She struck with the snappy poke-slap of an attacking kitten, and then I was staring at my empty hand.
She’d taken my phone. “Lexi, no!”
“Nah, I need to see what’sreallygoing on. I don’t believe any of this for a second.” She hid my phone behind her back and pointed at me with her other hand, the accusatory whirl of her wrist encompassing every lie I’d told her that morning and in my whole life.“Thisis too weird.”
I twisted and struggled, swiping around her shoulder at my own damned phone she was holding beyond my reach, and she spun in the sheets to turn her back to me. “Stop it.”
“Lexi, give me my phone.” I kicked at the blankets and mostly freed my legs. “This is an invasion of my privacy.”
Because fuck me, I’d left the damned thing unlocked after obsessing over that video since it had popped up in my notifications a few hours before, when I’d awakened to my phone screen casting a green glow on the ceiling.
She spun in the sheets easily while I flailed, turning her back to me and hunching over my phone. “What the heck?” she demanded. “Was this from last night?”
The video was mercifully silent because I’d listened to it the first time through my AirPods, but then I’d muted it as I’d tried to triangulate who’d shot the video and thus so egregiously broken everyone’s trust last night.
At the Omnia the night before, we’d had a spy in our midst, and from the angles of the camera shots, they’d been right in thecenterof our proverbial midst, not at the edges.
I feinted a grab at the phone around one of Lexi’s shoulders. When she twisted, Ialmostsnatched it with my other hand. “Lexi,stop watching it.”
“No.I want to know what the hell happened with you. It’snot rightto just walk away from someone and they don’t even know why. It’snot right.”
To wrest it from her, I’d have to hurt her, maybe injure her, and I didn’t want to. “This is not like your ex, Jimmy the Fool. Lexi,stop.You don’t want to see?—”
Her body was curled around the small screen in her hands, and she blocked my grabbing hands with her shoulders.
A flip of her blond hair filled the glowing pixels. “Someone filmed us last night? That’s rude. I mean, it was a public space, but they should’ve at least gotten permission to post it. Did they tag you?”
“It wasn’t on socials. Lexi,giveme myphone.”
“They were zoomed in on us the whole time. I thought that was the point, anyway, to show everyone how real we were.”
I lunged around her, trying to snap it out of her grip. Her hand seemed to dart away from everywhere I tried. My hand locked around her wrist and I tried to shake the phone out of her hand, but I was too gentle. I should have done whatever was necessary to take it away from her. “Lexi,don’t fucking watch it.”
“Nicolai,language,andlet goof me.”
My feints turned to frantic grappling, and I almost knocked her over as the video played, nearing the break.“Don’twatch it.Stop.”
“Wow, they even filmed us when we were standing in the hidey hole, when I was having my drunken meltdown about you being a shadow daddy. Did I really look that wild-eyed? That’s embarrassing.”
Recklessness caused my grabs to veer off the mark, and she dodged my attempts to take my phone away from her again. I was practically crawling over her, trying to wrestmy own damned phoneback. “Lexi,stop. Please.”
“Did you sneak away and cheat on me or something? I mean,wow,but we never even signed that supposed pre-nup contract, so it doesn’t count, I guess.”
Swipe.Dodge.Grab.Feint. Being unsuccessful was all the more uncouth. “I wouldnever,but Lexi, turn it off.Turn it off.”
The light in the room brightened because the video on the screen was brighter, no longer a shot from inside the dark Omnia nightclub.
I swiped at it, my fingers grazing the slick glass, but she jerked her arm away. “Lexi,no!”
Her voice had lost its breath, like she’d been sucker-punched.“What is this?”
The fight had gone out of my voice and my soul, and I sounded like I was begging even as I tried to pluck my phone from her fingers. “Turn it off.”
“Nicolai!This is a movie,right?It’s a horror movie? It’s not real.It’s not real.”
CHAPTER 2
an explicit threat
