All the Inside Howling (Hollow Folk #2)(52)

“This is important. It’s not a game.”

“Yeah? I helped you with something important before. We did all right.”

“You’re mad at me because I’m with Austin. Fine. Be mad at me. But this isn’t about Austin. This is about something that might be life or death, and you’re acting like a spoiled child.”

“I’m not mad at you.” He sprawled in the leather seat, legs wide, arms behind his head, and the whole pose was so sexily confident that he could have stepped out of a movie. The effect, of course, was partially ruined again by the massive amount of puke he’d emptied into the rocks around Bighorn Burger, but I was still impressed. Well, impressed isn’t exactly the right word. “I know you, Vie Eliot,” he continued with a smile that hovered on the edge of being cruel. “You’re going to get tired of him. Sooner rather than later. I mean, Austin is boring as shit. You’ll get tired and bored and then—well, I know what you want. I just have to wait.”

“Is that right? Is that what you think?” I took a breath. Jesus, he’d unbuttoned his collar and diamond of olive-colored skin showed where his pulse beat in his throat. Perfect. I was going to melt into a puddle because Emmett-fucking-Bradley was drunk and horny. And he thought he knew me. My next breath came a little easier. He thought he knew what I wanted. Did he think I wanted a kid so plastered he upchucked in a parking lot? Is that what he thought? Well, fuck him. I took another breath, and this was even easier. Yeah, fuck him. Fuck Emmett Bradley. And not in the way he wanted.

He was still staring at me, his fingers tracing the patch of skin visible on his chest. Somehow, I managed to make my voice even. “Here’s the thing, Emmett: I’m not putting up with any more of this. Tonight was your free pass, because I do care about you, messed up or not. But no more.” My hands tightened around the crumpled trash, compacting it even more, my knuckles straining and whitening. “If you ever try to come between me and Austin again, though, if you ever try to hurt him, I will break you into a million fucking pieces. He’s nice. He’s good. He’s not like—”

“Me.”

“Us.”

Neither of us said anything for a moment, and then Emmett said, “Hey, Vie?”

“What?”

“Thank you.”

And just like that, it happened again: Emmett the asshole vanished, and the sweet guy inside, the one nobody ever saw, poked his head out. Just for a moment, like he was checking for his shadow, but he was there. And for the hundredth time since meeting Emmett I thought why can’t this guy be here all the time? Why does the asshole always keep coming back?”

“Thanks,” he said again, clearing his throat. “For what you did, finding that guy who killed Samantha and Makayla. You—that changed my life, and I never said thank you, at least, never the way I should have. You came over, and I dumped on you. You didn’t deserve that.”

I grunted because I didn’t know what to say. Part of me wanted to tell him about Luke, about Mr. Big Empty, about the nightmare that was still going on. Part of me knew I didn’t deserve his thanks. But part of me? God, part of me was thrumming like a violin string ready to snap.

“Are you ok?” Emmett asked. Still the sweet Emmett: the Emmett who never showed his face at school, who never showed his face at all until moments like this, when I was ready to call it quits and never see him again. “I never asked that,” he continued, “and I should have. What you went through—”

“I’m fine.”

“Really? I’ve seen you at school, and sometimes your face gets white, and you have to leave class a lot, and you watch people—”

“Christ, what do I have to do? Write it down? I said I’m fine.”

“All right.” Emmett waited a minute and then added, “I’ll drop you off back at the party. I’m a lot better.”

I glanced at the clock. It was almost nine-thirty. “In an hour.”

“What?”

“You’re not driving for another hour. Then you can drop me off in town and go home. And I mean it, Emmett. You go home.”

“An hour?”

“It’s not that long.”

“I know what we can do,” he said with a smirk, and just like that Emmett-the-asshole was back. His hand slid up the inside of my thigh. “An hour won’t be nearly long enough.”

I swatted his hand away. “Nice try.”

He laughed. “It was worth a shot. Well, if that’s out, what are we going to do for an hour?”

“We’re going to sit here silently.”

“You’re no fun. Want to talk about you and Austin? Have you guys—”

“Emmett.”

“Geez, you really aren’t any fun. What about—”

I threw the wadded trash at him, and he yelped and laughed and flicked it away. And that was pretty much how the rest of the hour went, with Emmett trying everything he could to get a rise out of me, and with me trying to decide whether I wanted to deck him or kiss him and, even at the end of the hour, not really sure. When the hour had passed, Emmett looked and sounded a lot better, and so I let him drive us back across town. Instead of Kaden’s, though, I had him take us to the new downtown. Here, the streetlamps were newer, and brighter, and whiter. The buildings here, newer than in the rest of Vehpese, mixed wood and glass and steel in a way that looked modern and hip. In the crisp white of the street lamps, the street might have come out of a movie, something in Seattle or Portland or Vancouver. Even the young, springy lodgepole pines that had been planted here looked slightly artificial.