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A beat passes before Jake or whatever-his-name-is answers, “The new principal? I said, it’s Jen—”
“No. The kid.”
“Oh. Uh, um, I-I don’t know,” he manages to stutter out. He quickly adds, “Mom never told me. Just said he’d be starting up soon as a senior. He’s older, I guess, eighteen already. Should have already graduated, but I guess juvie put him behind.”
Not younger than me then. Which means…
At that exact moment, the guy standing a good thirty feet away seems to realize he’s being watched. Talked about. His head snaps over to where we sit on the bench, his jittery movements stilling as he straightens to his full height.
He’s too far away for me to make out his eye color, but I don’t need to see them to know they’re green, bordering on gray, as they narrow our way.
No, my way. He’s looking right fucking at me. And to my horror, I’m helpless to turn away.
Even as the two guys next to me curse, and hastily turn around, I find myself frozen. Locked in place. Held hostage by nothing more than that familiar, penetrating gaze, and something else, something deeper.
Something forgotten.
His mouth ticks up, and my stomach bottoms out, landing somewhere near my feet.
A chill spreads down my spine, pimpling my sweat-slicked arms, as I realize that’s not all that holds me hostage.
I clench my hands together in my lap, digging my blunt nails into my skin. As if that could somehow ward off the itch crawling through my body, boiling my blood. As if that could stop my too-tight compression pants from growing tighter at the thought of claiming that sinfully pretty mouth for myself.
His head cocks, sunlight bouncing off his golden-brown hair. I can’t help but feel like he’s sniffing me, even from way over there, sussing out his prey.
Or worse, he recognizes me too…
And senses the reaction I’m having to him.
It can’t be. It fucking can’t be. This isn’t fucking happening.
Before I can even begin to process either possibility, someone appears in my line of sight, just on the other side of the chain-link fence, blocking out my view.
“Hey, babe!”
I quickly jump to a stand, startled out of my revelry as I blink my immediate surroundings back into focus.
Seth’s fingers curl around the metal rungs of the fence as I dart over to him.
“What are you doing here?” I all but hiss, my voice harsher than usual. Behind me, someone makes kissy sounds—probably Casey, the dumbass—but I hardly pay him any notice.
Seth’s brown eyes widen, filling with something like hurt, before narrowing with a flash of familiar anger. “Nice to see you too.”
Blowing out a breath, I try not to be obvious as I press against the fence and glance over my boyfriend’s shoulder. Curling my fingers with Seth’s, I say, distractedly, softer this time, “Sorry, just lost in my head. You know what it’s like before a game.”
He’s still fucking watching me.
“I thought you were tutoring,” I say through numb lips, feeling like my pulse is seconds away from punching out of my throat.
In my periphery, Seth shakes his head with a quiet huff. “I texted you. Calliope needed to get home early, and…”
His voice fades into the background as all my attention lasers back in on the familiar stranger. Jake’s words play back through my head on a loop.
Juvie…last five years…
Nut-job.
Serial killer in the making.
