Chapter 47 Avery
Avery
I don’t know what to do with Caulder, now that it’s just us in this kitchen. Because now that it’s just us, I can’t stop thinking about the shock of falling on top of him. Of his warm skin and the cold rain on his jacket and the way he wasn’t sure whether or not to hold on to me…until he was.
And thinking of that moment, I can’t help but think of the other moment.
The moment before. The moment when everything fell apart.
And I can’t let myself think about that moment.
Not right now. Now, I need a clear head.
Because it doesn’t matter what Marlene and Kaitlyn said about being so sure about Mr. McCullough… The pieces just don’t fit.
There’s also the question of what happens when the police inevitably arrive.
They won’t believe us, a bunch of teenagers, especially if we don’t have a united story.
They’ll look for evidence, like that video on Lucas’s phone of me saying I wanted Mr. Jay dead.
Caulder must still have it, right? Will he share it?
He’ll have to. Maybe they even have resources to recover it if he did delete it.
It’s probably on Lucas’s iCloud somewhere.
Unless that doesn’t work here because there’s no internet?
Either way, the point is, they’ll look at our stories.
And I don’t think our stories make sense.
I need quiet. I need to be away from Caulder’s steady hazel eyes.
So, I start walking.
I go past the living room, past the couch where Lucas was, past the seven-minutes room, past the hallway where we found Ms. Dorman and Marlene earlier.
I wind through the halls until I reach a door I haven’t entered.
I remember it from our search earlier. The garage.
I turn the knob and let the door swing open to the concrete space.
Of everywhere in this entire mansion, this room feels the most normal, most like home, with cabinets mounted along the walls, a washer and dryer—enough space for two cars.
Enough space for me to sit down, to get as close to fresh air as I can without going outside.
I sit down on the ground and listen to the rain resume its pelting of the roof and try to center myself. If my phone weren’t dead, I could write in my Notes app. But it’s a brick, and I left it behind anyway.
So, I continue to force air in and out of my lungs. I try to breathe.
And then I realize I’m not alone, because he followed me in.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m thinking,” I say. And the old me might’ve added, Not that you would recognize the process. But I don’t.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he says. “What happened to being able to watch the entrances?”
“We already caught them,” I say. But there’s no conviction in my voice. Why isn’t there any conviction in my voice?
“You don’t believe that.”
“Don’t tell me what I believe.”
“Jesus, Avery, this is serious,” Caulder snaps. “People have died. And you can’t do this to me, okay?”
“Do what?”
“This hot-and-cold bullshit,” he says, breathing hard. “Yelling at me one second and then tackling me the next.”
My cheeks burn, and I look away. I focus my words on the garage door. “That was…That was just me being glad no one else died. I didn’t—”
“Don’t lie to me. You can tell me to forget what happened all you want, but we both know we kissed.”
I turn around, looking at him standing there over my shoulder. He still seems so certain, so fucking certain, and I realize I want to scream. But I can’t scream, because the others will think the worst is happening.
“Okay fine, we kissed,” I snap. “But then this weekend turned from what I thought was a nightmare to an actual nightmare. So it doesn’t matter that we…that we…None of that matters. We just need to focus on getting out of here alive, okay?”
“And I can’t do that if you’re leaving and going off by yourself,” Caulder says, stepping forward. “Jesus, Avery, you being okay is pretty much the only thing that matters to me right now. So I need you to not disappear like that, okay?”
“Okay, fine,” I say. “I won’t—”
“And if we really are going to die here,” Caulder continues. “I want you to know that kissing you was the best thing that happened all weekend.”
I can’t help it. I snort. “Fairly low bar, wouldn’t you say?”
“Okay, maybe,” he says. “But I’m trying to say…it did matter to me. It does. It’s mattered—you’ve mattered—to me for a long fucking time.”
I glare at him. “Don’t say that. Don’t lie to me, Caulder. You and I both know you stopped caring about me when I moved away.”
“Oh, we both know that?” Caulder asks. “Seriously?”
“You ignored me when I came back,” I say. “You pretended not to know me. I thought I’d have my friend back, and instead, you turned into some asshole.”
Caulder’s face falls. “I didn’t pretend not to know you. I was trying to be cool at a new school, at high school. And after that, you never acknowledged me.”
“Because you had embarrassed me!”
“Did you ever even wonder why I joined debate?” Caulder asks, throwing up his hands.
“Yes,” I say. “Because you wanted something else to lord over me—”
“Because I wanted to go back to the way things used to be with us, Aves,” he says, and something in me stills.
“Yeah, McCullough said it would be good for my college apps. But I saw you were in it. And I loved when we’d debate in class.
That was the only time you interacted with me.
Watching you get fired up about shit…I love arguing with you.
And so I wasn’t trying to be an asshole.
I was just…trying to be around you, okay? ”
I stare at him. “That’s not possible. You’re lying.”
He shakes his head. “I wouldn’t lie to you. I mean…I have lied to you tonight, but I won’t do it again.”
I freeze, thinking over the night. When did he lie?
And my stomach drops.
“During truth or dare,” I say quietly, slowly. “You lied about being in love with Kaitlyn.”
He’s surprised. His eyes widen. His lips part ever so slightly. But he’s not shocked. He’s not shocked because I’m right. He did lie.
When he said he’d never been in love, it was a lie.
Because of course he loved her. He loved her and her beautiful hair and her volleyball-captain body.
He loved how she can boss people around in a sexy way rather than my way, which is more like a librarian telling you to put your books back when you’re finished with them.
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” I say, shaking my head. “And it doesn’t matter. You probably still love her. And I get why. I do—”
“Avery,” he says, and when did he start saying my name so much? Doesn’t he see the way it unravels me?
“You’re right,” he says, the words falling quietly from his mouth as he steps forward. “I should’ve known you’d guess it right away.”
My cheeks burn. I wish I could open this garage door, but the button is back behind Caulder, who’s steadily walking toward me.
“But you’re wrong at the same time. I don’t love Kaitlyn,” he says. “I never loved her. Maybe that makes me a shitty guy, dating someone for that long when I didn’t actually care about her, but I can’t help that. As soon as I figured it out, we broke up.”
“So you told the truth,” I say. “You really haven’t been in love.”
“No, Avery,” he says. “I did lie. You were right. And you’re still not getting it.”
I shake my head. “But you just said—”
He closes the distance between us, standing right in front of me. I can count that he has four scratches on his cheeks, one on his forehead, and that one I noticed earlier on his jaw, a jagged slash of red on his obscenely clear skin.
“I’m aware when you walk into a room,” he says. “I don’t always want to be, but I am.”
I freeze. The words don’t make sense. They swirl with the sounds of the rain, telling me I don’t understand them. Telling me I’m not here, not really. I must be hallucinating. Must be completely delusional.
“I know what each of your smiles mean,” he says, lifting his hand to trace his thumb along my jaw. “And your frowns. Especially your frowns. The way your nose scrunches up. The way your eyebrows rise, or sometimes, just the one eyebrow. Did you know you do that? Because I do.”
I am immobile. I am drowning.
“Leaving you earlier nearly killed me, Avery. I couldn’t stop thinking what might happen to you because of me. And it’s not because I think you’re weak, because there’s no one tougher than you. No one smarter than you. No one who could survive this better than you.”
His hand stills on my jaw, holding my head tilted so his eyes can search mine.
“I didn’t lie about loving Kaitlyn,” he says. “I lied about loving you.”
Then he kisses me—or maybe I kiss him—and it isn’t like the feverish kiss in the hallway at the debate, the one where I was so sure that I hated him, that I was punishing myself for my horrible performance.
This kiss is one that replaces everything cold inside me with warmth.
His hands are gone from my jaw and instead wrap around my shoulders, pulling me closer, pulling me tight against him.
This is a kiss that tells me what I survived the night for.
He tastes like cherry Pop-Tart, and when we pull apart for air, I’m breathing harder than I think I ever have.
It’s easy to look into his eyes and feel anchored here, to feel like I can forget the rest of what’s happened tonight as long as I have him to cling to.
“Wait,” he says, and I don’t like that word for two reasons. One, he’s telling me what to do again. And two, he’s telling me to stop this.
“You said you came out here to think,” he says, catching his breath.
His hands drop to my lower back. He’s still grounding me, but he’s giving me space as well. For a moment, I want to tell him I don’t need the space, that I want to just get back to kissing him and never stop.
But then I remember what I wanted to think about, and I know I can’t not think about it.
I pull out of his hold, just a bit, so I can sit back down on the ground. It’s cold, and the cold helps me center myself. I reach up for Caulder, and he takes my hand and then sits next to me, keeping my palm in the warmth of his.
“Things aren’t adding up to it being Ms. Dorman and Mr. McCullough,” I say. “And when the police come, we’re going to need to be able to explain those things. And…I can’t. That’s a problem.”
He nods, then runs his free hand through his hair. When he does, it stirs up the smell of the woods still clinging to him, reminding me that he was out there.
“I was afraid you were going to say that,” he says.
“Why afraid?” I ask.
“Just because I’ve been thinking about it myself,” he says. “Like you said, parts don’t fit. And I didn’t want to say it to everyone because, well, I didn’t want them to be scared if they didn’t need to be scared. But…”
“You don’t think Ms. Dorman and Mr. McCullough did this.”
He shakes his head. The terror of that sentence hangs between and around us. This flimsy wooden garage door could be all that’s separating us from the actual killer.
No, I tell myself. Not just the door. Caulder’s here, too, and he’s holding my hand.
“What parts don’t add up for you?” I ask him.
He considers this. As he does, he runs his thumb in a small circle over my palm. It feels so natural and strange all at once. Caulder Grant. Not my enemy right now. Maybe he’ll change back tomorrow, just like he did after the hotel. But for now…
“We found Marlene’s jacket in the woods,” Caulder says. “McCullough and me. It was covered in blood. I’m talking, we-were-sure-she-was-a-goner levels of blood. But Mr. McCullough didn’t have any blood on him. So did he change in the woods? Or what?”
“But Marlene wasn’t covered in blood,” I say. “So even if he changed, that wouldn’t make sense.”
“Unless it was all on her jacket and nowhere else, but that seems weird, too,” Caulder admits.
“And it just doesn’t match up with McCullough.
I didn’t want to push it earlier, since she was so sure.
But Marlene’s so easily terrified, and I wouldn’t put it past her to have not recognized some guy attacking her.
” He shakes his head. “I keep thinking that maybe she was just looking for someone she could blame so that we’d have our answer and we’d all be safe. ”
“And Emerson,” I add. “Something isn’t right there, either.”
“Definitely,” Caulder says with a nod. “He’s been an asshole—which isn’t exactly abnormal—but there was something about when we saw him out there…He was out of it, and he kept saying he just has to get through this until four a.m. But why four?”
I frown. “I don’t know.”
“And then there’s Lucas,” Caulder continues. “And him just…vanishing. That…that I can’t even begin to explain. Because if—”
The scream rips through the air, and we both jolt up from the floor. Caulder’s hand tightens on mine as we both look to where it came from—above us. Terror finds me, adrenaline racing through my blood again as I stare at him. I know what we’re about to do before we do it.
Because we don’t leave people behind.
Hand in Caulder’s, I pull him back into the house, down hallway after hallway, through the living room, and up the stairs.
Where Emerson’s standing, shirtless, his blond hair wet from his shower, emerald-green sweatpants covering his legs.
The knife in his hand pointed directly at us.