All the Lies We Tell (Quarry Road #1)(48)

“It’s just a saying,” Alicia replied, trying to keep her voice down so their mother didn’t overhear. “And if she or Dad see those hickeys all over your neck, you’ll be in such bad trouble you’ll maybe wish they’d kill you, instead.”

“I would never wish to be dead.”

The words were so quiet, so bleakly bland and without any remnant of her sister’s usual sassy attitude that Alicia turned, certain she heard wrong. “What?”

“Nothing. Never mind. Forget it, you’re right, I’m hungover. Shit, maybe still drunk.” Jennilynn mumbled her answer, words slurring a little, and cut her gaze from Alicia’s. She dove beneath the blankets again. “Leave me alone now. Tell Mom I’m sick, please? She’ll believe you.”

Alicia was quiet for a second. Her own stomach began to hurt. “Where were you last night?”

“Out in the woods.”

“Yeah. I can tell. With who? A boyfriend?”

Last year, before Jennilynn and Ilya started up whatever it was they thought nobody knew they were doing, she’d gone out with Franco Dalton for a few months. It hadn’t lasted long. Before that, she’d dated Brad Kennedy, who went to a rival high school. There’d been others. Jennilynn’d had half a dozen boyfriends while Alicia was still waiting to have one.

She carefully didn’t let herself think about Nikolai. Or that party in October. Or the kiss. Definitely anything but that kiss.

Jennilynn was silent for a few seconds before letting out a giggle that finally sounded at least a little bit more like her usual self. “What if I was?”

“Since when do you have a boyfriend?” Alicia asked, deliberately casual, while she found a matching pair of knee socks in Jennilynn’s drawer. All of her own socks usually ended up there, anyway.

“I didn’t say he was a boyfriend.”

Alicia turned, socks in hand. “You’re out with him often enough, whoever it is. Just tell me, Jenni. Who is it? Is it someone I know?”

Jennilynn was silent beneath the blankets for a moment, before she mumbled. “Yes. You know him.”

“Ilya.”

“Who? What about Ilya?” Jennilynn flipped the blanket back just far enough to reveal one mascara-smeared eye.

“He’s your boyfriend?”

“Why? Did he say he was?” Jennilynn sounded weirdly . . . hopeful. She pulled the blanket back over her face. “Was he talking about me?”

“I haven’t asked him. I asked you.” With an eye on the clock, Alicia ran a comb through her hair, still damp from the shower. She had just enough time to swipe on some mascara and lip gloss and grab a toaster tart on the way out the door to the bus. She hesitated, though, staring hard at her sister, at the mysteries she was concealing beneath the cover of the comforter. “If it’s not Ilya . . . who is it?”

The only answer was a soft snore that had to be fake. If she went over to her sister’s bed and yanked off the quilt, that would force Jennilynn to get up. She’d have to go to school instead of getting to lie around all day watching TV. Alicia wanted to force her sister to stop lying about where she’d been and what she was doing, and with whom, but though Alicia wanted to do this, she couldn’t quite make herself. Because then she’d know, she thought as she left their bedroom with a click of the door behind her. And if she knew exactly what her sister had been up to, she wouldn’t be able to keep pretending that nothing was wrong with her.

“Jenni’s sick,” she told her mother, who was already wearing her coat and putting the lid on her travel coffee mug.

“Again?” For a moment, her mother looked concerned, the crease between her eyes deepening in a way that Alicia realized made her mother look . . . old.

“It’s her period, I think.” The lie slipped out easily enough.

Her mother wrinkled her nose. “Does she need anything?”

“She’s sleeping,” Alicia said. “I gave her some aspirin for the cramps.”

“Thanks, honey.” Her mother gave an absentminded look upward, as though she could see through the floors and into her daughters’ bedroom. “I’m going to be late for work, and I don’t have time to take you if you miss the bus. You’d better run.”

Alicia grabbed a toaster tart and allowed her mother to hurry her out the back door. She walked down the long lane toward the bus stop, where she could already see the Stern brothers and their still-newish stepsister waiting. Just once, she paused to look up to the window of her bedroom, but not even a shadow hinted at the sight of Jennilynn looking back.





CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE


It felt good to be fixing something, to have a concrete task he could put his mind to and complete. Niko had always liked working with his hands for that reason. It took his mind off everything else that was going on.

Everything except Alicia, anyway, and since she was the main thing taking up all the room in his brain lately, he’d set out this morning to plan a day of tasks that would fill his time so he wouldn’t have to . . . what? Decide? Choose? And what had he done but go to see her—like that would help him forget the sound of her soft moans when he’d touched her.

“Yuck,” Niko muttered as he pressed the perpetually damp spot on the wall surrounding the tub. He poked a little harder, making a hole.