“Yep.” He took another long drag.

“Then your fascination with me will probably go away.” As much as I felt a twinge of regret at that thought, I felt relief too, and that made me feel a little more sane.

“I doubt it.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “Then I’ll just feel less guilty being with you. I won’t be the dirty older pervert who ruined you.” He blew a long stream of smoke out. “We’ll be partners in crime.”

I shook my head, which had just started to pound. “Yeah, we’ll be just like Bonnie and Clyde,” I said sarcastically. “It won’t work, anyway. In order to do the bad things, I’d have to do them with you, so you’d be like my rebel mentor. And since you’d have the upper hand, we couldn’t be partners.”

“That’s where you’re thinking too much like Jake’s girlfriend.” Saxon gave a careless, one-shouldered shrug. “I’m willing to keep our relationship open.”

“What does that mean?” I didn’t bother to point out that we weren’t in a relationship, because Saxon would just laugh at that. I was deep enough in this to know that he wasn’t going to get tripped up with technicalities.

“It means if you need to do some experimenting without me, I’m not going to preach you a sermon about it.” There was no light except for the moon coming through the window. It highlighted the planes of his face and glinted off of his eyes, making him look like a ghost. “I’m not saying I won’t beat the crap out of a few guys to work out my jealousy. I’m just saying that I’m not going to expect you to be on some leash.”

“Like a pet,” I snapped.

He didn’t seem upset at all. He seemed amused, and that only made me more upset. “No, not like a pet. A pet is something you keep on a leash, Bren. Or in a cage. Or right by your side. You would be free. With me. No checking in, no rules.”

“You can’t have this both ways, Saxon.” The feeling that went through me was mostly sadness. “You can’t have us united and let me do what I want while you do what you want.”

“Why not?” he demanded. Now he seemed a little irritated.

“Because you have to give things up to be in a relationship.” I spoke with all the wisdom of someone who had dated one guy for four months. It wasn’t much, but it was more experience than Saxon had. I finally had the ability to trump him in something!

“I disagree.” He got up and put his hands on my waist. “I think you can be yourself completely and let the person you’‘re with do the same thing,” he said lowly, his voice falling as he bent his head. “And I think you can enjoy each other without all of the complications of being monogamous.” He put his lips on mine, and there was the burn I had felt before, the excitement, but it was dampened.

This wasn’t what I’d wanted. Even given my low expectations as far as a relationship with him went, this was not at all what I had expected.

I pulled my lips from his. “You want me all to yourself sometimes, but sometimes you’re happy to think about me with other guys? It makes no sense. You make no sense.”

“No one makes any sense. That’s my point.” He kissed my neck slowly, flicking his tongue on my skin. “I’m just honest. Sometimes I want you alone, sometimes I’m willing to acknowledge I can’t do it all for you. Not that I’m happy about that one, by the way.” His kissed all along the underside of my jaw, and it felt so incredibly good I could almost forget the idiot things he was blabbering about. “I just feel like we would both like being flexible together.” He laughed at his own dirty pun.

I pulled away. “I’m going to bed.” My neck was painted with the cooling moisture of his tongue, my mouth still puffy from our hard kissing.

“Coward,” he said affectionately.

“Take a look at yourself,” I said, so bone tired, I could only think about my bed.

I made my way down the hall, still in Saxon’s clothes, the acrid smell of smoke so overwhelming I considered a shower, but decided I was too exhausted. I stopped outside of Mom’s door. Part of me wanted to crawl into bed with her, not to tell her any of this crap I had managed to wade deep into, but just to be near her. But I knew she’d be preoccupied with the smell of smoke on me. Mom worried a lot about that kind of thing. Good thing she didn’t know the other less than desirable activities I’d been participating in lately. Things that would make a few cigarettes look like nothing.

Chapter Eight

Once I got to my room, I expected to pass out from weariness, but even though my body was heavy and beaten, my mind raced a hundred miles an hour. I tossed and turned, something that was completely out of my norm, then pulled out my laptop and logged on to Facebook.

Jake was still my friend. My heart leapt a little when I saw that the picture of the two of us was still the one he had up.

I wondered why this had happened in the first place. Now, groggy, miserable, and disillusioned by Saxon’s cowardly hard-ass approach to dating, I wondered why I hadn’t grabbed on to Jake and never let go. I wondered why I had ever let my mind wander to anyone else or to anything else.

I clicked his picture section. The album had been renamed. Now it just said “Gone.” I opened it, though I knew that wasn’t the best idea considering how much I already had crammed and crashing in my head. There were four new pictures.

The first one was actually two pictures next to one another. One side was a color picture of me, smiling in the diner, a forkful of waffle held out to the camera. The other side was a black and white close up of a waffle, cut up with two butter knives stuck in it and a cigarette smashed in the center. My breath caught in my throat. It was such a weirdly ugly, jarring image. And very similar to the one of the apple with the knife through it that I had taken earlier.

Each picture after was done in the same format. On the left side was a color picture of me, on the right a black and white of whatever had been in the picture with me, but undone. There was a picture of me in front of the school, then a close-up of the school mascot, toilet papered and graffitied. There was the picture of the overlook where we had skipped school, me smiling brightly, then a black and white of the same backdrop, deserted, a dusky light making it look ominous. And the last was me sitting on Jake’s bed, grinning like an idiot. The black and white on the other side showed his blankets rumpled and thrown, and a wrapper on the sheets.

A condom wrapper?

I felt my throat tighten. I wasn’t sure. I’d never had a reason to use a condom, but Jake had some. I had found them deep in his closet when I was spying. He told me he had bought them while he was still living crazily.

I swallowed hard. Was I being melodramatic? But Jake was a precise artist. He was methodical. If there was a wrapper in the middle of that picture, it was there to send me a message. He knew I’d check it. He knew it would make me crazy.

I realized then how dangerous it was to get so close to someone. Only Jake could know exactly how to punish me so perfectly.

I simultaneously realized that I deserved every second of agony. I thought about him smiling his slow, slightly crooked smile at someone else. I imagined him laying her down and taking his time, being gentle. Or had he gone back to the way he was before? Drunk and uncaring?

How had it happened so fast? It was winter break. All of the lowlifes in the Sussex County area would be throwing parties, getting plastered and humping each other with jolly abandon. If Jake wanted, he could pick up a different girl, or even two, every night of the week, and it could happen in no time at all. In just one day, with just a few stupid decisions, he and I had probably smashed everything good and real we spent the last few months building together. And I started the whole ball rolling.