Chapter 21 Neve
TWENTY-ONE
NEVE
“How’s that hangover?” Cynthia asks as I come padding into the open area of our apartment.
My pulse is thrashing around inside my temples, I can barely open my eyes, and I have a black velvet blanket wrapped around me like a cloak, with red knee-high socks for extra warmth.
I squint at Cynthia as she scrambles eggs on the stovetop, the first time I remember either of us cooking in weeks.
The scent of something sweet is in the air too and I glance at the countertop beside her—where Sylvan smashed Will’s nose—and see a stack of pancakes, maple syrup in a glass bottle, and butter on a platter.
I stop, frozen, as Cyn turns to look at me over her shoulder.
She’s in a black pajama set, her curly hair up in a thick bun on her head, and her eyes look a hell of a lot less tired than mine, despite the fact we stayed out the same amount of time, both taking an Uber back when I was done speaking to the boys.
Although it felt more like a battle than a conversation.
She didn’t ask questions last night, gushing to me instead about wanting to fuck the guy she met—a football player—but she was too drunk to trust herself, so she didn’t go home with him.
Tasia was nowhere to be found. She vanished alongside Clay and Ace, but Karter was still there. She took her own Uber, though.
Now, I think Cynthia is going to ask those questions she was too tipsy to verbalize last night.
I’m not looking forward to it. At all. Not because I don’t want to talk to her, but because I’m having trouble making sense of it in my own mind. I need a little more time to psychoanalyze, but it looks like the therapy session is going to come before I figure it all out.
“Who is the feast for?” I glance down the hallway to our locked front door and panic for a second, thinking maybe she’s invited someone over. Okay, so, yeah, maybe I do need to talk about it.
“Us,” Cynthia says, and her tone is bleary but upbeat.
Okay. Maybe she doesn’t want to talk about last night? Maybe she’s just feeling hungover, too.
I’m too tired to puzzle it out so I pad over to the breakfast nook, a miniature kitchen island, and sit at one of the barstools, my socked feet tapping along the bottom rung, the blanket still a shroud around me.
Cynthia turns off the stovetop, divvies up the eggs into two separate plates, then starts forking two pancakes onto each.
“We,” she says, gathering up both plates and turning, setting one down in front of me, and another at the place beside me. “Need to talk.”
Fuck.
She’s not done, though.
She heads to the cabinets, snatches out two glasses, thunks them both on the counter, then pulls the apple juice from the fridge. With a knowing glance at me, she opens the freezers and tosses some ice cubes into mine.
It’s my favorite way to drink anything.
With ice.
I mean, I did grow up in the South.
When she’s brandished the glasses toward me, and I’ve gotten up and retrieved forks, the syrup, and the butter, and we’re both sitting next to each other, I freeze, staring down at my plate.
Pancakes are one of my favorite foods on earth, probably right up there with cannolis. But I avoid both, as often as possible. And I don’t eat before eleven, and it’s only just about to turn ten, according to the clock on the oven.
I pick up my fork, because Cyn went to all the trouble, and she has hers in her hand already. But when I glance over at her, feeling oddly like I’m in trouble, she’s already looking at me.
“I know your weird daily fasting ritual,” she says, eyeing my plate, “so I’ll eat, while you talk. But at some point today…” She nods toward the food in front of me. “You’re finishing all of that. Besides, you’re hot, but you look like death.”
I swallow tightly as she cuts a triangle of her pancake with the side of her fork.
When Nolan was responsible for feeding me on those days Mom had to go into work early, he’d slice a kiwi for us, or else peel off a Slimfast shake from the plastic web of them, and split it into two different glasses, his and hers.
Thinking of Nolan, I realize I need to text him back since he’s been blowing up my phone, asking for updates. But I don’t feel like dealing with him right now.
The blanket that was my safety net falls from my shoulders into a black puddle on the floor.
Cool air graces my back.
Cynthia is eating, and she’s staring at me.
Chills run over my arms, forming goosebumps.
“What are we talking about?” I finally ask.
She narrows her eyes. “Do not.”
But the truth is, I’m not sure exactly what she knows.
I never told her about Will being in our place, and now, I realize that’s probably for the best. If the detectives question her, she’ll truthfully be able to say she’s never met him in her life, and if they check the cameras outside the building, if he’s on them, they’ll be able to corroborate her story. She wasn’t here when he came by.
So I don’t think I should tell her now.
And has his identity been released on campus yet? Possibly. But would the name ring a bell? Unless it specifically stated Will was a friend of Jackson’s or connected to the previous murder, she might not even make the correlation.
So despite the fact the murders are the thing pressing most on my mind, I don’t think it’s really sitting in Cyn’s head at all.
Then that means…
“Tasia thinks you’re a snake.” She says it with a small smile at me, and I know she doesn’t think that, or if she does, she thinks it only affects Tasia and thus, she doesn’t care, because she and I are firm friends.
But the guilt settles heavy in my stomach, despite the fact I haven’t eaten anything.
I’m lying to Cyn, too. A lie by omission, so maybe not quite a snake, but it’s still not giving her the truth.
“And how did she come to that conclusion?” I ask.
I don’t really care what Tasia thinks. While I think we could probably be friends, we currently aren’t, not really, and I have more pressing things to worry about.
But I want to know exactly where this is going in terms of what it is Cynthia expects me to tell her.
I’m in that weird position of not wanting to say more than necessary but not knowing what my friend knows.
Cynthia swallows a bite, sets her fork down, then grabs the maple syrup between us in a bottle shaped like a leaf.
I roll my eyes at it.
Fucking Canadians.
I play with the eggs on my plate by moving them around with my fork.
“Something to do with you coming when Sylvan Connor called. Then she said she saw Faust Darling walk into the private room Sylvan led you into.” Cynthia’s cheeks curve up as she grins at me, putting down the syrup and picking up her fork again.
She tilts her head expectantly.
Heat flushes along my throat.
“If you don’t tell me right now, Neve Allison Devine, if you had a threesome with the two hottest boys to ever play hockey in this entire country, I’m going to lose my mind.” She slices another triangle of pancakes, stacked two high.
My stomach grumbles and she narrows her eyes, then teases me by opening her mouth and flicking her tongue along the syrup that drops from her fork.
It’s kind of hot, but I just sigh heavily, blowing out a breath.
“We didn’t have a threesome. I mean, maybe I straddled the blond one, but—”
“Frostbite?” she quips, and my eyes widen at the nickname.
“What?” she asks. “You had to have seen some of the signs the girls bring to the games. Frostbite, I’ll melt you.
Frostbite, let me freeze.” She mocks the words I’ve definitely never seen—but I’ve only been to two games and I was a little distracted at both of them—then laughs at herself as she takes another bite of her food.
“That’s not actually his nickname.” I don’t ask it as a question, because it’s fucking absurd. It does make sense, which makes it more annoying.
“You’re stalling. So you dry fucked Frostbite after dry fucking another guy… What was his name by the way? He was hot, but not as hot as Sylvan Connor. Those tattoos on his throat though, hmmm.” She makes a groaning sound, and I can’t disagree with her attraction, but I fucked that up.
“Ace,” I supply.
“Ace!” Cynthia snaps her fingers. “I think he was in my photography history course last year. I thought those tattoos looked familiar.” She gives me a look, wiggling her eyebrows. “Does Connor or Darling have any tattoos the public can’t see?”
I take a dramatic breath. “Cynthia.” I need to tell her at least some of the truth. “I don’t know what’s going on with me and them, but that’s not why we were in a room together.”
She must notice the nerves in my voice.
She sets down her fork, swallows, then swivels on her stool to face me, and I do the same to her, our knees brushing.
Reaching for me, she grabs my wrists gently in her hands.
“Tell me what happened, Neve. If they hurt you, I swear to God I will—”
“They didn’t,” I say quickly, although I think of Sylvan cornering me last night and wonder if I’m being entirely honest about that. I inhale. Exhale. Meet her gaze.
Then I tell her about Will Barbour, leaving out the part where he came here, which makes the truth seem less spooky, but I can’t have her involved.
Not until I know exactly what I’m involved in.