Frenemies(31)

I frowned, thinking it over.


I had been on fire with self-righteous indignation after Nate stalked away from me, true, but this inferno had not managed to persuade Amy Lee to leave the party.

“You need to let go of this,” she’d snapped, glaring at me. “Stalking your ex through his girlfriend is the kind of thing that never, ever ends well.”

“She needs to be taken down as a matter of liberty and justice!” I replied, outraged. “This has nothing to do with stalking!”

“It has to do with Nate, and I’m not driving you back into Boston so you can make the whole situation worse,” Amy Lee had told me. “End of discussion.”

“Just see if I’m ever available again for one of your hours of need,” I told her then, but she was already ignoring me.

In retrospect, I would have been better off concealing my motives. I could see that now. Amy Lee was very often prickly about the strangest things, and sometimes required careful handling.

It was too late now: I was freezing my ass off on a front porch in Winchester.

The front porch that now held Henry Farland. I gazed at him, thoughtfully.

“You’re trying to figure the best way to work this, aren’t you?” Henry asked.

“I might be.”

“Because you think a specific approach will somehow make me forget or overlook the past few weeks?” He shook his head. “I can only think of one that might work.” He considered. “No, two. But it’s a little bit too cold for either of them.”

I shook my head at him. “You’re—”

Just in time, I caught myself. Henry smiled.

“If I were you,” he advised me, “I’d just ask.”


Which was how I found myself bundled up in the front of Henry’s car, being chauffeured back into Boston. He had the heat turned up and the music low. I-93 spread out before us, the lights of Medford twinkling off to the right as we headed south toward home.

Henry drove like a benign lunatic—which was to say, he was better than most of the other drivers on the road. Massachusetts drivers weren’t called “M*s” by accident.

“Why are you so quiet?” Henry asked, shifting in his seat.

I was quiet because I was suspended in the dark with him, racing down the highway, with nothing to do but realize how intimate it could be to find yourself cocooned in a car with someone else. Intimate and awkward. Particularly someone else with whom you had a history. I hunched down in my seat and kept my eyes on the red taillights dotting the road in front of us, wishing he would speed up.

(That one didn’t work, either. Apparently the wish thing was a one-shot deal.)

This was exactly why I’d gone to great lengths to keep from thinking about this situation in the first place. I avoided Henry for a reason.

I was so flushed in the face I was worried he might actually be able to see me glowing red in the darkness.

“I thought the point of this was for you to be more entertaining than that stupid party,” Henry said when I still hadn’t answered him. Because, obviously, despite his many nefarious powers, he still couldn’t read my mind. “If I wanted to sit in uncomfortable silence, I’d find myself a girlfriend.”

“Wow,” I said, knocked out of my discomfort, which, it occurred to me belatedly, might have been his intention. “Was that sexist or misogynistic? Or both?”

“Just the voice of sad experience.”

“I believe you,” I told him. “Where’s Ashley tonight?”

“I think we already talked about Ashley,” Henry said reprovingly, although his mouth was twitching. He was trying not to laugh.

“Oh, right,” I said. “Not your girlfriend, just your f*ck-buddy.”

He actually laughed then. “I think that’s a glass house you’re standing in, Gus.”

He had a point. I felt myself flush again, even hotter and more ashamed, but for some reason he still seemed to be amused.

“Anyway,” he said after a moment of silence. “Ashley’s kind of crazy, it turns out.”

“I would be surprised if she’s even twenty—”

“She’s twenty-two! I think.”

“—So you shouldn’t be surprised. You were crazy at that age yourself. I was there, I remember.”

“I’ll let you in on a secret,” Henry said, looking over at me. “I don’t know why or how, but I can pick out the raving lunatic lurking in a roomful of normal women. It’s like I have this homing device. Usually you can’t even tell when you look at her, but it’s there. Waiting. Everything’s fine for a while and then BOOM! She goes nuts.”

I considered that for a moment. “Maybe it’s you.”

“I figured that might be your take on it.”

“I don’t mean because you’re evil,” I hastened to assure him. “Although, of course—”

“Of course.” He let out a sound that was halfway between a sigh and a laugh. “Satan. Got it.”

“I just mean, maybe there’s something about the kind of boyfriend you are that lets the lunatic creep out.” I was warming to my topic. “I think everyone walks around with the possibility of crazy lurking around in them, but it takes certain circumstances for it to burst free.”