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It’s a brief ray of light breaking through the clouds of despair hanging over my head, but it helps me breathe a little easier and soothes some of the anxiety, bringing me back from the brink of an emotional breakdown. Once we’re inside, he sits me down on the bed, kneels in front of me, and opens his slim laptop with a grim expression.
The tension is killing me. I haven’t fully calmed down from what his mom tried to pull, let alone the bomb dropped on me last night.
“Your mom wants to bribe me to stop seeing you.” I put one thing out there, shoving the weight off my shoulders so I have help bearing it before it crushes me.
Connor stills, dragging his attention from the screen to stare at me. He pinches the bridge of his nose.
“Fucking bitch. Don’t listen to her. Whatever poison she tried to feed you, it’s bullshit.”
My body sags in relief. “I thought—when I couldn’t get a hold of you. I thought you didn’t want me.”
“Thea.” He puts the laptop on the floor and slides his palms up the sides of my thighs. “I want you. I love you. Everything I’ve been doing is for you. All of it. I’m ready to tell you why I’ve been distant the last few days.”
I lean in, resting my forehead against his. The earthy scent uniq
ue to him twines around me as he strokes his thumbs against my legs.
After a minute, he taps my thigh and picks up the laptop again. “We have to prioritize this. Time is running out and I’m not waiting around anymore.”
“What is it?”
Connor sighs. “You know I’m good at weeding out people’s secrets?”
I nod.
“Back when you and I…well, before I revealed myself to you, I did some digging. It wasn’t hard to access for someone like me. I told you I’m good with computers.”
“What are you saying?”
“It’s better if I show you what I stumbled on.”
Connor turns the laptop, the screen full of several windows showing photos of necklaces, email transcripts, and Mr. Coleman’s photo.
“What is this?”
“Something sinister. Chief Landry won’t listen. That’s where I was this morning, begging him for an arrest or an investigation after I did all the damn legwork. ‘Evidence obtained illegally is useless’.” Connor pulls a face, imitating Maisy’s dad’s gruff voice. “Bullshit, right? Whatever, like hell I’m waiting around. We’ll get him ourselves if we have to.”
“You’re throwing a lot at me,” I say, head jumbled by the battering my emotions took and wary of where this is going. Connor has always had trouble with my favorite teacher.
“Coleman,” he clarifies, watching me as he taps his laptop screen. He gestures to each of the windows as he talks. “If I didn’t have the comments to compare the conversations to, I might not have figured it out, and then he said that freaky shit to you. It threw up red flags.”
My lips part to interrupt, but he goes on before I voice my questions.
“I couldn’t tie him to the creepy knight username concretely with an ip address match at first—bastard’s damn good at covering his tracks—but there are these insane hackers also onto him, and they sent me on a wild goose chase to get one of Coleman’s trophies back. They gave me the unsealed files once I did, but I’d already seen enough after I broke into his place.”
“Broke in?” I yelp, pushing my fingers in my hair. He broke into our teacher’s house? “Oh my god, Connor. What are you talking about?”
“I had to.” He squeezes my knee. “I’d do anything to keep you safe.”
There’s so much to unpack. Between his confusing explanation and the information overload, I’m speechless. One window in particular pulls my focus and my body freezes.
The relief I felt moments ago vanishes. He already knows my secret. An instinctive refusal rears up, leaving me feeling exposed, but I swallow it back, trying to keep a level head.
He sees you. All of you.
“How did you find that?” With a shaking finger, I point at the browser window with my blog loaded.
“I hacked into your computer and it was in your recent browser history.” Connor shoots me a look that says not the important thing here, and jabs his finger on the screen over Mr. Coleman’s face. “I don’t care about the blog. Although, really, if it’s private you should’ve password protected it, but what matters is it was key in figuring out—”
