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“But not everyone’s on there. That dumb girl who wrote the haiku about Aubrey? Not on there, and a nail would have been incredibly easy to incorporate into the artwork. That dorky kid, Frank something, he’s not on there, and that dumbass is in jail for a crime Dare committed. There are other people that didn’t make the cut, too. He didn’t ink them all into his skin. Only us. You, me, and Aubrey. Aubrey and I have both fucked him.” She looks Hannah in the eyes. “So, I’m going to ask one more time—have you?”
“I told you I didn’t, Anae.”
Tapping Anae on the arm, I point out, “He could have tattoos for the other people. Maybe he just put them in a different place.”
“Oh, that’s true,” Anae says, as if she hadn’t considered that. A crease mars her perfect brow and she backs out of that picture, checking other posts to see if she can find ink anywhere else on his body. Since she’s looking through a few beach posts, there’s a lot of skin to look at.
While Anae is distracted, I glance over at Hannah. She’s chewing on her bottom lip.
I’m concerned about her getting sucked back into this twisted web now that Anae is back. It was really hard on her last year. I thought she was finally clear of it once they moved and Anae wasn’t around, but if Anae keeps bringing her focus back to the past, and especially if she finds new wrinkles Hannah hadn’t considered…
I never met Aubrey and I have nothing against the girl, but being with Dare washerchoice. I’m all for helping people when you can, but sometimes you have to let people live with their choices.
Hannah insists Aubrey didn’t really know what she was getting into with him, that he deliberately misled her and only revealed the truth about himself once she’d fallen for him, but at the risk of sounding like an uncaring asshole, that’s Aubrey’s problem. If she’s truly in trouble with him, then I hope she finds a way out of it, but not at Hannah’s expense. I don’t want my too-caring-for-her-own-good friend getting sucked back into Aubrey’s vortex of dysfunction trying to save her. I don’t know if she can make it out again.
When Hannah first told me about all this, I warned her that it was much easier for someone to pull you down when you offered a hand to help than for you to pull them up, so she had better make sure she had excellent footing. A stumble could prove fatal.
In Aubrey’s case, if the devil really has a death grip on her ankle, it’s even more likely.
But Hannah could not be convinced she lacked the Herculean strength to fight him, apparently, because every time she put distance between them, she let Aubrey suck her right back in.
“What if you’re misinterpreting it?” Hannah suggests. “Maybe it’s not symbolizing breaking Cinderella, but something with time. Like ‘time’s up’ or ‘it’s only a matter of time,’ or…”
Fear cuts through me when she utters that last guess. I cut in before Hannah inadvertently leads Anae somewhere crazy. “Maybe we should all stop trying to read into these tattoos he never even meant for us to see.”
Anae’s head snaps up. “Oh, he meant for me to see them. He didn’t block me on any of his social media. He knew the first thing I would do when I got my phone back was check in on him, especially after he sent me that picture after prom.”
“Did it say anything else?” Hannah asks. “Did he just send the picture with no context, or was there a message attached?”
“I kept it,” she says, swiping away from his social media page and bringing up her old text messages with Dare.
The last message is from him to her. The time stamp says he sent it the morning after prom. There’s a picture of Hannah in a red dress wearing the rose necklace, and above it is a bubble of text that reads, “Thought you’d want to know Cinderella is playing with your toys while you’re away.”
I look to Hannah, who sits back and loses a shade of color.
I get it. It’s hard to look at that message asnotsiccing Anae on her.
I try to insert some reason. “Look, Dare’s cruel. We all know that. I get that you guys knew him so you’re trying to understand why he would do something like this, but the honest answer is probably just for his own sadistic amusement. He’s not even here and he’s messing with both of you. Can you imagine the pleasure he must feel knowing he can do that?”
Anae sighs—but it’s not the kind of sigh I would expect, it’s like she’s downright smitten. “He’s so wonderful. How could anyone not love this man? He’s so interesting.”
“He’s not. He’s just a shameless psychopath who leaves a path of destruction and broken lives in his wake.”
Anae shakes her head. “You’re so boring. You’re just like his stupid vanilla scoop. You don’t see his genius.”
“Well, she must see something in him since she rode off into the sunset with him,” I point out.
Anae narrows her eyes at me. “Ew. Whose side are you on?”
“Hannah’s. I don’t have a dog in this fight. I couldn’t care less about Chase Darington. I think he’s the worst, and I’m glad he’s gone.” Standing, I say, “Now, can you guys stop playing detectives over theinkhe has chosen for his skin and come back to the present? We need to pick our stupid lipsticks.”
Anae shakes her head, looking back at the screen. “I’m going to figure it out. I feel like he’s still playing with me. He’s leaving me messages, I just have to decode them and figure out what he wants me to do.”
“Or you could not care what he wants you to do because he’s literally living happily ever after with someone else, so honestly, fuck him.”
She rolls her eyes. “Please. Aubrey isnothis end game. Dare is a beast and she wants him to live in a cage. He’ll get restless. Bored. Maybe he already is. Dare will never stay where he doesn’t want to be, so once he tires of her, it’s over. He’ll ditch her just like he did me, and after spending this time with someone who doesn’t understand him, who doesn’t let him be who he is, he will remember me fondly. He will miss having me around, someone who understood and appreciated him for everything he truly is. We were the perfect couple. He just got distracted by her, that’s all. He was used to me and he had a taste for something softer, something pure and sweet that he could sink his fangs into and pollute. But now he’s used to the taste, or he’s already polluted her and it’s not fun for him anymore. He’s probably bored to tears with his downgrade and realizing he made a massive mistake. That’s why he left me all these clues. He wants me back.”
“No,” I say firmly, because her delusions are getting dangerous. “Anae, he doesn’t love you. He doesn’t want to be with you. Look at the pictures. They’rehappy.”
