“Hey,” she said with obvious surprise. “What are you—”
“I don’t want to be your friend,” I said, because I knew if I waited even a second I would lose my nerve. “I want more than that. I get it if you don’t, but I do and I’m ready for it.”
Her mouth opened and closed but no words came out.
“Here’s the thing,” I said. “Someone told me once that being with the right person makes the world seem like a less scary place, and the world seems less scary when I’m with you. And I like myself better when I’m with you. And I think that’s a good thing and something I’m finally ready to deal with, so . . . I want us to be together.”
She didn’t say anything, just reached out and took my hand and pulled me inside the house. She pulled me up the stairs and into her bedroom, where she locked the door behind us. Then she pulled me toward her, so close I could feel the pattern of her sweater and the button of her jeans pressing against my body, and then she kissed me.
? ? ?
Later Ren and I were curled up on her bed, watching a movie on her laptop. Well, she was watching the movie. I was mostly watching her.
It was a perfect moment. Deep in the marrow of my bones, I was warm.
“My throat’s so dry,” she said, sighing and burrowing closer into my side. “It’s too bad I’m so comfortable here.”
I raised an eyebrow at her.
“I guess I’ll have to get up,” she continued, “and then I’ll have to get comfortable all over again, which can be tough. You’ve got to find the right configuration of pillows and make sure—”
I groaned and rolled out of the bed. “What do you want?”
“Diet Coke, please!” she said. “Good job picking up on my very subtle clues.”
Downstairs I found Kai already standing in front of the open refrigerator. It was basically where he lived.
“Hey, man,” he said when he noticed me. He took in my slightly rumpled appearance and grinned. “Whatcha been doing?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Right.” He offered me his fist to bump and then started gathering ingredients for a sandwich. “Be good to her though, seriously. She’s a good kid.”
“I’ll try,” I said.
“Dude, this sandwich is going to be epic. Hey, you need to give me your sister’s number. I want to catch up with her. Sexy Lexi! I never hit that in high school, and it’s a damn shame. Came close a couple of times, but she and your brother were, like, attached at the hip, and he would have killed me.”
I tried to smile to humor him. Even though Lex wasn’t actually my sister, I didn’t want to hear about the possibility of him “hitting” her.
But then I realized this was an opportunity.
“I forgot you knew Lex and Patrick in high school,” I said. “Patrick was pretty tough back then, huh?”
“Shit yeah. He could be a scary dude when he got worked up, and he was crazy protective of Lex.” Kai looked down at his sandwich as he squirted mustard haphazardly across two slices of bread. “They were close, you know. Like really close. No one ever messed with her because they knew they’d get cut off or worse.”
“What do you mean?” I said. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and pretended to check my texts. What I was actually doing was starting an audio recording. I wasn’t sold on Jessica’s confession, and Kai, who obviously knew about Patrick’s checkered past, might say something interesting I’d want Nicholas to hear.
“I mean he’d beat the shit out of them, man. Damn, where did I put the cheese? I just had it.” Kai searched through the ingredients on the countertop. I reached for the bag of deli cheese slices that was about four inches from his hand and gave it to him, and he dissolved into giggles. That’s when I realized just how high he was.
“No,” I said. “What did you mean by ‘cut off’?”
“Well, before he was Mister Big Important Lawyer Guy, Patty was the biggest dealer at Calabasas High,” Kai said. “If you pissed him off, no one would sell to you.”
“Yeah?”
“Hell yeah. He was a badass, and no one touched his little sister.” He took a giant bite from his sandwich and started to laugh. When he spoke, it was around a mouthful of food. “This one time a guy grabbed Lex’s ass in the hall, and after school Patrick just started whaling on the dude’s car with a baseball bat. It was awesome. They got into this big fight. Pretty sure Patty put the guy in the hospital.”
I could see it all in my head. Danny poking around Patrick’s room, looking for money to spend at the arcade with his friends or just looking for dirt on him. What he stumbled on instead was Patrick’s stash. So much pot and pills and powder that even Robert Tate wouldn’t be able to pull enough strings to keep Patrick out of serious trouble. Danny told Patrick he’d need a hundred bucks to keep quiet. When Patrick refused, Danny yelled for their mom, just to scare him. But Patrick lost his temper. He hit Danny, harder than he’d meant to, and Danny never got up again.
“No one messed with Lex after that,” Kai continued, “even though she was pretty much the hottest girl in school. Such a fucking waste of a perfect rack, but no one would risk asking her out.”
“Not even you?” I asked.
He laughed. “Not even me. I wasn’t suicidal. But maybe now that Patrick’s all upstanding and shit, he wouldn’t mind me getting back into touch with his little sister, you know?”
“Why did you two stop being friends?” I asked.
He shrugged. “You disappeared, and they hauled his ass to jail because they thought he’d killed you or something. He went straight after that, got totally boring. He wouldn’t even talk to me anymore.” He sounded actually hurt about that last part. “The last day I talked to him was actually the day before you got snatched.”
“Yeah?” I said. When Kai stuck his head back in the refrigerator to fish out a beer, I glanced down at my phone to make sure it was still recording.
He nodded. “He called me and asked me to go to the movies and buy him a ticket.”
“Huh?”
“It was this thing we’d do for each other sometimes,” Kai said, “if we were doing something we shouldn’t be. I had this girlfriend, right, that my parents hated. Forbid me to see her, like some Romeo and Juliet shit. She lived up in Ventura, so when I’d go see her, Patrick would go to the movies and buy two tickets. He’d give me one of the stubs, and when my parents asked where I was, I could show it to them. Couldn’t have been up in Ventura, I was at the movies! I’d do it for him sometimes too.”
My heart was thumping. “And he asked you to do that for him the night before I disappeared?”
“That afternoon, yeah,” he said. He started rooting around in the freezer. “I never even got to give him the stub. It was a zoo around your house, and he wouldn’t take my calls. Damn, I could have sworn there were ice cream sandwiches in here!”
“Did you tell the police?” I asked.
“Why would I?”
“Because . . .” Then I realized. The police would never ask about what Patrick was doing the day before Danny was reported missing.