Chapter 8 Wren
The day has faded into a star-filled night, and love warms the air. It’s electric, with fizzes in champagne flutes, echoes in laughter, and clicks under designer heels and shiny loafers. My skin is alight with its magic, my heartbeat dictated by the brass band floating in the candle-lit lake.
Sigh.
I love, love. Even more so when it looks like one of my Pinterest boards. I’m high on it, drunk on it, and despite my earlier meltdown, not even the black hole looming by the bar can sober me up.
The band breaks into a Whitney song, and though I always “Wanna Dance with Somebody,” I need a respite. Not breaking in these heels before the wedding was a rookie mistake.
I spot Matt at an empty table, hobble over, and flop down on a chair opposite.
“Are you still sulking?”
He sinks a shot, then slams it on the table so hard the other empty shot glasses shake.
All seven of them.
“I’m not sulking. I’m thinking.”
“About what?”
“About walking out onto the freeway during rush hour and taking a nap.” His gaze shifts over my shoulder and hardens into a scowl. I glance behind me to find Anna, his crush of the week, at another table laughing with her friends.
“Don’t say such things.” I reach between the half-eaten desserts to pat his hand. “You’re far too good for her anyway.”
I know that’s what you’re supposed to say to a friend when they’ve been rejected, but I mean it.
Matt’s a delight. A happy-go-lucky guy whose job as an ice-skating coach at the boarding school in Devil’s Hollow keeps him in decent shape.
Sure, you can’t see it under those baggy skater clothes he usually wears, and he could do with a good haircut, but he has a heart of gold and a fun sense of humor.
I throw in another cliché for good measure. “Any girl would be lucky to have you.” He snorts into another shot. “I’m serious,” I say, picking up the disposable camera off the table and dragging my thumb over the winder. “You’ll make the right girl very happy someday.”
He mutters something about redownloading Tinder while my gaze sweeps across the dance floor.
It snags on Rory and Angelo moving to their own beat.
It’s a slow, lust-filled one only they can hear, and that familiar jealousy threatens to jump up into my throat.
As the glow from a nearby tiki torch flickers upon Rory’s grin, I bring the disposable camera to my eye and click.
“Bartender, karaoke extraordinaire, professional-figure skater,” Matt mutters, eyeing me over the candle centerpiece. “Now budding photographer. Is there anything Wren Harlow can’t do?”
I smile at him. “Don’t let my Instagram selfies fool you, honey.
I’m only making a scrapbook.” He winces at the flash as I sneak a candid shot of him, though I don’t even need to get the photos developed to know it won’t make the final cut.
“I’ve put disposables on every table so everyone can take their own photos for Angelo and Rory.
I saw it on a wedding blog—cute, right?”
“So cute,” he says in the tone of a man scorned. “And how’s that going?”
I glance up at Benny at the edge of the dance floor. He holds a camera in one hand and fastens his belt with the other. I sigh. “So far, it’ll be a scrapbook dedicated to Benny’s balls.”
Matt isn’t listening. He’s too busy staring at Anna again, so I sweep the forest for other photo opportunities. Tayce has found tonight’s prey; she’s gazing up at a beefcake in a gray suit while running her fingers along the length of his bicep. Click.
Castiel Visconti and his younger brother, Nico, are sharing a joke over a high cocktail table—click.
I squint at the bar behind them to see if I recognize the redhead Rafe is talking to.
Oh, it’s Penny Price. She used to live down the road from me.
Click. Matt has brought her as his plus-one, though he’ll tell any girl who listens it’s purely platonic.
I’m about to ask him what she’s doing back on the coast, but he cuts me off.
“Wait—speaking of Instagram. Anna follows you on there, right?”
My eyes fall to meet his. “I think so?”
“Great.” With newfound enthusiasm, he lunges for the camera in my hand and shuffles across the seats until he’s beside me.
With an arm around my waist, he presses his temple against mine and angles the camera toward us.
“If we get a really hot photo together, you can post it, and she might get jealous and realize what she’s missing. ”
“Uh, I don’t think that’s how it works—”
The flash burns bright, killing my protest. It leaves a white stain on my vision that doesn’t fade with rapid blinking. I’m suddenly disorientated, and maybe that’s why the question slips out from my subconscious and through my lips.
“What do you know about Gabriel Visconti?”
As Matt’s outline sharpens, I’m met with a glare.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Wren. Not you too.
” He huffs, tossing the camera onto a crumb-caked plate.
“What’s every girl’s obsession with the Viscontis?
Sure, they’re all hot, and like, make more money than that dude who owns Facebook.
But Christ, can’t a normal guy get a look in around here? ”
I dig him in the ribs. “Don’t be so dramatic. I’m just asking.”
“Yeah, well. You’re far too good for him anyway,” he mocks in a high voice I suppose is meant to mimic mine.
“Any boy would be lucky to have you, blah, blah, blah …” He eyes Gabriel at the bar.
My eyes follow. Although there’s a large crowd waiting to be served, they huddle with their backs to him, as if they’ve decided there’s safety in numbers.
He’s half dipped in shadow, barely visible, and the stillness vibrates off him like a tremor of a slow-moving earthquake.
Matt must feel it too because a shudder rolls through him. “Is he really your type? It’d explain why you’ve never dated.”
I’d laugh if my throat wasn’t closing. Gabriel Visconti being my type is obscene, and that’s before I even found him sprawled over my favorite armchair in the middle of the night.
He’s someone’s type, sure. Not mine, though.
I’m looking for smiles and laughter, not scowls and scars.
Everyone knows you never get your happy ever after with a bad boy.
Besides, I’m certain anyone brave enough to go on a date with a man known as the Boogeyman will likely end up on the back of a milk carton.
“Of course not.”
Matt runs a hand through his hair and lets out a frosted breath. “Good, because the rumors are true, you know.”
Unease presses down on my shoulders. I shouldn’t ask. I should stuff my mouth with cake or bite through the blisters and dance again. Anything but ruin my manicure by peeling back the layers of a question I don’t really want to know the answer to.
But, as always, my curiosity rears its ugly head. “What rumors?”
“That he’s feral. Like, lives-in-a-cave-beneath-the-National-Reserve kind of feral.”
I give a weak tut. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“He does. I’ve seen him.” He shifts in his seat, getting closer. “Well, kinda. I was driving home one night from yet another failed date sometime after midnight. I took that sharp turn onto Grim Reaper Road, and my headlights flooded the forest. And there he was, between the trees, staring at me.”
It’s a story too similar to my own, and something inside me wants to deflect it, to make it not true. “Can a man not go for an evening walk without being accused of living in a cave?”
He flashes me a look of disbelief. “That’s not all, though. He was topless.”
“Maybe he runs hot.”
“And he was covered in blood.”
My vision swims, and my pulse throbs in my mouth. The panic I felt during the ceremony is creeping back to get me. Now there’s a pattern. The woods, the blood.
And where do the similarities end? How many people has he terrorized in their own home too?
Matt slices through the silence with a dry laugh. He picks up a shot glass, and puts it down again, disappointed that it’s empty. “No wonder they call him the Boogeyman.”
The Boogeyman. Cave-dweller. The Devil works hard but the Devil’s Coast’s rumor mill works harder, and now the lines are blurring between fact and fiction.
A wave of nausea rolls through my stomach, churning the remnants of an eight-course dinner. Darkness claws at my chest.
For once, I was too nice, and to the worst person possible. Though his blood was on my hands, it wasn’t on my conscience. Thank God, because it’s heavy enough. Yes, it was a selfish idea, trying to shift the weight of my secret from my soul to his, but he was meant to die.
He was meant to take it to his grave, and me, I was meant to feel lighter.
But he’s alive. Here. On the coast, at Rory’s wedding, forever in my peripheral. So instead of confessing to a dead man, I’ve given a thread to a living one. He’s had three years to pull on it, to rip back the stitches of my perfectly curated life and reveal the darkness beneath.
I can only hope he wants to avoid me as much as I do him.
“Anyway. Lay off the Viscontis, Wren. There are so many dudes on the coast who have the hots for you, why can’t you go for one of them instead?”
His words are a fast-acting antidote to my panic. My ears prickle, and I sit up straight. “Really?”
“Sure.” He flags down a passing waiter and orders drinks. A lemonade for me, and another three tequilas for himself.
“Like who?”
“What?”
“Who likes me?”
“Oh”—he flutters a dismissive hand—“everyone.”
“Matt, the vagueness simply won’t do.” I grab a napkin and retrieve my eyeliner from my clutch, then put both in front of him and tap the table. “I need names, honey.”
With a groan, he begrudgingly gets to work, fisting my eyeliner like a moody toddler with a crayon. A few moments later, he tosses the napkin on my lap.