Dangerous Boy (24 page)

Maybe it doesn’t even matter. Daemon’s proven to me he’s dangerous. Being with Logan just puts me closer to that. I lean back against the window casing, cradling my arm in my lap. Below me, raindrops ripple across the surface of the mud puddles as the clouds darken.

This has been the worst streak of bad weather I can remember. I’m still sitting there, my temple resting on the cool glass, when a familiar red Jeep glides into the driveway.

Logan.

I’m so caught off guard, I don’t move. I just stare down as he pulls to a stop and steps out, holding what appears to be a suit jacket over his head as he dashes to the back door, rapping hard on the screen.

I reluctantly uncoil from my spot near the window and go downstairs, my heart up in my throat as I open the door. Logan steps onto the darkened porch and follows me inside, and in the bright light of the kitchen, I realize he’s wearing his costume.

It’s a black tuxedo, shiny dress shoes and all, coupled together with a white mask that only covers one side of his face.

We were supposed to go as the couple from
The Phantom of the Opera
. He looks devastatingly handsome dressed as Erik, his eyes like dark orbs, one behind the mask, one uncovered.

“You can’t think I’m still going,” I say, taking in his rain-darkened hair.

He fiddles with a button on his tux, then looks up at me. “Look, I know I have no right to be standing here right now, but this week has been hell. I
need
you.”

I cross my arms, as if it’ll shield my heart. “So?”

He steps further into the house, taking small, tentative steps. When he looks up at me, I realize his eyes are red-rimmed, anguished. “And so I’m ready to talk. Come to the dance with me. I’ll tell you everything you want to know on the way there, and if you want nothing to do with me after that, you can get a ride home from Allie or someone.”

I swallow. I don’t know how I’m supposed to talk to him with a lump this big in my throat.

“Okay. Fine. Give me five minutes. And then you can start with who the hell Trent Townsend is.”

“Google is an interesting thing when you have the right name to search,” I say, my voice bitter as I settle into the passenger seat of Logan’s Jeep, arranging the full skirts of my old-fashioned dress. I’m wearing a big brunette wig, too. The curls cascade down my shoulders and end near my waist.

I left my brace at home. I’m supposed to wear it twenty-four-seven, but I think I can manage a few hours without it. I just couldn’t ruin the effect of the dress with such an ugly scrap of fabric and Velcro.

Logan lets out a heavy sigh. “It’s really coming down, isn’t it?”

“
Logan
.” I snap. “Stop stalling and just tell me the truth already.”

He swallows. “I guess you’ve figured it out anyway. Trent is his first name; Daemon is his middle name. He needed a fresh start. We agreed he’d go by Daemon.”

“A fresh start from what? Or from
which
thing, should I say? That was some pretty heavy stuff that happened in Cedar Cove.”

He nods, his lips pursed, his eyes turned downward. “I know.”

“And you didn’t think I deserved to be told?”

“Of course I did.” He shakes his head, meeting my gaze
with glittering eyes. Somehow, it’s like he’s just as hurt as I am. “I just didn’t want you to look at me like you are right now. Like you’re disgusted by me. I didn’t do those things, but everyone treats me as if I did.”

“It’s not what he did, Logan. It’s what
you
did. How can I possibly be with you if I can’t trust you to tell me the truth?”

He stares out into space as he pushes the key into the ignition and fires up the Jeep. “Please, Harper, just let me tell you everything, and then you decide what to do with it, okay?”

“Fine. Just don’t leave anything out.” I glare at him, awaiting the sordid details.

He nods, and the eye behind his mask is dark, shadowed and unreadable, while his other eye catches the glow of passing street lamps. The two, in combination, are an odd sort of contrast: night and day.

We pull out of the gravel driveway, turning right. Silence falls around us as we leave my house behind.

Then, suddenly, Logan speaks. “I was dating this girl, Deanna.”

I swallow. Deanna. The brunette in the slinky dress on Facebook. I turn away from him to look out at the sparkling wet concrete.

“She was nice, into sports. We had that in common. We weren’t really serious, but we were having fun, you know? But Trent kept screwing it up for me. Just like he is with you.”

“Okay…”

“He went to school with me then, so it was harder. He’d
flirt with her, and make her uncomfortable. He couldn’t get why she wouldn’t go for him, even though he knew we were together.”

“’Kay,” I say, waiting for the story to take a turn for the worse.

“In a way, I think her attitude toward him reminded him of everything our dad did, and that’s what really set him off. He’s really weird about if someone favors me over him. He gets a little crazy.”

That would have been good to know a few weeks ago.
How could he know all this and not tell me? Warn me?

“Well, we were all three at this party. A big post-prom thing.”

I blink, remembering the Facebook pictures, the pretty brunette. Were those newspaper stories—the ones about the fight at the party—about a post-prom party? Logan’s staring straight ahead, at the road, and it’s hard to see the expression in his dark eyes.

“I went with Deanna and some other couples, and we were having a great time. I went to the bathroom and when I came back, he was standing really close to her. I told him to back off and we got into an argument. Really escalated, turned physical. One of my buddies tried to jump in and help me and ended up getting hit in the face with a brass lamp. Broke his nose.”

That doesn’t sound like the news made it sound. It was just a fight at a high school party. Don’t those happen all the time?

“And?”

He breathes deeply, staring out into the darkness as if lost in thought.

“Logan…” I coax, waiting for the rest of the story. Dying to know and…not wanting to hear it at the same time.

“So everyone tells him he has to leave, and he’s over in the foyer, getting his shoes on. That’s when I realize this girl is acting really weird.”

My mouth goes dry. “Weird, like how?”

“Like, insanely drunk, even though I knew she’d only had one or two. She was leaning on me, her eyes kept half-closing even when she was talking. Her words were so slurred I couldn’t really understand her. I had to hold her up.”

“So what, she was slamming shots when no one was looking?”

Logan shakes his head but he won’t look at me, just keeps staring at the road. Finally, he breaks the silence. “No. It was him.”

I open my mouth to speak, but the words don’t come. I think I know what he means but I don’t want to say it aloud. A chill sweeps down my spine.

Logan pulls up to a shiny-new stop sign on Semanski Street, and finally turns to look at me, anger burning in his eyes. “He slipped something in her drink.”

“Oh God,” I say.

He turns away and drives through the four-way stop. “So that kicked off part two of the fight. He was crouched down, putting his other shoe on and I flew at him in a rage, and it
turned ugly. Really fast. It was bad, Harper. Really bad. It took half the football team to pull me off him. I told him I’d kill him.”

My breathing turns shallow.

“You don’t understand what it’s like to be related to someone like that. To know that we share
anything
, let alone DNA.
Identical
DNA. If he would have gone through with that…with what he must have been planning…I would have murdered him. I’m not just saying that. He’d be a dead man if he had done it.”

Despite myself I reach out and grasp his hand. Squeezing it to comfort the shattered guy sitting beside me.

“He didn’t, Logan.”

His voice cracks. “I know but I can’t stand looking at him every day, knowing what he’s capable of. I wanted to move here without him. I wanted to leave him back in Cedar Cove.” Logan turns to me. “I promise you…I swear to you, I’ll never let him touch you. Please, just don’t let me lose you, too. I’ve lost so much because of him. I can’t do it again.”

I’m gutted, sitting here beside him, finally understanding everything he’s been through, finally understanding why it was so important to him to keep me away from Daemon…from Trent.

I lean my forehead against the glass. “I’ll give you tonight. And then, Logan, I don’t know…”

I
slide out of Logan’s car, holding my dress up off the ground. The rain darkens the cement parking lot as Logan rounds the car and grabs my hand.

“Are you ready for this, Madam President?” he asks, grinning. But there’s something hesitant, timid about it, like he’s afraid he’s not allowed to smile right now.

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” I say.

We’re only halfway to the building when the rain thickens, drenching my bare shoulders. Logan pulls my hand and we run across the curtain of rain, laughing as we make it to the overhang. The rain intensifies even further, pounding the roof until it’s hard to make out the heavy bass beat coming from the gym doors.

“Do you hear that?” Logan asks.

“I can’t hear anything,” I say, laughing.

“It’s either thunder or the DJ…” His voice trails off as it gets louder, and when he meets my eyes, there’s something
like fear in them. But then it’s gone.

We walk to the gym, his dress shoes clacking on the cement. Allie and Adam should be here soon. It’s too bad Bick didn’t have anyone to go with. Maybe Allie and I should try to introduce him to some new girls. He hasn’t dated since Madison ripped out his heart and stomped all over it.

We step in through the double doors, and the heavy beat of a hip-hop song greets us. Orange lights span back and forth from the rafters, and the walls are plastered with the butcher paper that Allie and a bunch of us decorated. As promised, papier-mâché spiders dangle down from the rafters.

The crowd is thick, decked out in fake blood and torn dresses, bloody gashes and green hair. Fog drifts among them, from where, I’m not sure.

“This is cool,” Logan says. “We didn’t have anything like it in Cedar Cove.”

I stiffen at the thought of Cedar Cove, at the image that swarms my vision. A grainy, black-and-white picture of Trent Townsend.

But tonight isn’t about Daemon, or Trent, or whatever I’m supposed to call him. It’s about me and Logan.

The band switches to a slow song, and he turns to me. “Do you want to dance?”

I smile and look down, shy, and then back up at him. “Number three,” I say, nodding toward the floor.

“You have a fear of dancing?”

“Dancing in public,” I correct, blushing.

He pulls me against him. “This is one I can cure you of,” he
says, taking my hand.

I relish the familiar warmth as he leads me toward the dance floor, butterflies swarming like mad.

We push our way past ghouls and goblins, Frankensteins and undead cheerleaders. I do a double take when I pass a guy with a bloody slash on his neck, then blink away the image. It’s fake, of course. I feel stupid for the way my heart jumped at the sight of him.

My shoes vibrate with the intensity of the bass as Logan pulls me into the center of the floor. “Put your arms around my shoulders,” he says.

I lift my left arm, resting it on his shoulder, and then look down at my injured one. “I can’t lift this arm above my chest,” I say.

“It’s okay. This will have to do,” he says, sliding my right arm around his back. It’s awkward and a little silly, but I don’t resist.

He puts his arms around my back and pulls me against him, and I rest my head against his chest, breathing him in and willing my heart to calm. God I missed him. I had no idea how much I’d wrapped everything up in him until he was gone.

“Now, there’s nothing to it. Just sway back and forth,” he says.

I do as he instructs, though I feel awkward and out of place.

The song bleeds into another, and I slowly find the rhythm of it, allowing my body to relax into the beat.

All I can think is I’m glad I didn’t miss this. It’s stupid to
want so desperately to be with Logan when I know I shouldn’t be, but right now, it doesn’t matter. Right now, we’re together.

I stand more upright when the song ends, feeling a little light-headed with it all. “I’m going to go use the restroom. Meet me back here in five minutes?”

Logan nods.

I push my way through the thickening crowd. We’ve gotta be breaking a fire code or something with how many people are in the gym.