Page 204 of What We Burn

“Give me that.”

“Never. It goes in the wedding slideshow.”

I laugh so hard I fart, and then everyone’s laughing—the ugly, honking kind of laughter that hurts, that folds me in half over the table while Milo shouts “SHE’S HUMAN!” like he’s just won a bet with God. Knox’s hand stays on my knee through all of it, steady, and when I finally surface, wheezing, there are tears on my cheeks that have nothing to do with the fart.

Mostly.

“Okay,” Holden says, smiling as he gets up and finally brings the coffee to the table. “Okay. Drink up. Then everyone showers and gets horizontal before we all start hallucinating.”

“I already hallucinated once tonight,” Milo says. “Turned out it was just Dean’s face, and he got real mad when I poked him in it.”

Micah fills my mug and adds a splash of milk before sliding it back. “Eat some crackers first, baby girl. You haven’t eaten enough.”

“I ate half the cheese plate at the club,” I say.

“Explains the gas,” Milo points out, and the laughter starts again.

It takes its time dying and keeps reigniting—Milo says “cheese plate” under his breath and Eli snorts coffee through his nose, which sets Holden off, which is genuinely unsettling because I’ve never seen Holden laugh with his whole face before. He has a nice face. He should use it more.

Then the exhaustion lands all at once, like someone cut the power to the room.

“Bed,” Knox says.

“Shower,” Milo counters.

“You showered at the scene,” Holden says.

“I still have blood in my ear, Holden.”

“Shower it is then.”

Milo stops and narrows his eyes at Holden. “You can’t come.”

Holden just laughs.

When I try to stand, my legs file a formal complaint with management. Knox doesn’t ask. He slides one arm under my knees and one behind my back and lifts me out of the chair like I weigh less than the cushion.

“I can walk,” I say.

“Sure, you can.” He heads for the stairs anyway.

Behind us, chairs scrape. The whole flock follows—Eli close enough that his hand finds the back of my calf and squeezes, like he needs the contact point, Milo narrating our ascent like a nature documentary.

“And here we observe the Hangmen migrating toward the communal nest. The female of the species is feral but docile when carried⁠—”

“Shut up, Milo,” five voices say in unison.

“Rude. Accurate, but rude.”

We shower in shifts, and when I finally come out—hair wet, skin raw, wearing one of Holden’s T-shirts that hits me mid-thigh—the bed has already happened. All of them. Settled across Holden’s barely big-enough-mattress like a crime scene of limbs. Milo is face-down in a pillow again. Eli is sitting against the headboard, eyes open, waiting.

For me. He’s been waiting for me.

“Phone,” Milo mumbles into the pillow, one hand extended.

I hand it over. He sits up, suddenly brisk, thumbs flying across the screen, his tongue poking out the corner of his mouth. Two minutes later he hands it back with a flourish.

“Catch is live. Anything routed through Brock’s number hits the group chat instantly. I named it Project Dead Man Texting.”