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“Hello, Lennon. How are you? Are you enjoying Minnesota? Did your mom recover from her food poisoning?”
“Fuck my mother!” Lennon stands up, carrying the phone with her across the room until she pauses and I hear a sliding door open followed by dog nails clicking on the hardwood. “Respectfully,” she adds. “Spill everything. Can he still hear me?”
I glance up at Griffin, wondering the same thing. He doesn’t seem to be listening. “Finn?” I say. No response. He’s clicking around on the monitor, doing whatever it is he’s supposed to be doing to craft the music industry's next greatest hit.
“I don’t think so.” I flip the camera around, revealing Finn in his sweatshirt with his headphones on and his thigh tattoos on full display below his shorts. I don’t want to admit what those do to me. They’re woefully slutty.
“He’s fucking hot, Ellie!”
I giggle.
Like a schoolgirl.
“I know,” I whisper, leaning over to grab my own water bottle from the floor, carefully trying to unscrew the cap with one hand to take a drink. I manage the task successfully, and when I set it back down, I see the feral smile on Lennon’s face.
“Did you–”
My stomach drops. “No!” I interrupt before she can finish, the heat of a million wildfires rushing to my face. “But Idohave to go.”
“Are you going to–”
I roll my eyes. “No, Lennon. Not tonight.”
She wiggles her brows. “Not tonight? Okay, okay. Well, I have to go anyway, too. My parents are probably going to wake up from all my screeching.” She’s walking up a set of stairs in a dark hallway. “Call me tomorrow?”
“Sure.”
Lennon hangs up, and the cracked door to Finn’s closet opens a bit more, creaking as a black, fluffy creature prowls into the room.
Finn turns around, taking his headphones off again. “Simon,” he offers. “He doesn’t usually like strangers. He’s probably been hiding, but I suppose he got curious.”
“I almost forgot you said you had a cat.” The cat walks over to me, and I reach my hand down, letting him sniff me before he rubs his face on my fingers and lets me pet under his chin. My heart is suddenly warm and fuzzy and about to explode. “He’s cute.”
Finn bites the inside of his cheek, suppressing a smile as he stares at me, and my brows furrow.
“What?” I say.
“Nothing.”
“No, tell me.”
“You think I’m fucking hot?”
My face is in my hands faster than Christian inviting a stranger to coffee. The embarrassment has me wanting to crawl into the Earth to move as far away from Finn as possible. “Oh my god,” I mutter.
“It’s fine,” he says. “Payback for the ass comment earlier.”
I can’t look at him. I slowly pick up my sketchbook and wish some freak accident would just take me out. End my life so I don’t have to see hisfucking hotface again.
“So, you’ve been drawing in that, right?” I risk a glance upward, noting that there’s no judgment there. I’m thankful for that. “Drawing for your fancy spy job, of course.”
I sigh. “Yeah.” Opening the sketchbook, I flip to a page with a park scene–anything but my sketch of Finn.
He stands up, moving closer and sitting himself on the floor next to the beanbag. When he takes the book, my heart poundsrapidly in my chest. He’s flipping through it, and I’m nervous he’s going to see the image I drew of him.
“These are really good,” he says. “I’m not sure why you’d pick marketing if you can do all this.” He turns the sketchbook on its side, looking at one of the drawings I did of Lennon. She practically commissioned it–for free, of course.
“Well, you know,” I say. “Art isn’t exactly stable.”
