I don’t have a choice. I need to know what exactly she knows… and what she wants from me to keep it from getting out.I have to believe that if she wanted to tell anyone, she already would have.
It’s just a matter of the price for her silence.
“Let’s go,” I say, starting to walk again.
Pandora takes my hand and follows along. I try to let go, but she holds on tight, even squeezing as if in warning. “This is going to be so much fun! I’ve been wondering about your bachelor pad. Blaze is covering it all, right? Is the interior modern, or one of those run down student housing places where the landlord gives zero shits?”
I don’t want to talk about it.
I don’t want to talk about anything.
All I can think about is the sight etched permanently into my memory of an unconscious Blaze, my hand stroking his cock until it came all over my hand.
And Pandora knows.
Pandora fucking knows.
“Modern,” I tell her, my voice flat. “I really don’t want to chat right now, Pandora. Or, how about this? Tell me about your snake.”
That has to interest her, right? Enough to get her off topic long enough for us to get back home, enough to distract me until we have this inevitable conversation.
“You want to know about Echo?” Pandora reaches into her hoodie pocket and pulls out a phone.
It’s a new phone, I realize, not the one she’d had that night. The case is also neon pink, but the design on it is different. Still a snake, but this time coiled around a skull instead of simply coiled into itself.
It’s a new phone, because we’d taken her old one. Nobody had ever returned it to her.
That, or River’s finger bones.
Pandora taps on the screen—angled away so I can’t see her inputting her password—then pulls up pictures of the snake. “Here we go. Look at my baby danger noodle. She looks fat, but that’s just how blood pythons are. They are the curvaceous beauties of the snake world.”
I glance at the street, both hoping that the bus arrives to end this sooner and dreading getting to that point, then look back down at her phone. “Danger noodle?” I ask. “Really?”
“Yeah. Papa calls them that, but he says he got it from an internet meme back when he was a young person, so like, a billion years ago.” Pandora’s eyes crinkle. “I tell him that to make him feel old.”
“Uh huh,” I tell her.
Her Papa is, from what I’ve learned, the head of the Pavone Family, and it’s strange to hear about him as Pandora sees him instead of how Blaze described him.
The bus arrives, and I swipe my bus pass against the card reader. Pandora has to fumble to use her credit card to pay, because of course she wouldn’t have something as plebeian as a bus pass.
I’m pretty sure she has a car here, like Blaze and River do, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be trapped in a car with her anyway.
I sit down at an empty seat in the middle, and Pandora slides in next to me, trapping me between her and the window. She scoots as close as physically possible, our thighs pressing against each other.
“You don’t have to sit right on top of me,” I mutter.
She doesn’t back off, of course. But then, why would she?
“I’m serious,” I tell her. “Move over.”
“No.” Pandora scoots even closer, going so far as to lay one thigh over mine. “What are you gonna do about it, boyfriend?”
“You only wish I’d do something about it,” I mutter. “But fine. I guess someone like you wouldn’t know about basic bus etiquette.”
A few weeks ago, I’d gone from wanting to strangle her to wanting to kiss her — and cut her up, a small voice reminds me — and now I’ve gone back to the former.
I can’t deny she’s beautiful, or sexy, but that doesn’t make her any less deadly.
