Chapter 15
Benny took Lulu back home with him. He asked me if I was okay when we had a moment to speak before the group disbanded for
the night, and I told him the truth.
“I don’t know anymore.”
He seemed to understand. I was worried about Jazmine and confused about the details of her relationship with Paul. I should
be thinking about the fact that we’d screwed up Mabel’s clue and came away from the brewery empty-handed. But my stubborn
brain only bounced back and forth between Jazmine’s predicament and what happened on the roof.
Seb kissed me.
I kissed Seb.
What was I going to do about that? Was it a one-time thing, or would it happen again? Did I want it to? Did he? And why was I remembering Seb’s hands roaming down my back when my friend was in trouble?
By the time Seb and I returned to the cottage, my thoughts were completely tangled around the night’s events, and I couldn’t
make sense of anything. It was already one in the morning, and Punkin barked at us from inside until we’d unlocked the front
door. That was a good thing, I figured. She made a decent guard dog.
“Do you have anything to drink?” Seb asked after we headed inside and turned on a lamp. “I’m dying of thirst.”
In a haze, I got out two glasses from the kitchen cabinets and filled them with tap water. I handed one to Seb, and he tipped
his head in thanks, then headed out the back door, letting Punkin run out with him.
Okay, then. He was taking the porch-swing conversation quite literally.
Nana’s porch swing was built for her by an old woodworker who lived down the beach—probably the same guy who carved the Mr.
Legs tree-trunk sculpture, but I never asked. More raft than swing, it was wide enough to take a good nap in, whether you
were human or canine. The turquoise canvas pad that lined the bottom and backrest had always been there, and when Seb plopped
down, it seemed he’d always been there, too.
Don’t think about the kiss. I set my glass of water into a cup holder built into swing’s wooden armrest and sat next to Seb, a respectable distance away.
“Last time I sat in the hot seat with Nana Malone,” he mused, “she was cussing me out for stealing cigs from Mr. Hammond’s
trailer.”
I snorted. “Yeah, I remember that. We must’ve been fourteen. Nana was hot for Mr. Hammond. You were harshing her love life.”
“Found that out a little too late. She was so mad at me.” He smiled to himself, and the dimples almost appeared. “I couldn’t believe a trailer would have a security camera. Lesson learned—never assume.”
Right. Maybe that was a lesson I needed to take to heart myself.
The swing didn’t do much swinging. You could get it going if you really tried, but mostly, you just floated. And that’s what Seb and I did, we slowly floated in the moonlight, staring at Punkin’s dark form running around the beach.
“Talk to me,” I told him, kicking off my sneakers to pull my feet onto the swing. “Tell me everything I don’t know about Jazmine
and Paul.”
“Everything?”
“As much as you can. She’s already told me some, but clearly not the whole story.”
He nodded, scooting farther back, then he reached over the armrest on his side and patted around the underside of the swing.
With a small noise of victory, he pulled out a purple disposable vape.
“What the hell?” I complained. “You’re hiding weed around my property?”
“Not anymore. You tossed most of it. This has been here a couple months.” He offered the vape to me, but I shook my head.
“Harvard made you prim and proper, huh?”
“Not really. This year has been tougher than anything I’ve ever done, academically, and I never have time for much else.”
“See, I imagined you going to frat parties and dating one of those crew rowers who competes with Yale.”
He’d imagined my life in Harvard? That surprised me. “You should’ve been imagining me sitting at the same library cubicle
every day for nine months. I’ve never worked so hard in my entire life.”
Seb clicked a button on the vape several times, and the digital screen lit up.
Whatever it said made him groan, and he tossed it onto the swing cushion, muttering, “Useless.” Then he kicked off his Converse and scooted farther back in the swing to lazily bend one knee.
“I respect that, Paige. Seriously. I’m just giving you a hard time.
Besides, can’t tell a fib on the porch swing.
Nana Malone said it, so it must be true.
” He slid his eyes toward mine and gave me a soft smile.
I smiled back, then exhaled a long breath. “Okay, so tell me about Jazmine and Paul.”
He sighed and leaned an arm atop his bent knee. “She told me it started around Christmas. I was back in town, staying at Benny’s
place, out in the pool house. Benny was still at school in Kalamazoo, but he and Jaz had been staying in touch, and he started
to get really worried about her about a month ago. So I . . . started tailing her.”
“In secret?” I said.
He winced. “I know, but she wouldn’t tell me anything, and Benny was right. She needed help. I tailed her to the fucking Vanderburg
prepper compound outside town.”
It was a farm, at least it used to be. The Vanderburgs sold off most of their land, and all the boys in the family had built
homes there. The compound was surrounded by a ramshackle fence and keep out signs. I’d never been inside the fence.
It mildly terrified me that Jazmine had been.
“As you already know by now, Jaz was hooking up with Paul,” Seb said. “No need to sugarcoat it. She’d told Benny it was just
casual, purely for the sex, no emotions. She could have any guy in Haven Beach, so I have no idea what she was thinking .
. .”
“Maybe she wasn’t,” I said quietly, as our roof kiss popped back into my head. Don’t think.
“Anyway, she told me all this after she busted me tailing her. She was not happy about that, in case you couldn’t guess. We
had a fight, and she nearly broke my nose.”
“Jesus.”
“Couple weeks later, she called me crying from the compound and asked me to come get her, no questions asked. She was in a
panic. So I parked off the highway near the compound and stealthed my way through the woods and through their dumb fence—which
couldn’t keep a rabbit out, much less the Feds. And I helped her escape Paul’s house through the bathroom window.”
“What the hell?” I said, sitting up straight. “Was he keeping her prisoner? You told me she was safe with him tonight!”
He held up a hand. “She is, and he was not holding her prisoner. Apparently, she met Paul’s dad, Big Burg, and he freaked
her out. You know they buy and sell illegal weapons, right? It’s not just the fentanyl.”
Everyone knew. They were eternally a week away from being raided. For the gun sales, for smuggling fentanyl and a host of
illegal prescription drugs from Canada via the lakes. Paul’s mother was in prison for tax evasion.
These were not fine, upstanding people.
“Well,” he said. “That day when Jaz called me to come get her, Paul had left her in his house while he went on some urgent
errand for Big Burg. Apparently, Jaz got bored, didn’t stay put, walked through the compound, and stumbled upon Big Burg conducting
a deal—guns or narcotics, not sure. But she saw more than she expected, and it scared her. She didn’t have her car with her,
and Paul wasn’t answering his phone. She just freaked—and who can blame her? I saw so much bad shit when I was hanging with
Paul, and the worst of it always started with Big Burg. That man is a psychopath.”
“And Paul isn’t?”
“He’s no choirboy, but when he gives you his word, he honors it. He’s very particular about his code, I guess you could say. And he promised me tonight that he won’t touch a hair on her head.”
“And you trust him?”
“I trust that much. And I trust Jaz when she says it’s okay.”
I hugged my knees, trying to figure out if I did, especially since she’d already told me about her mental state. When I added Pretty Paul into the mix, I could absolutely
see why someone like him could be destabilizing. I thought back over everything both she and Seb had told me. “Jaz said she
sprained her arm in a parking lot when you got the black eye.”
“Ye-e-eah,” he drawled. “That whole thing was a misunderstanding. Paul mistakenly got it in his head that Jaz had left him for me.”
Hold on, what? “You and Jaz . . . ?” Confusion and worry rose.
“God no,” he said, shaking his head emphatically. “It’s just what Paul assumed.”
The relief that flooded my chest was monumental. “Oh my God, this is what you meant when I asked if you’d stolen something of Paul’s and you said ‘maybe’? You stole Jazmine?”
“I took her out of a bad situation and gave her my protection. I’d do it for any of you.”
The way he said this, eyes slanted and expression dead serious, anyone would believe he meant it. But I knew he did, after what he’d sacrificed for Benny.
“Thank you for helping her,” I said.
He nodded, then settled against the back of the swing and stared at the dark horizon over the lake.
“Anyway, for a while after I got Jaz out of the Vanderburg compound, I thought Paul just wanted revenge against me for fucking up his game. He challenged me to settle it at the bonfire . . . that’s when you walked up. ”
“Right,” I said, remembering Seb shirtless, about to get his ass handed to him.
“But after tonight, I’m thinking I miscalculated when I assumed that Paul was just out to get me because I helped Jaz get
out of the compound. See, I thought he blamed me and not his own father for scaring Jaz away from a relationship after that
day.”
“But he didn’t?”
“Paul’s pissed at me, for sure. But from a couple things he said tonight, couple things he didn’t . . . I’m starting to think what we’re looking at here is that Paul’s seriously hung up on Jaz. However things started between
them, they must’ve been more serious than Jaz let on.”
I thought about that for a moment and remembered Lulu saying that breakups were hard. “Paul has feelings for her?”
“Maybe. But I’ll be damned if I know how she feels about him.”
I wished I could’ve said differently, but I didn’t know, either. She’d told me it was over. Guess it was a little more complicated.
“What do we do? Jaz doesn’t need this right now.”
“One thing I’ve learned is that you can’t tell people what they do and don’t need, even if you’re right. Like it or not, Jazmine
is an adult. Even if it’s hard not to think of her grinning down at you with pigtails and a missing tooth the first time she
stood up on a paddleboard.”
He wasn’t wrong. I had that same image of her.
But I suppose that none of us were those children anymore.
I double-checked my phone to make sure Jaz hadn’t texted, then I took a long drink of water and watched Punkin digging a hole in the sand in the dark.
“Well, then. Guess there’s nothing to do but wait for Jaz to let us know she’s okay. Not sure how long that will be.”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“As for you, you’re still on the hot seat,” I pointed out. “While you’re doing all this confessing, you might as well tell
me about what’s happened to you since boot camp . . .”