Modern Monsters (Entangled Teen) (10 page)

The curiosity on Autumn’s face softens. “I’m sure you’re smart at plenty of stuff.”

“Uh…no. Not really.” History? English? Aside from word meanings… Science? Math? I’m pretty much a failure at everything that will get me a career in any line of work that doesn’t involve flipping burgers and asking, “Would you like fries with that?”

“Maybe not bookish stuff, but there are other things to be smart about in life.” She turns to my dresser, pulling open the top drawer. Thankfully she got my socks on the first try because I don’t think I really want her digging around in my underwear. She chucks a clean pair at my face. “Like, being a nice guy. Being forgiving and kind and loyal and all that.”

I put on the socks. “Not so sure that r-requires smarts.”

“I don’t know about that. It requires a certain knowledge of people and how to relate to them. Empathy, you know? It’s like…emotional intelligence.”

“So I’m emotionally intelligent?”

“Sure.”

I would laugh, but this is obviously very serious to Autumn, so I smile instead and rise to my feet. She’s paying me a compliment, so instead I say, “Thank you.”

Her shoulders relax and she smiles back at me. “Come on. We’ve got things to do.”

Chapter Thirteen

Autumn and I spend the day driving around town. We go to a bookstore she frequents across from the mall, where we can order coffee from the adjoining café and sit and read on couches for as long as we want. We stop by a pet store so she can get food for her cat, and where she corners me into holding some of their baby rabbits—despite the fact that I’m terrified I’m going to either crush them to death or drop them or both. She seems to take great joy in watching me do this. Something about it being funny and cute to see a creature so tiny in my large hands.

Lunch is fast food at the park. Or rather, the parking lot of the park. With the windows down and the seats leaned back some, the radio on, eating burgers and fries, I mention, “I’ll be making these burgers someday.”

“Oh, shut up. You will not.”

“Will, too. With all of my emotional intellect, I m-may be flipping burgers, but those burgers will
understand
people.”

She laughs so hard she nearly chokes on her food, smacking my leg. When she can talk again she says, “You’ll never be a comedian.”

I couldn’t care less so long as my dumb jokes make her laugh.

Then my phone going off ruins the moment. The fourth time in the last hour. And for the fourth time, it’s Brett, trying to find out where I am and what I’m doing. I hadn’t responded because I wasn’t sure if I should. Would he tell Mr. Mason that I’m out with Autumn? Would Mr. Mason flip out?

Autumn is peering at me curiously. I type a quick message to Brett:
out with Autumn will call later
and pocket my phone. “S-sorry. It’s Brett.”

“Ahh.” She finishes off her fries. “If I’m keeping you from something…”

“No,” I say quickly. “No. You’re not.”

“Good.” She opens her door and gets out. I blink once, puzzled, and get out to follow Autumn into the park, where she immediately scales the empty jungle gym and stops at the top to look down at me.

She’s so cute. Cute enough that I can’t resist the urge to hold up my phone to take a picture, for which she poses with her hands on the railings and smiles wide.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Having fun. Forgetting about life for a while. Don’t you ever do that?”

I tilt my head but say nothing. I certainly don’t point out that we were supposed to be “playing detective” today.

Autumn shrugs. “You’ve been through a lot. It might be nice for you to pretend you’re a kid again, back when the most important thing that mattered was when those two snot-nosed toddlers who’ve been monopolizing the swings are going to leave.”

Makes sense, I guess, though I suppose Brett’s idea of making me “forget” about things is going to another party or hanging out with his family. Don’t get me wrong, we have fun when we’re together, but…it’s different.
This
is different. “W-why does it matter so much to you?” With Callie, I get it. It’s her best friend, like Brett is to me, and she was alone before Callie came along. But me…I’m just the guy she threatened to run over with her car a few weeks ago.

“Really?”
She sounds offended by the question, leaning over the railing and squinting down at me. “I thought we were friends. Why wouldn’t it matter to me?”

Friends. Yeah, of course. That’s all we are. I look down at the photo of her on my phone, embarrassed. “Sorry.”

Autumn rocks forward onto her tiptoes, head bowing, long hair spilling forward over the rail and dangling a foot or so above my head. I could reach up and touch it if I wanted. “So I’ve been thinking. We should go down that list and start talking to people.”

I blink up at her, squinting against the sunlight peering through the trees and glinting off the metal of the jungle gym. “And say what?
Hi, I’m Vic and they think I raped Callie Wheeler, but was it actually you
?”

She lets out a short laugh. “I was thinking more like asking them if they saw anything. Maybe the police haven’t talked to them all. Or maybe there are details they didn’t want to go to the cops with because they were worried about getting in trouble. Callie told me some of the people there wouldn’t admit to having gone at all because they didn’t want to get busted by their parents for being at a party with alcohol; there’s no way the cops have the complete list of everyone who was there.”

I guess I hadn’t thought about that. “Y-you think they’ll talk to me, being the prime suspect?”

Her mouth purses together. “Do you want to help or not?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then it’s worth a try, isn’t it? Nothing is going to get accomplished sitting on our asses, and we need to start somewhere.”

She has a point. Maybe I’m just scared of the idea of being judged more than I already am. At least when people are whispering behind my back, I can turn away and try to block it out…but facing it head-on like when Aaron and his pack cornered me in the bathroom, or when Marco hit me, that’s a little different. Harder to handle.

“Okay,” I relent. “M-Monday, then?”

“Monday,” she agrees with a grin. “It’s a date.”

It’s five in the evening before I talk to Brett. He’s been texting me all day with questions, confused by the one lone message I sent him. While Autumn is inside cooking us dinner, I step out onto the back porch to call him. He dislikes talking on the phone, but he answers on the second ring anyway.

“Are you dead?”

I roll my eyes. “N-no, I’m not dead.”

“Good, because I was beginning to wonder if she locked you in her trunk and drove her car into the lake.”

“Alive and kicking.”

“Okay. So what’s going on?”

I didn’t plan out what I was going to tell him, but the question sparks a silly grin to plaster itself to my face. “Um, I’ve been hanging out with Autumn.”

Brett pauses. “Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

Another pause. I can tell he’s trying to gauge what he’s supposed to say, what this means. “Okay. Why?”

“We were j-just hanging out. We’re friends, that’s what friends do, isn’t it?” This time, Brett is sighing and I get the feeling it’s one of those sighs that suggests he wants to say something I won’t like. “What?”

“I don’t know, Vic. I mean, it just seems like…” He hesitates. “Are you sure she’s not like…playing you?”

“Why would she?”

“Because just the other week, she thought you raped her best friend and now she’s wanting to hang out with you? Sounds suspicious to me.”

I try not to let the comment sting or take away the slight cloud I’ve been floating on all day. No one is going to ruin this for me or make me question it. He sounds genuinely worried, and that only bothers me more. “She’s not like that.”

“Considering she put you flat on your back and treated you like shit the first few times she met you, how do you know?”

“B-because that was different. She thought—”

“And what makes her positive that you didn’t do it?”

The question rubs me in all the wrong ways. As my best friend, I thought Brett would laugh and congratulate me. Never did I think he’d act like he can’t believe I’d have someone to spend time with other than him.

“Y-you know what, I have to go. She’s making us dinner.”

“Vic—”

I hang up without saying good-bye. There’s never been a moment when I haven’t supported Brett and encouraged him. He’s had a total of three actual girlfriends in the last few years—not counting casual hookups—and every time he’s been with them, I got nudged to the background while he was busy taking them out on dates and buying them lavish gifts. I went along quietly with it because he was happy, because he still tried to include me even though I always felt left out, and he still found time for me if I needed him.

So maybe I expected more support than this. Maybe he really is concerned given how Autumn and I met, I don’t know. But I refuse to dwell on it. Especially when I turn around and see Autumn standing at the stove, balanced on one foot while she scratches her calf with the other foot. She’s intently studying the recipe in one of her mother’s cookbooks. This last twenty-four hours has been a godsend. I didn’t realize how much I needed it. How much I needed her. Yet I still can’t help but feel like I don’t deserve it.

Autumn twists around to glance over her shoulder and smile at me through the sliding glass door. I pocket my phone and slip back inside, wandering up behind her to peer over her shoulder.

“Rice noodles and chicken stir-fry,” she explains. “I hope it tastes all right.”

“Smells good.” I’m so close to her and the temptation to just lean down and rest my cheek against her shoulder is obnoxiously strong. Do friends do that? Pretty sure that would be crossing a line I’m not sure I’m invited to cross yet.

We eat dinner—which is pretty tasty; better than anything I could conjure up—and relocate to the couch to watch a movie, which feels very date night-ish considering Autumn curls up at my side and I put my arm around her shoulders and play with her hair the entire time.

When it comes time to either decide to go to bed or take me home, she turns off the TV, debates for a moment, then turns to me.

“If you know how to be a gentleman, you can sleep upstairs with me.”

I blink once, not quite comprehending. Is there a guest room? I don’t remember seeing one. I just remember a bathroom, her room, and one other door that I assumed to be her parents’ room. So that means—

Oh.

“Okay,” I say dumbly, because I’m not sure I would know how
not
to be a gentleman. But I’ll admit the thought of curling up with her in bed is appealing to me in more ways than one. I do have hormones. I’m attracted to her. I can’t help that much. All I can help is that I’d never do anything to Autumn she didn’t ask me to do.

She locks up downstairs and takes my hand to lead me to her room. I was only here that one time and hadn’t looked around much, too distracted by Callie’s presence, but now I take in the details of her black lace curtains and the Japanese cherry blossom tree paintings on her walls. She vanishes long enough to get changed in the bathroom, and when she returns it’s in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt.

“These are pretty,” I comment, nodding to the paintings.

Autumn actually looks down shyly, smiling to herself. “You think so?”

“Well…y-yeah. Did you paint them?”

“Yep, last summer. I’ve always liked to paint, but last year I really got into the whole
sumi-e
style.”

“You’ll have to add that word to my vocabulary.”

She laughs, gesturing to her desk in the corner where some odd stones, bottles of various colors, and some brushes are neatly organized. “Let’s see…
Sumi-e
, the Japanese term for ink on paper. I guess. Something like that. Basically, painting with ink and water.”

I commit that to memory. Probably not a definition I’ll find in my dictionary. I’m trying to imagine painting with something like ink and thinking I’d probably make a mess everywhere. These paintings are intricate and beautiful. “Is th-this what you want to do after high school?” I find myself asking. “Art?”

She comes to stand right beside me, looking up at one of the canvases on her wall. “I don’t know. I’ve thought about it, but the term ‘starving artist’ exists for a reason. I’d like to get into a field I can at least support myself on while doing art on the side, you know?”

At least she has that much figured out. My after-high-school goals include trying to survive. It’s a time period I haven’t put much thought into because Brett will be leaving the state to attend Harvard, Yale, whatever those big schools are that he’s been busting his ass to get into the last several years. That’ll leave me here alone.

“What about you?” Autumn asks. “You’re not actually aspiring to flip burgers, I’m sure.”

Looking at Autumn’s paintings, I really wish there were something I was good at other than remembering words out of a dictionary. I’ve never been much of an artist, singer, actor, anything. Nothing in the creative arts. “I wish I knew. I d-don’t know what I’m good at.”

“Well, what interests do you have? Music, sports, books, movies?”

“I like music,” I admit. “Brett had a guitar a few years ago I liked to mess around on.”

“Were you any good?”

“I c-could play a mean ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb.’”

Autumn laughs. “Okay, well…we’ll figure it out. Everyone has something they’re interested in.” She gestures to the bed. “Sorry, I looked through my dad’s stuff but he’s short and kind of chunky, so I don’t think any of his sweats would fit you. Besides, who knows if he wears underwear with them and that’d be kind of gross.”

A smile ticks at the corners of my mouth. “That’s okay.”

“Just sleep in your boxers if you want.” She flicks off the overhead light and crawls into bed. There’s just enough light coming in through the curtains that I don’t fall all over the place while stripping out of my clothes and, crawling beneath the covers beside her, I almost feel more exposed than I did this morning getting changed in the same room as her.

There’s a three-inch gap between our bodies, an invisible barrier that I’m afraid to breach. After a minute of lying silently in the dark, Autumn does it for me. She nudges me into position so that she can fit her body up against me, one of her legs between my thighs, arms around each other, and her face tucked against my throat so her lips are resting on my pulse point. This is where things get tricky, because I’m closing my eyes and willing my body not to react to the feel of so much of her skin against my skin.

It’s almost funny, though, how as Autumn falls asleep in my arms, the sensation of feeling turned on fades to utter calm and peace. Her breathing evens out, her fingers curled against my back slowly going slack, and when I whisper her name, she doesn’t respond. I almost want to pull away to stare at her while she sleeps, but moving would probably wake her.

I marvel at this. All of this. At her. At the fact that someone as sharp-tongued, fierce, loyal, and beautiful as Autumn Dixon would ever have been lonely like me, would ever have any interest in someone as under-the-radar as I am, and how something so horrific could possibly bring something so incredible into my life.