Tyler lay in bed with Kinley. She smiled at him, her lips swollen from kissing. She was damn good at it. Especially for someone who’d done so little of it. Tyler was willing to bet all the cash he had that he was her first kiss. Girls like Kinley didn’t kiss much.
Still, he couldn’t help but think that maybe she’d suddenly been all about the making out because she was trying to distract him from something. Maybe he didn’t have her grades, but he wasn’t a total dumbass.
“Can I ask you a question?” he said finally. He studied her eyes. They were sweet and clear, but there was something in them. Something a little guarded. A little strange.
“Sure.” She smiled, anticipating something sweet.
“Have you heard anything?” Tyler asked. He rolled away from her and out of bed. “Is there—anything? Yet?”
He felt like an asshole for asking. He didn’t want to know. But he had to.
Kinley shook her head. “Honestly, no. But I haven’t looked for it. I leave the room when the television is on. I haven’t checked any social media since”—she paused, her hand motioning at something out of sight—“that night.”
“So you think he hasn’t been found.” Tyler crossed the room and leaned up against her computer desk.
Kinley sighed. “Probably not. Sometimes cops hold stuff back to see if anyone will come forward.”
“Why would anyone?” Tyler asked.
Kinley ducked her head, and very quickly, Tyler grabbed her hearing aid and flash drive off the desk and stuffed it in his back pocket.
“I don’t want to think about this, Tyler.” She looked up at him. “What good will it do?”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “I don’t know. I just thought it might be better to have the facts.”
Kinley’s eyes turned hard. “If the cops come to question me, I don’t want to know anything about what’s happened. Anything at all. I want to be clueless.”
Tyler squinted at her. “You? Didn’t you place, like, first in a regional current events quiz bowl or something?”
Kinley shrugged. “So?”
“So maybe you should know these things. Maybe it’s weird that you don’t know at all what’s happening in an area you’d be an expert on. Besides, if your professor randomly stopped coming to class, wouldn’t you be curious?”
“I just don’t want to know, okay?” Kinley said. “Tyler, I just can’t think about it. I don’t want to think about it.”
Tyler shook his head. “Just try to process what I said, all right? We can’t go quietly into the night on this.”
“I’m not stupid.”
“I didn’t say you were,” Tyler said. “I’m just saying it will look suspicious.” He shifted, and felt the weight of the flash drive in his jeans. It was practically nothing, but it was hers, and he was stealing it. He had to.
“And you know this because, what, your many run-ins with the law?” Her voice was cutting.
“That’s not fair.” Her words hurt more than they should have—they burrowed in, just under his skin. It wasn’t that he hadn’t heard them before. Hell, he heard them all the time. But he’d hoped Kinley, of all people, had thought more of him than that.
“Isn’t it?” she challenged.
She wasn’t wrong. Damn, that stung. But she wasn’t.
“I thought you were better than that, Kinley,” he said, his voice quiet.
Kinley tilted her chin up, just slightly. “Are you saying I’m wrong?”
Tyler glared at her. Anger started, hot and burning. He had been so stupid to believe that Kinley could ever understand. Did she even like him? Or was he just some asshole she was using to get her mind off the murder?
After all, girls like Kinley didn’t like delinquent guys. They were meant for douche-canoe guys who wore thick sweater-vests and had glasses pushed up too far on their noses.
“No. You’re right. I guess you already know this, but I have regular meetings with a probation officer. So I know the law. I know how cops work, okay?”
Kinley stared at him, as if just remembering who he really was. “So maybe we should be acting more like ourselves.”
“Which means I should be getting into trouble. Being risky. Right?”
“And I should be toeing the line. Which does not actually involve this.” She motioned at Tyler and back at herself.
“So I’m a problem?”
“Are you?”
And suddenly, she was close to him, and he wanted to kiss her. He wanted to kiss her hard, and he wanted her to remember him and forget that she wasn’t supposed to be with him.
But his anger was hot and painful, and there was something else there. Something beneath it.
He didn’t trust her.
But he needed her. He needed someone who knew everything that had happened. He needed someone just to be there with him. In fact, he was pretty sure he’d never actually needed anyone or anything like he needed her.
He leaned in and kissed her. She melted underneath him and kissed him back, her arms encircling his neck as he pulled her against him.
“I need you,” he whispered in her ear. It was the kindest, and the most honest, thing he’d ever said to a girl.
Kinley put her head on his chest. “I’m sorry, Tyler. I need you too.”