“What was he, some kind of stalking dipshit?”
“No. Well. Yeah.” I throw my hands up. “Not the normal kind. He was popular. Way more popular than me…”
“Oh, well that makes it better.” He rolls his eyes, though he’s still furious. “And in all this, you forgot to mention you had a stalker because…?”
“It was years ago. Jesus, Aeron. I haven’t seen him in an age.” Though it’s feasible he figured out the alibi thing.
That it was my mum who took the money from Aeron.
The air conditioning is suddenly uncomfortably cold, gooseflesh puckering my skin.
“God. You’ve got a lot to learn.” He sighs as he falls down beside me. Peels off his t-shirt and fans himself. It’s hard to understand the bulk of Aeron until he starts getting naked; unclothed, he looks like he should be hanging in the window of a butcher’s shop, each cut of meat neatly marked. “Is he still on your Facebook?”
“Of course not—”
“Wrong. Look. People like him, you keep them sweet from a distance. Don’t ever give them a reason to doubt you. I have a whole litany of fucktards from college as friends online, and none of them ever talk to the media because I press Like on their shitty, whinging statuses once in a while, and it bloats their sense of loyalty.”
“Bloats,” I repeat flatly. “Like a corpse.”
“Shut up. You’ve cut him off, so he feels free to talk. You should never have done that.”
I grab a white linen cushion and hug it to my chest. “I like my privacy.”
“People like us have to fly six thousand miles to get privacy, Leo. Deal with it. You’re lucky he hasn’t said anything else.” He prods at the print outs and snorts. “He was actually quite complimentary.”
“We weren’t on bad terms or anything. I think.”
“You weren’t on terms at all, since you cut him off. Thank fuck you’re pretty, huh?”
If Dean had figured out the alibi thing…well. Surely he’d have said something, right? Judging by the quotes Gwen printed out, he was kind of defending me…if suggesting that Rachel killed herself because of me—and not Aeron—is defending.
Huh.
“What are we going to do about the second face, Aeron?”
He blinks at me. Heat and sweat have darkened his eyelashes; they look longer, ashen and angelic at the same time. “What would you like me to say?”
“The guy looks like you. The FBI happen to be interested in the clip. We need to stop assuming this is all a big bunch of coincidences.” I reach out experimentally, dragging a fingertip down the damp plane of his cheekbone. “We’re safe to talk about it here, right? Or do you just not want to talk?”
“I know it isn’t a coincidence.” He closes his eyes. For a moment, he ripples toward my touch like liquid; the sunlight plays with his features, just as I do. We’re both inexplicably drawn.
“You feel powerless,” I murmur, stroking him. “It’s why you brought us all here.”
He flinches. “No.”
“It’s okay, you know.”
“Help me out here, smart ass. The guy’s only going to look like me if we’re related. Yes? I played Super Mario while my mother buried my dad—”
My stomach lurches, all the nausea from the plane resurfacing in one bile-flavored punch. My hand drops from his face.
“—So I’m left with the highly plausible theory that this is some kind of government conspiracy, and he, Ash and I are genetic clones, spaced out and tested in various environments to see if we’re all still sociop—” He cuts off. Just bites the word in half.
The room pulls silent around is. Squeezes us in its fist.
I peer over the cushion at Aeron; he watches me with the eyes of a hunter. His chest falls and rises in breathless panic.
“You can say the word,” I tell him. “It doesn’t change anything between us.”
He doesn’t say it. Instead, it hangs there like the slithering knot of sounds that it is, and I turn it over in my mouth, taste the fear in it.