One of her perfect black brows arches and a wicked smile tugs at her mouth. “What if I want you to change your mind?”
The thought that this might be my last chance to be with her hits me like a wrecking ball. The temptation to tow her into the bedroom and spend the rest of the day demonstrating just how much I love her is overpowering. I teeter on the precipice for a long moment before reaching for the door handle. I’d like you to remember that you’re the adult in this scenario, Mr. Brenner. Time to act like one. “Call me when you’re done at school.”
She presses up onto her toes. “They’re not going to win,” she whispers, then kisses me. “They can’t keep us apart.”
I pull open the door and she steps through, but when she glances back at me from her car, the same way Detective Diaz did, I know she’s wrong.
Chapter 15
Blaire
Caiden says it too risky to see each other while we’re being investigated, and just yesterday, he told me we shouldn’t talk on the phone either. He’s shutting me out and I don’t know what to do about it.
But I’ve done as he asks, because I’m starting to worry that I screwed this up. Gloria called me two days ago and said Detective Diaz was questioning people from Tino’s. I don’t think anyone there saw us doing anything but talking.
I don’t think.
But what if they did? I’ve played everything over in my head, and there was a kiss on the sidewalk someone might have seen.
My window is open and the soft sun of an early-June morning slants across my bed. It feels good on my skin. I use the sensation to ground me in this moment and keep my thoughts from drifting.
Everything is going to be fine. No one saw anything.
Someone is knocking around in the kitchen and I know it has to be Mom. Dad is gone for the weekend to some convention in San Diego, and even though Marcus just got home from L.A. last night, there’s no way he’s up at nine on a Saturday morning.
I’m hunched over my AP history book. With graduation only a few weeks away, most everyone in my class has checked out, including Zoey, even though she’s only a junior. Most teachers have given up and stopped assigning homework. But not mine. My acceptance to Berkeley is provisional. I can’t get a B in this class.
The third time through the reading, it finally starts to make sense, words and paragraphs coming together in fully formed concepts that I can grasp, and when there’s a knock at my bedroom door, I realize that I’ve gone nearly a full hour without obsessing over Caiden.
“Yeah?” I say.
Mom cracks open my door. My senses go on high alert when I see her ashen complexion and the concern lining her face. “Blaire, honey, there’s someone here to speak to you. Can you come downstairs?”
“Um…” I look down at my T-shirt. “Okay. Just give me a sec.”
She nods and closes the door. I hear her feet on the stairs, then voices. She’s talking to a woman. How did I not hear the door?
I go to the window and look out at the street. Parked behind my Mini at the curb is the black sedan I saw at the high school. The urge to climb out the window is overwhelming, but it’s a two-story drop with no handy trellis or tree. And disappearing will only make us look guiltier.
I yank on the shorts from the floor near my bed and trudge downstairs. Detective Diaz is sitting on the sofa, sipping a cup of coffee.
She sets her coffee down and stands when she sees me. “Blaire,” she says.
Mom comes in from the kitchen and we all sit.
“I may have overstepped,” Detective Diaz says. “I didn’t realize you hadn’t discussed your situation with Caiden Brenner with your family.”
I shoot a panicked glance at Mom. She looks confused…or really more blindsided, but she won’t meet my eyes. “I told you, there is no ‘situation.’”
She looks at me for a long moment, then turns to my mother. “I wonder if I can have a moment alone with Blaire.”
Mom nods and rises from her seat. Finally her eyes find mine. “I’ll be in the bedroom…if you need me.”
I almost laugh out loud at the notion of her “being there for me,” but something in her expression stops me. Under her shock is something deeper. Something maternal. I feel my heart bunch.
She looks back from the door, once again relaying some message I’m not quite grasping with her eyes, then slips into her room.
Once the door closes behind her, Detective Diaz reaches into her bag on the floor at her feet and pulls out an iPad. “I need you to see something.” She taps on it a few times then turns it for me to see. A supernova explodes in my chest as a video of me on the hood of the Mini plays. The clip is dark and grainy, but there’s no mistaking what Caiden is doing to me, his head between my legs and his fingers digging into my ass as I moan out sounds that aren’t even human.
Gloria said they were questioning people from Tino’s. But who would have seen this? Who would have recorded it?