.

“Hi,” I said.

Ellis didn’t answer, but she had that oh my god this actually happened look.

I laughed. “Yo sé eh.”

She pulled the sheet over her head.

At first she was shy, hiding until I wrestled her down and kissed her. We were a total mess, half-hungover, feral from sex, and I didn’t care. I kissed the hell out of her till she stopped being self-conscious, till she took me in her arms and kissed me back, breathless. A red sun rose and warmed the room. I pulled her atop me, gazing up at her.

“What are you thinking?” she said.

“That I could look at your face forever.”

Her breath caught, and so did mine. I hadn’t really thought about the words. I just said what I felt.

Ellis smiled, playing it off. “You like me, dork.”

“Nope. Way too nerdy.”

“Admit it.”

“Dream on.”

“You want to look at me forever.”

“Only because it’d take that long to count your stupid freckles.”

“You can’t freckle-shame me. I know you think they’re cute.”

I shut her up with a kiss. Sweet at first, laughing against each other’s mouths, but soon it turned intense and led to lip-biting, hair-pulling. “Okay,” I said, pushing a knee between her legs, “you’re not cute. You’re hot as fuck.”

It was a dream. All of it. Fucking each other as the sun poured molten gold against our backs. Perching on the sink and chatting with her as she showered. Interrupting her every five minutes with a kiss, a goofy smile, a piece of my heart. Finally dragging ourselves out of the room and ambling through the fog-haunted city, our breath hanging in veils of chiffon, pretending to peer in shop windows when I was really just watching her reflection. Hands linked, images tumbling through my head like kaleidoscope bits. If someone came up right then and shot me through the heart I was pretty sure a rainbow would splatter on the bricks. I took her to a comics shop and told her to buy as much as we could carry, and her eyes lit up. She kissed me, which made two teenage boys stare and break into grins. Then she led me down the aisles as her pack mule, shoving graphic novels into my arms. I didn’t care. I was doped up on this, smiling dazedly at everything.

Oh my god. This was actually happening.

I was in love with my best friend. Hopelessly, completely in love.

No more hiding. No more denying and downplaying it. Fuck what other people thought. I didn’t care how we looked, how they’d label us. I only cared what she felt. If two people could make each other smile and laugh and forget all the pain and darkness in the world for a moment, why should we feel ashamed of it?

Why had I been so scared of this, of being happy with her?

As payment for the comics I pulled her into a boutique to try on random things and demand her opinion. Ellis loathed clothes shopping. But she sat enrapt in the changing room, her pulse swelling in her throat. Only her eyes moved, locked on me. Finally she followed me into a stall and pushed me up against the door. My clothes piled on the floor. In the mirror across from us I watched a redheaded boy fuck me. One hand covered my mouth, muffling my gasps.

Dane met us across the channel. We bought soft pretzels from a street vendor, walked along the harbor taking pics. Joke porny group selfies for Frankie and sweet ones for ourselves. When Dane snapped pics I kissed Ellis unhesitatingly, then looked him in the eyes. Some part of me wanted to see something there—a flash of resentment, regret. Any clue. But he only looked happy for us.

Before he left, Dane kissed my cheek and murmured, “Now I get why you turned me down. You and her were meant to be.”

“You big sap,” I said, but something bright brimmed inside me, uncontainable.

Ellis and I stayed to watch the sunset. In its own way Boston is haunted—not with silence and loneliness like Maine, but with history. Blood soaked deep into the soil, cannonballs sunk low in the muck. We’d fought here bitterly for independence. I could still sense the bared teeth, tattered sails, the fiery arcs of flung torches. That fight was still in us, in our roots. And I wondered if it was still in me.

If you’re really an artist, I thought, you’ll find a way to make art however you can, like Bukowski said. With half your body gone. With soot and a cave wall. With your own blood.

Something settled heavily in my chest, like a book closing.

I thought of Blue somewhere out there in the lights twinkling across the harbor. Alone in a hotel room, watching the tiny people below. So far away from it, the warmth of skin and breath. From everything real.

Then Ellis took my hand, our fingers dovetailing, and all I thought of was her.

We watched the light fade behind the city and drove back through the black night, home.

—WINTER—

—12—

Snow fell on the beach, coating shells and the stony shore in fine white felt. All the colors softened as if too much water had mixed in. In winter Chebeague Island seemed even more isolated, a snowflake adrift in the great green-black abyss of the Atlantic.

I slid the box up the boat ramp with my toe, carving a trail through the snow. Ellis had told me she could carry them all. I wouldn’t allow it. As if I’d let her show me up.

But as soon as I’d left her line of sight, I’d bitched out.

Most of her stuff was already on the yacht. Frankie let us borrow it to move Ellis back to Portland. Too cold in winter to stay in the cabin. Plus, there was us. Me and her.

Some of my stuff was on the yacht, too.

I hadn’t told Frankie yet that I planned to retire from camming. Didn’t want to leave her in the lurch. I wanted to come to her with a new business plan, and seed money.

And I was almost ready.

Back at the cabin I found Ellis sitting on the bare floor with her laptop, typing rapidly, frowning.

“Are you raging at someone who just pwned you?”

“It’s Frankie,” she muttered.

“Frankie pwned you?”

“Stop saying ‘pwned,’ dork. She’s worried about the site.”

Last month they’d discovered a bug in the cam site code. Ellis had worked round-the-clock to patch it, but repercussions kept echoing. A change here meant a cascading series of changes there, there, and there. She stayed up late, tapping away in the blue screenglow, code flying across the void. Sometimes I curled up and watched her work, wondering if my creative process was as cryptic and arcane to her. An entire universe unfolding inside her head, invisible to me.

Sometimes it reminded me too much of him, and I had to leave the house and walk along the shore, clear my mind. Ellis would find me there and fall in step, silent. She’d take my hand. And everything would be okay.

For a while.

I asked once if she could analyze Blue’s IP logs. Maybe he’d been careless. All it took was one time, one rash log-in attempt from an insecure location, and I’d know. Peaks meant Max, Boston meant Dane. I even skulked at my old coffee shop, swathed in a scarf and beanie, watching Curtis. If I could just look him in the eyes, look at his hands. Why hadn’t I paid more attention to his hands?

Blue never contacted me after Boston. I’d emailed him, messaged him on various sites. The emails bounced. The messages didn’t deliver.

User does not exist.

As if he’d never been real.

“No,” Ellis had said to my request. “That’s a breach of privacy. Frankie could fire me for it.” Her voice wavered. “I thought you let him go, Vada. I thought it was us now.”

“It is, baby.” I put my arms around her, my lips to her ear. “It’s just closure. I hate not knowing why it happened.”

“We don’t always get closure. Sometimes we have to make our own.”

So I tried. Very hard.

And I was almost there.

“We’re pretty much done,” I said, kicking Ellis’s boot. “Couple more boxes and the mattress. No thanks to you.”

“You’re the reason there are so many boxes to begin with.”

“Can’t help it. I enjoy humiliating you with gifts.”

“I don’t think that’s the spirit behind gift-giving.”

“Let me give you the gift of silence,” I said, setting her laptop aside and tackling her to the floor.

I kissed her, my whole body lighting up when we touched, my skin glowing like a paper lantern. Crazy, how wild she still drove me. As if we’d started all over again with limerence and lust. As if she were someone new. I cupped her face and gave her my patented Cheshire grin.

Ellis laughed. “Will you—”

I kissed her again, slower, running my tongue between her lips till she opened her mouth. Pulled back to make a flicker of eye contact, heat filling my head, then wrapped my tongue around hers. We were still in our coats. No fire in the hearth, the cold breathing through the wood. Her mouth scalded me. I kept kissing her deeper, trying to reach the point where we shared one breath, one set of lungs, one everything. She broke away.

“We have to—”

I kissed her again. She stopped trying to speak and used her mouth for more important things. Like me.

Somehow we managed to climb to the loft bed before all our clothes came off. By then Ellis was in control, kissing my breasts and throat and making me feel that weightless submission that came when I lay on my back in the water, palms upturned, mouth open to the sky. We burrowed under the bright white quilt and she put her face between my legs, painting me with her tongue. After, I reciprocated, our hands clasped, crumpling the quilt like crepe paper. It wasn’t always rough and intense. More often now it was this tenderness, touching each other as if something fragile hung between us and we both wanted to protect it, keep it from shattering. I thought of those broken bowls glued back together with gold, more beautiful once they’d been broken. When she came I kissed her softly, adoringly, amazed that this was mine, this beautiful person, that letting go of my fear could feel like this.

You can fall in love again with someone you’re already in love with. It’s like waking from a dream within a dream and finding another layer, the colors more vivid, the light more lucid, the fantasy more real. Being in love is an endless loop of waking to reverie.

We lay side by side, tangled in a spell of blankets and warm skin.

“Estoy tan feliz,” I murmured.

“Me too.” Ellis smiled, one side of her mouth higher than the other. Every time she did that a little bird zigzagged madly inside my rib cage. “I wish time would stop right here.”

“It does, you know.” I spun a finger in her hair. “When someone makes a sketch, a song, a poem, it stops. The moment repeats forever inside that piece of art.”

“Then draw us.”

“Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“I’m a big old scaredy-cat.”

My hand fell. Ellis caught it, raised it to her cheek.

“You’ve already done the bravest thing. You told me what you’ve been holding back.”

But I hadn’t.

Then she kissed me, and for a while I forgot all my fears. There was only color and texture. White sheets folding around us like camellia petals, bare arms intertwined, red hair and near-black spread across the pillow. Like that Toulouse-Lautrec painting of the two girls in bed. A perfect moment.

Ellis nestled her head under my chin, and I said, “It’s almost been a year.”

We both brooded about it lately, a somberness lodged in our bones, weighing heavier the closer we got to the anniversary. Less than a week to go now.

“I wonder what Ryan would’ve done with this year,” I said. “It’s not right, that I’m here and he’s not.”

“Don’t say that.”

I traced a finger over the low ceiling, raw pine. The same thing they’d made his coffin from. Inside lay the urn holding his ashes. There was something perturbing about the cremation, as if Max couldn’t bear for the body to exist a moment longer than necessary. “I wonder what he really wanted to be. Marine. Musician. Photographer.”

“Maybe he just wanted to be himself.”

“That’s sad. Not even having that before you die.”

I felt her tense against me, and kissed the top of her head. If I could shield her from every homophobic asshole out there—the kind who beat up gay kids at school dances, the kind who told their child to pray the gay away—I would.

Maybe it was enough to hold her hand in public.

Maybe if Ryan had had someone like that, he’d still be here.

“It could’ve gone the other way,” I said. “It could’ve been us in the water and Ryan lying awake right now, wondering who we were. All of this is so ephemeral.” I stretched out my right hand and candlelight cast witchy shadows from my fingers. I brushed Ellis’s hair out of her eyes. “You don’t even realize all the things you can lose.”

“You won’t lose me. I promise.”

In my head I wrote the dialogue we didn’t speak.

No matter what I tell you?

No matter what.

“Ellis.”

“Vada.”

Could she feel the craziness happening in my heart right now? Fuck.

“I don’t ever want to lose you again. I don’t ever want to wake up without you at my side.”

It took a second for her to process it. She twisted around to look up at me.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I want to look at your stupid freckles forever, okay?”

I was light-headed, blood pressure dropping from the words I’d just let loose into the universe. Her face was a mix of shock and wonder. Then she threw her arms around my neck so vehemently I actually did start to black out a bit.

“Baby, you’re choking me. Not in a good way.”

She pulled back, covered my mouth and face with kisses, and I gave up trying to breathe and let it happen. In my head I sketched her: hair in wild thistles around that elfin face, eyes lit up like I’d never seen before. Like the kid in her must have looked right after her first kiss, or when she aced a test and got the highest grade in the class. Like she’d just been given the whole world.

All that remained was the bed. Ellis was carrying the last box to the boat as I paced through the empty cabin, remembering. Paint still splattered all over the wood, a furious rainbow. We’d dragged the couch back to the beach house. An empty rectangle outlined where it had sat, and I knelt there, tracing the hollow.

My weight tilted a floorboard. Something white flashed beneath it.

Weird.

I leaned harder and the board corner rose. Below was a letter.

Mail that must have fallen, gotten trapped. I pulled it up with a nail. Torn envelope.

From the Office of the Medical Examiner. To Ellis Carraway.

Wait, what?

I’d let her complete the request form because she was better at that stuff—my lefty handwriting was shit, and I’d just end up doodling on it anyway. But we’d listed me as the recipient.

I pulled out the sheets inside.

Autopsy report: Ryan Francis Vandermeer.

What the actual fuck?

Footsteps on the log stairs.

On instinct I slid the report back into the envelope and dropped it beneath the floorboard. Ellis walked in as I stood.

“Hey,” I said, too brightly.

“Hey yourself. Brandt’s on the next ferry.”

Her cousin had a legit boating license. We figured it’d be good to bring him along. Plus I needed some bonding time with him, since we’d all be living together soon.

I said nothing, staring at her face, my mind turning over and over.

Ellis moved closer. “You okay?”

“Just spacey. Having sex in the middle of moving day was probably not our best idea.”

She blushed and lowered her eyes. Which gave me the chance to move from the hot spot.

I tried to process this, to phrase a conversation starter. Ellis, why? Even if it had fallen there, been mislaid, it was open. She’d read it. Never mentioned it to me.

Before I could begin, my phone buzzed. A text, from the last person I expected.

I need you.

I stood there staring at the screen.

“Who is it?” Ellis said.

“Max.”

She frowned. “What does he want?”

“To see me.”

“Why?”

“Don’t know.” I pocketed it before she could look. “Didn’t sound serious, but who knows with him. Can you and Brandt handle the yacht?”

“Sure.” Ellis touched my arm. “I should go with you, though.”

“It’s fine.”

“Vada.” She cupped my face and peered into it. So observant, so sensitive. Sometimes she seemed to know what I felt before I did. “What’s wrong?”

I realized what she must be thinking: All that talk about forever. Cold feet, second thoughts.

“Nothing, promise,” I said, and kissed her before she could ask more, and though my mind was going a million miles an hour a part of me surrendered to her, lost itself, my heart giving a flutter like a startled bird. I kissed her till the jittery energy in my body became focused and intense, then made myself stop. “I’ll take the ferry. See you tonight at my place?”

Ellis nodded, flushed and breathless and so winsome I could almost forget, for a moment, that she’d hidden something from me. Something she knew I wanted, desperately.

Because why would she do that? To spare me? But she was the one who’d been reluctant to look, not me.

What had she seen?

“Love you,” I said, smiling, as I walked out the door.

Snow fell on the ferry ride, the sky growing cottony and thick. By the time we docked I could barely see my hand before my face. I knew the path by memory, up the hills into the knotted heart of the island where tree roots reached centuries deep, clutching at rock that had been thrown here by glaciers. In Maine, like in Kahlo, the world was stripped close to the nerve.

It was dark when I reached the house. Snow-dark, light reflecting off the dull pearl underbellies of clouds. I scrambled up the porch and banged on the door, shaking powder from my coat.

“Max?”

No answer. But it was unlocked.

I went in cautiously, still calling for him.

The house smelled of leaves and dust, the peppery tang of ice. Lights off. Far cry from the last time I was here.

I walked past the bathroom twice before I came back, slower, peering into the shadows.

“Max?”

He sat in the tub, boots braced on the wall. Glass glinted, moved in an arc. He was drinking.

I found a candle and lit it on the stove, brought it to him.

This time I saw the gun.

It sat on the rim of the tub, dark blue steel shining softly. All the light seemed drawn to it as if it were hungry.

“What are you doing?” I said, sitting on the toilet lid.

I smelled him from here. Whiskey and a musk of sweat and sandalwood, like he’d been working in the woods. His hair was tangled. Fine stubble covered his jaw.

An empty bottle of Jim Beam lay in the tub with him, a half-filled one on the floor.

“Max, how long have you been drinking?”

He finally looked at me. Glazed eyes. “How long have you been lying?”

My spine went cold. “What?”

He drained the glass, reached for the bottle.

I snatched it away. “What the hell’s going on? Why’d you text me?”

“I’m lonely.”

His voice creaked like old wood. His head tipped forward, hair falling in his face. Even with how drunk and surly he was, I felt a wild urge to touch him.

No person should feel this alone.

I lowered myself to the floor. Gingerly, watching him, I pushed the gun away, lifted his hand to the tub ledge and laid mine over it.

I didn’t have to ask about the booze. Anniversary week.

“You should get out of Maine,” I said. “Go somewhere else, till it’s over.”

“It’s never over.”

“Why do you have the gun?” My hand tightened. “If I have to sit here on suicide watch, I will.”

“Don’t worry. Too much of a coward to do it that way.” He laughed, unpleasantly. “I like to touch it.”

His talisman.

In a box in my room were three hand-carved wooden figures. Sometimes, while Ellis was away, or sleeping, I touched the box. Sometimes I opened it and touched them.

We’re not so different, Max. Holding on to our ghosts.

“I’ll come by,” I said. “On the day of.”

He bared his teeth. Not sure if it was supposed to be a smile.

“If I have to sit on your porch in the snow, I will. I’m a stubborn bitch. You know that.” I rubbed his knuckles. “You texted me for a reason. You want to talk.”

“You don’t come around anymore. I missed you.”

“I’ve been busy. And you were being weird about my girlfriend.”

It still gave me a little jolt, to call her that.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you. Either of you. I wanted to protect you.”

I looked at the hand beneath mine. “Ellis is a good person, Max. Better than I deserve. I wish you knew her the way I do.”

“I wish you knew her the way I do.”

“How is that?”

“She’s hurt you. You don’t understand yet, but you will.”

“No more of this ominous shit, okay?” I pressed his hand. “I love her. No matter what, I will always love her. You know what it’s like. You felt it for Ryan. That love will never change.”

“You’re young to be so wise.”

“It’s been a hard life. Makes you grow up fast.”

“I missed this, Morgan. Your voice, your face. I missed you.”

Everything. Slowed. Down.

Morgan.

I turned his hand over. Traced the smooth skin of his palm with a fingertip. Looked up. He was watching me.

“You weren’t there,” I whispered. “I saw everyone who walked through the door. You weren’t there.”

His eyes searched mine.

What had I missed? Someone in the restroom, or already seated? Dane took pics of the café; we scrutinized them later. No one looked remotely familiar.

I let go of Max and stood, dizzy.

“Don’t leave me,” he said.

Oh, god.

I rummaged in my coat for my phone.

Tell Ellis. Call for backup.

“You came into my life,” he said. “You came in and made me feel alive again. And then you left. I need you. Please.”

“How dare you, after what you did to me.”

“What have I done?”

His face was dashed now in candle flame, now shadow. I couldn’t read the look in his eyes.

“You catfished me. Fucked with my head, and my heart. Led me on a wild-goose chase.”

“Wild-goose chase?”

“I knew it was you. You coward, watching me on cam. Bitching out in Boston. Do you know how much you fucked me up?”

“It was only a few minutes. I couldn’t stand it.” He glanced away. “You’re like a daughter to me. It felt wrong.”

“Don’t fucking call me that. That’s disgusting.”

“I mean it. I couldn’t watch. I wanted to pay you to stop.”

“You did. You paid me to stop camming for anyone else.” I knelt to his level, met those vivid blue eyes. “This is why you were always casting aspersions on Ellis. Trying to play me against her. Your ‘archnemesis.’ You fucking asshole.”

Max sat up straighter. “Watch your mouth. I said it was only a few minutes. Then you left, to do a show for someone.”

I was breathing hard. He faced me, unflinching.

“You were there every night, Max. For months. You and me.”

“You’ve got me mixed up with somebody.”

“What, you just stumbled across my site, despite the region ban? Accidentally used a VPN?”

He shrugged. “It’s all Greek to me. I understand joints and ball bearings. Not ones and zeroes.”

“How did you find me?”

“I looked up your picture on Google. It brought up other photos of you. With ties around your neck, and things like that. I was worried, so I clicked.”

I laughed in his face. “Sure.”

“It let me watch for free. You were right there. It broke my heart, watching you do that to yourself. Choking. You were in so much pain. I never realized how deep it went until then.” His throat twisted, words straining out. “I thought it was because of Ellis. You know, the way she is. Love means being happy for someone even if it hurts, but I thought I could spare you that pain. I was wrong, Vada. You’d love her even if it destroyed you. Told you I’m bad at this father thing.”

Either he had the best poker face in history, or he wasn’t lying.

What the hell?

I got up, paced the bathroom. “What is this? Are you collecting dirt on us? Is this part of a lawsuit or something?”

“I haven’t talked to any lawyers. I told you, I mean you no harm.”

“Good, because you don’t want to fuck with me. I’ve been collecting dirt, too.” I decided to gamble. “We found Ryan’s ex. And we had a nice long chat. He told us everything.”

“Who?”

“His ex-boyfriend, Sergio. In Bar Harbor.”

Max blinked.

“Your gay son’s partner.”

“He wasn’t seeing anyone.”

“Guess he didn’t tell you.”

“No, I’d know something like that. I spoke with his therapist.” Max shook his head. “He’s never been to Bar Harbor.”

“We tracked this guy down, talked to him in person. He knew Ryan.”

“You talked to this person, or Ellis did?”

I started to answer and then my mouth hung open, stuck.

He nodded, slowly. “You didn’t actually meet anyone. You’re repeating what she told you. What did this person supposedly say?”

Even though I was shaken I lobbed another dart, aiming blind. “He told us who beat Ryan up.”

Max stood, grabbing the shower rod for balance. “Give me a name. Give me a name and I’ll take care of it.”

His hand drifted toward the gun.

He legit wanted to kill someone. Holy shit.

It couldn’t be him, on the autopsy. Not his hands making those bruise patterns. He didn’t hurt Ryan. He wanted to kill whoever had touched his son. The same way I’d wreck anyone who hurt Ellis.

None of this fit what I thought I’d known.

What the hell was going on?

“Who did it?” Max said.

“Answer me first. How did you watch me on cam? There’s a region ban.”

He exhaled, annoyed. “Ask your computer whiz friend. I don’t know how that shit works.”

Bugs in the code.

“You found something.” Max narrowed his eyes. “You have a name. I need that name, Vada.”

“I was bluffing, okay? The only name I have is Skylar. We still haven’t even found her.”

“What?”

“We looked everywhere. There was no Skylar at his school. Can you just tell me who—”

“You still don’t see.” He seemed almost about to laugh. “You looked right at her and didn’t see.”

For some reason I thought of Blue’s last email.

you looked right at me. through me.

“See what?” I said.

“You cracked the laptop. You got the photos.”

“Right.”

“You saw her.”

“Skylar wasn’t in them.”

“Yes, she was.”

My thoughts skidded, losing traction.

“You’re playing with me,” Max said. “This is all a game to you. You and your girlfriend, playing detective. And you still don’t realize she’s playing against you, too.”

He barreled toward me and I backpedaled, but he stormed past, toward the stairs. The gun was still on the tub.

“Max,” I called.

“Please leave. No more of this.”

“How did you see Skylar’s pics?”

He turned around, leaning on the wall. In the darkness I could barely see him.

“She showed me.”

“You met her?”

Now he started to laugh, dryly.