Chapter 62 Learn The Wrong Lesson
LEARN THE WRONG LESSON
Boyfriend - Dove Cameron
Honeymonster
Iknock once and don’t wait for an answer. That’s the rule with Kayla. You hesitate, she’ll see you as weak and dismiss you. I shoulder the door open with my hip and come in carrying far too much food like this is a conscious lifestyle choice and not panic disguised as hospitality.
“Right,” I announce, dropping the bags onto the small table. “I have made several executive decisions, most of them questionable.”
Kayla looks up from where she’s perched on the edge of the bed, hair loose, expression neutral in a way that always makes me feel like I’ve walked into the middle of something she’s already solved. She glances at the bags, then at me.
“You over-ordered,” she says calmly.
“Incorrect,” I reply with a grin. “I planned for options.”
She snorts, which I take as a win.
Nightshade is there, but already heading towards the door. He gives Kayla a look that says something between behave and I’ll be back, then spares me a nod.
“Don’t poison her,” he says.
“No promises,” I reply cheerfully.
The door clicks shut behind him. The room exhales, or maybe that’s just me.
“Hi,” Kayla breathes softly. Almost shy. Not like her at all.
I’m going to do my damndest to get her feeling like herself again, but first, I start unloading containers like a magician revealing increasingly unnecessary props.
Toast. Pastries. Fruit. Something warm that claims to be an omelette that smells better than it deserves to.
Kayla watches me with a mix of amusement and suspicion.
“This is a lot,” she points out.
“I’m offended by your lack of faith,” I reply. “Also, Bones said you needed calories and I took that personally.”
She smiles – small, genuine – and something in my chest loosens a fraction.
I don’t hover. That’s the trick. Everyone else watches her like she might fracture if they blink wrong. I treat her like a person who survived something awful and now wants to eat breakfast without commentary.
I shove a fork toward her. “Eat. You can interrogate me after.”
“I wasn’t going to interrogate you.”
“Lies.”
She takes the fork anyway.
We settle on the floor because the chair situation is terrible and the bed feels too intimate, too soon. We eat cross-legged, passing containers back and forth, knees occasionally bumping. Normal. Stupidly normal.
“So,” I say around a mouthful of toast. “You slept.”
“I did.”
“Like…actually slept?”
“Yes.”
“Huh.” I squint at her. “Well. That’s inconveniently reassuring.”
She arches a brow. “You wanted me exhausted and irritable?”
“I wanted you alive,” I say lightly. “The rest is negotiable.”
She takes a bite of fruit, chews thoughtfully. “You’re bad at being subtle.”
“False. I’m excellent at being subtle. I’m just choosing not to be.”
She laughs – real, warm – and it’s stupid how good it sounds in this room. Like something clicking back into place.
I keep talking. On purpose. I complain about the lift music. About the coffee being aggressively optimistic. About how Bones alphabetises things that don’t need it. I tell a story about Snow nearly starting a fight over toast once, which Kayla immediately demands more details on.
“Two kinds of toast?” she asks.
“Two philosophies,” I correct. “It got ugly.”
She shakes her head, smiling, and for a few minutes it’s easy to pretend this is just us killing time in a hotel room for boring reasons.
I watch her out of the corner of my eye anyway. Not for weakness. For tells. She eats steadily. Doesn’t rush. Doesn’t stall. No hands shaking. No sudden stillness. Whatever she’s carrying, she’s carrying it well.
Too well.
But I don’t say that.
I nudge a container toward her. “You didn’t touch this one.”
“I’m pacing myself.”
“Rude.”
She shakes her head with a snort but takes a bite to shut me up.
Good. This is the part I’m good at. Noise. Warmth. Making the world feel temporarily survivable. If I can give her ten minutes where nothing sharp gets in, I’ll take it.
I lean back against the bed, stretching my legs out. “See? Perfectly normal morning.”
She glances around the room. The food. Me. The closed door.
“Normal’s relative,” she says.
“Sure,” I agree easily. “But relative still counts.”
She hums, considering that, and goes back to eating.
For now, it works. For now, I let myself believe it might.
We don’t stay on the floor too long after that.
Not because anyone says so – it just happens.
Plates get shuffled, containers closed and stacked, and Kayla slides back onto the bed with her legs folded beneath her like she’s always sat there.
I follow, leaning against the headboard, shoulder brushing hers without ceremony.
Close, but not careful.
Which matters.
She twiddles idly with the TV remote on her lap, not using it. Just touching it like it’s an option she’s choosing not to take yet. I clock it and deliberately don’t comment.
“So,” I say, stretching my arms out. “You want a stupid story or a mildly incriminating one?”
She considers. “Define incriminating.”
“Snow. Mostly.”
“That’s not a definition,” she says. “That’s a promise.”
I grin. “Fair.”
I tell her about the time Snow tried to bluff his way through a restricted access point with nothing but confidence and a fake accent that changed halfway through the sentence when we were on a mission. I exaggerate. Obviously. Kayla corrects me anyway, filling in gaps I didn’t realise she knew.
“You’re leaving out the part where he panicked,” she says.
“I am editing,” I reply. “For tone.”
She laughs again – quieter this time, but just as real – and leans back against the pillows like she’s forgetting to hold herself upright. The contact stays easy. Unforced.
This is the thing people miss about her. She doesn’t take up space loudly. She takes it deliberately.
We sit there for a while trading fragments – nothing important, nothing sharp.
I tell her about a disastrous meal in Prague that involved something pickled and a man who definitely lied about what it was.
She tells me about a place she once stayed where the curtains never quite closed and how she learned to sleep anyway.
“That sounds miserable,” I say.
“It was,” she agrees. “I liked it.”
I snort. “Of course you did.”
Her knee bumps mine when she shifts. She doesn’t apologise. Neither do I. It feels…right. Like a shared rhythm we didn’t have to negotiate.
“You’re very calm today,” I say, aiming for neutral.
She shrugs. “I’m choosing it.”
That gives me pause. Not because it’s wrong, but because it’s accurate. Everything we do is a choice. And we need to give her more credit for the choices she’s making.
I glance at her again, really look. Not the bruises. Not the tiredness she’s hiding better than she thinks. The intent. The way her attention flicks, always tracking more than she lets on.
“You always do that,” I say.
“Do what?”
“Decide,” I reply. “Before anyone else realises there’s a choice.”
She meets my gaze, eyes steady. “Someone has to.”
There it is.
The room feels quieter after that – not awkward, just aware. I shift slightly, letting my shoulder rest more fully against hers, grounding rather than guarding.
“You’re allowed not to carry everything,” I say, lighter than I mean it.
She doesn’t answer straight away. Just breathes. Then: “I know.”
The pause that follows isn’t empty. It’s full of things neither of us are saying, and for a moment I think that’s where it’ll stay.
Then she speaks again, tone casual, almost curious. “Can I ask you something?”
I glance at her. “That depends entirely on how dangerous it sounds.”
She smiles faintly. “Hypothetical.”
I relax a fraction. “Those are usually the worst ones.”
She doesn’t look at me when she asks it.
“If someone wanted to bait you,” she says lightly, like we’re still talking about toast and bad curtains, “what would they offer?”
I don’t answer straight away. Not because I’m suspicious, but because my brain is still in banter mode, reaching for something clever, something deflective. Hypotheticals are usually easy. You keep them abstract. You keep them safe.
I glance at her, expecting a grin. A follow-up. Something to tell me this is still light.
She’s watching the city instead.
Waiting.
“If someone wanted to bait me,” I say slowly, rolling it around like it’s a joke I’m not sure lands, “they’d promise certainty.”
That gets her attention. Not a reaction – a focus shift.
“Certainty how?” she asks.
I shrug, casual. “Control. A clean edge. Information before it’s dangerous. The illusion that if I just do the right thing, nothing bad will happen to the people I care about.”
I hear myself as I say it and don’t stop.
“They’d offer protection,” I continue. “Not real protection – just enough that it feels irresponsible to refuse. A way to think you’re choosing safety instead of being manoeuvred.”
Her fingers are still on the remote. Not gripping it. Not tapping. Just…there.
I laugh softly, trying to pull it back. “Which is why it wouldn’t work. I don’t trust easy outs.”
She turns her head then. Looks at me properly.
“And if it wasn’t easy?” she asks.
That lands. I hesitate for the first time.
“If it was wrapped in patience,” I say. “If it looked like space. Time. The chance to breathe before the next hit.”
I trail off.
The words hang between us, suddenly heavier than they should be. I can feel the shape of them rearranging themselves into something I don’t like.
Her voice stays even. “What if they didn’t threaten anything at all?”
I swallow.
“What if,” she goes on, “they just waited for you to step into it on your own?”
That’s when it clicks.
Not all at once. Not dramatically. Just a quiet alignment of facts that have been sitting in front of me since I walked into the room with too much food and too much confidence.
I stop talking.
Kayla doesn’t look at me.
She doesn’t need to.
She asked the question because she already knows the answer.
And she’s known it longer than I have.
I sit back against the headboard once more, the humour draining out of me in stages rather than all at once. It’s not panic. Panic is loud. This is a calm recognition. Resignation, even.
“You’re not asking about me,” I say.
She finally looks at me then. Not guilty. Not frightened. Just…steady. Like she’s braced herself for the moment someone else catches up.
“I am,” she says gently. “I just didn’t want to say it that way.”
I run a hand over my face, scrubbing at my mouth like I can wipe the thought away if I try hard enough. “Fuck,” I mutter. Then, quieter, “You already know.”
She nods once. Not dramatic. Not apologetic.
“I didn’t at first,” she says. “I thought it was just damage. Aftershocks. But it keeps lining up too neatly.”
I exhale through my nose. “You’re the variable.”
“Yes.”
“And you know it.”
“Yes.”
I want to argue. I want to tell her she’s wrong, that this is paranoia wearing clever shoes. But the problem is it fits. Too well. The ease. The gaps. The way things keep just barely working.
I look at her stomach before I mean to.
She notices.
“They don’t have to touch the baby to use it,” she says quietly. “I think that’s the point. I think they’re watching what I do when everything I care about is on the line.”
I swallow.
“That’s not bait,” I say. “That’s…conditioning.”
A faint, humourless smile curves her mouth. “You said they’d offer certainty. Space. Time.”
I don’t answer. Because I did say that. Because I walked straight into it.
“You didn’t tell the others,” I say.
“No.”
“Why?”
She considers me for a moment. Then: “Because I wanted to see if you’d hear it without being told.”
I drop my gaze to my hands, flexing my fingers like they belong to someone else. “I’m supposed to be the one who keeps this light,” I say. “I’m meant to be good for morale. Food runs. Jokes. Normal.”
“You are,” she says immediately. “That’s why I asked you.”
I look up at her again, chest tight.
“You trust me.”
“Yes.”
“And you still didn’t ask me to fix it.”
“No,” she agrees. “I asked you to see it.”
Silence stretches. Not hostile. Not awkward. Just heavy with the shape of what comes next.
“You’re not wrong,” I say finally. “They’re not pushing. They’re waiting. Which means we’re already inside the experiment.”
She nods. “That’s what I thought.”
My jaw tightens. “And you’re sitting here eating toast and drinking tea like a person who plans to survive it.”
Her eyes don’t leave mine. “I do.”
That’s when it gets me. Not the danger. Not the manipulation.
The calm.
The way she’s already adjusted, already standing on ground she hasn’t shown anyone else yet.
I lean forward, forearms braced on my thighs, and for the first time since she asked the question, I don’t try to soften my voice.
“You don’t get to carry that alone,” I say.
She exhales slowly. “I wasn’t planning to.”
“Good,” I reply. Then, quieter, “Because if you’re bait…they don’t get to choose what bites.”
A beat passes. Then she reaches out – not for reassurance, not for grounding – and rests her fingers lightly against my wrist. Steady. Intentional.
“I knew you’d say that,” she says.
I cover her hand with mine without thinking. The humour doesn’t come back. Nor do the jokes. But something else settles instead. A quieter, more dangerous resolve.
And for the first time since I walked into this room pretending everything could still be normal, I stop trying to be the one who keeps it light.
Because this isn’t about morale anymore.
It’s about making sure that if they’re watching they learn the wrong lesson.