Fame, Fate, and the First Kiss(21)

He laughed and backed away, grabbing my arms to hold me at bay. “You’re not a vampire!” he said, while struggling to hold me off. He twisted me around so I was facing the opposite direction, then pulled me up against him, wrapping his arms around me and trapping mine in his hold. I let myself relax against him. I was Scarlett; he was Benjamin. His arms were strong, so was his chest, which pressed all along my back.

“If I let you go,” he said by my ear, “will you stop trying to bite me?”

The skin on the back of my neck tingled to life. That was new. It was working. Being in this building, away from cameras, interacting with someone as Scarlett was stirring up some feelings that I could draw from.

He tightened his hold slightly. “Deal?”

A shiver went through me. I leaned down and bit his arm. Not hard, but enough to make him feel it.

He released me. “Lacey Barnes, you are so weird. Seriously.”

I finally dropped the act and laughed. “Oh, come on, it’s fun. You have to admit it.” It was surprisingly fun to goof around with Donavan. Maybe because he was usually so serious. I decided it was now my mission to help this boy act like a seventeen-year-old. At least some of the time. “Wait, are you seventeen?”

“What? Yes,” he said, registering my question.

“And are you opposed to having fun?” I asked. “Does fun mean that you are not learning something new?”

“I am not opposed to having fun.”

“Good.” I looked around the room we were standing in. It was cleaner than the other rooms. Almost lived in. There was a metal bedframe with an old stained mattress in one corner. A night table with broken drawers sat next to the bed. A picture frame with a real picture inside was on the night table. I walked over to it. A man and woman and three kids smiled at the camera while standing in knee-high yellowing grass.

“Did they forget to clean out this room?” I asked. The rest of the room was cluttered with an array of other things—a hanging rack of clothes like I had in my dressing room (only men’s), a stack of dusty books, a lantern.

“I don’t know, but check it out. I don’t think this old man liked his nurses much.” He went to the nightstand and opened the top drawer. It scraped along its track as he did. He shined his phone on the contents.

I peered inside to see a serious knife. “Wow. That knife is not messing around.” It was huge, with a serrated edge. It looked like the kind I’d see on the set of a movie about a drug lord. I thought about it for thirty seconds too long. It was like my brain was trying to fit the knife into the nursing home script I’d given when we climbed through the window. But as I slowly assessed the evidence I was coming to a realization.

“And what’s in drawer number two?” Donavan tugged open the next drawer and revealed plastic bags full of white powder.

I gasped, then said aloud what I had realized. “Someone is living here now.”

He paused, his eyes darting upward like he was thinking, then he cursed. It sounded funny coming out of his mouth, like it was the first time he’d ever done it in his life. He slammed the drawer shut, grabbed a dingy towel off the corner of the bed, and wiped the handles as if he thought his fingerprints would immediately appear in some sort of database.

“We need to go,” he said. “Now.”

Right as we made it to the top of the stairs to head back down to the first floor, a loud bang sounded somewhere below us.

Donavan cursed again. I remembered a hall closet behind us and took him by the hand and dragged him there. We both stepped inside, and I pulled the door closed.

“Whoever that is saw my car,” Donavan whispered. “They had to have. It’s the only car in the parking lot. We are going to get caught. Either by the cops or by whoever owns that knife. This is going to go on my record.”

“Or you’ll be dead,” I whispered back.

“Exactly.” He was quiet for a moment. “Do you think this is funny? How do you think this is funny?”

“I don’t . . . well, it is a little. I feel like I’m in a Heath Hall movie.” I was scared too. My heart was racing, and my nerves were heightened. But it was also kind of exciting.

“A Heath Hall movie?”

“That’s the character Grant normally plays in movies.”

“I know who Heath Hall is,” he snapped.

“Oh.” I reached out and my hand met with some part of Donavan. His back? His chest? It felt like a shoulder blade maybe. “Don’t stress so much.”

“When should we start stressing, then?” He paused for a minute. “Wait, is this some kind of joke? Did you set this up?”

“You’re the one who brought me here. How would I set this up?”

“True.”

We both went quiet as a set of footsteps sounded outside the door. They didn’t slow down, just walked right by. I could feel the tension release from Donavan. We stayed in the closet until I could no longer hear any noise at all.

“Thanks for coming with me tonight,” I whispered.

“Is this the new experience you were going for?”

I was shut inside a small, dark closet with a guy, tension and heightened awareness thick in the air. It kind of was. “It’s actually helped a lot.”

“I’m glad something came out of it.”