Page 59 of Lethal in Pink

I hold his gaze. Something tight and burning twists beneath my collarbone.

“Yeah,” I say, my voice steady despite the noise in my chest. “I want that too.”

Five syllables. A simple agreement on the surface, but a massive breach in my armor everywhere else.

I reach out, wrapping my fingers around his wrist—feeling the heavy jump of his pulse against my thumb—and drag him back into the center of the crowd before the silence forces us to say anything else.

Someone has zip-tied every single chair in the Thornfield Hall lobby to the ceiling grid, and the ThornsUp feed is undergoing a collective meltdown. The clip has hit twenty thousand views before noon.

I stand in the arched doorway of the quad, holding a sweating iced matcha in one hand, watching three engineering seniors try to explain to a campus security guard that the hanging furniture represents a critical commentary on the weight of higher education. The guard looks like he’s calculating how many years he has left until retirement. The comments section under the video is calling for the pranksters to be knighted.

It’s the final day before summer break, and Blackthorn University has unraveled into complete madness.

The water inside the marble fountain in the center of the quad has been dyed a blinding, neon pink. It’s a wonderful color choice and clearly the work of someone who bought industrial dye in bulk and refused to compromise. A fleet of two hundred yellow rubber ducks drifts lazily across the surface while a circle of freshmen records them from every conceivable angle. Over at the main gates, someone has draped a Blackthorn banner over the bronze statue of Elias Blackthorn, giving the university founder the appearance of a very confused superhero.

I’m wearing shorts and an oversized Blackthorn crewneck I bought months ago and stuffed into the bottom of a drawer. The sleeves are pushed up past my forearms, my pink sneakers are scuffed at the toes, and my blonde hair is thrown into a messy knot at the base of my neck with a single pink elastic.

I spot Jae on the east side of the quad, perched on the low limestone wall with his phone resting on his knee. He’s scrolling through the campus feed with the quiet, fascinated amusement of a researcher studying an alien species. His thumb moves in slow flicks, taking in the floating ducks, the hanging chairs, the chaotic energy—not filming a single second of it himself. Just observing. Letting the madness wash around him without trying to capture it.

There’s an easy, detached calm to him that I’ve noticed before. While everyone else is desperate to document every second of their lives, Jae is completely content to just exist in the middle of it.

I walk over and drop onto the stone wall beside him. Our shoulders bump. Neither of us bothers with a greeting.

“Engineering seniors?” I ask, nodding toward the lobby chaos.

“Biochem majors,” he corrects, eyes still on the screen. “The petition to keep the chairs up has three hundred signatures.”

“Unbelievable.”

We sit in easy silence, watching the quad vibrate with post-finals mania. Near the shuttle loop, a group of frat guys is attempting to duct-tape a full-sized mattress to the side of a parked campus bus. The driver is standing a few feet away with his arms folded, staring at them with profound indifference.

“That tape isn't going to hold,” I say, not needing three seconds to run the math. “Standard polyethylene backing, low shear strength, and zero surface prep on painted sheet metal. The moment gravity takes over, the adhesive shears.”

Jae tilts his head, looking down at me with a slow, amused brow raise. “They might have used high-grade gaffer tape.”

“It’s cheap duct tape from the campus bookstore, Jae. Technique doesn't override physics.”

“Says the woman who tried to convince me that arcade basketball games are rigged against people under five-foot-six.”

“The rim ratio is mathematically biased, Jae.”

“You missed four shots in a row.” he reminds me.

“It was a structural anomaly.” I plant my hand against his shoulder and push.

He doesn't move an inch—his arm is solid muscle under his jacket—but he lets out a quiet chuckle. My palm lingers against his jacket a second longer than necessary before I drop my hand.

“If I were executing a campus prank,” I say, leaning back against the stone, “I wouldn't waste time with tape or dye. I’d break into the administration building and swap every official oil portrait of the Dean with an identical, custom-painted portrait of a Victorian cat. High quality. Gilded frames. It would take them three weeks to even notice.”

Jae considers this, his mouth pulling up at one corner before the other follows—slow, warm, infuriatingly attractive.

“Weak,” he decides.

“Excuse me?”

“Cats are subtle. Subtle isn't disruptive. Disruptive is replacing the fountain water with high-viscosity gelatin.”

“Gelatin would dissolve in the rain.”