Page 82 of Jack

Hannah rolled her eyes. “Oh, you met someone who might be nice to your face and a bitch behind your back? Do tell?” she asked sarcastically.

I laughed. “You’re right, I’m not holding her properly accountable. It’s so much easier with people like Shelby and Addison. You know immediately where you stand. It’s confusing with people like Casey. You think you’re cool and then you find out they’re taking nude pics of you and stealing your gym clothes.”

Hannah snorted. “Oh, yeah, I forgot about the clothes! Jeez, you definitely need to hold her accountable. Where is she, by the way? I haven’t seen her for ages.”

I shrugged. “Maybe in the study? Maybe they wanted her in the room to get Mike to admit what he’s up to.”

We heard a chirping noise, and both checked our cell phones. It was Hannah’s. “Oh, it’s Emmy, I have to answer this,” she said, shooting me an apologetic look.

“No worries, I need to find a bathroom anyway.”

I wandered off in search of the restroom and found a long line. So, this is where everyone was. This house was enormous, so while I knew there were definitely more bathrooms, the issue was trying to figure out where they were.

I turned a corner and ended up back in the foyer, so I decided to walk upstairs, certain there must be one close to the top of the stairs.

I turned a door knob, and seeing it was a bedroom, turned to leave, but something caught my eye. It was a picture of Jack in a frame on the nightstand. The only reason I noticed it was because the picture frame was so large, and there were a series of tea lights around it. Unable to resist, I found myself creeping further into the room.

This had to be Casey’s room, but why would she have candles around a picture of Jack? A sick feeling started to rise up in my stomach as I found myself looking around the room for any other evidence of her feelings for Jack. I felt like a total creep for invading her privacy, but that didn’t stop me from looking under her bed and looking through her nightstand. I didn’t find anything, so I sat on her bed trying to decide if I should just leave or look around some more when I noticed her closet door partially ajar.

I got up and pulled it open.

Yahtzee. Holy shit, there was a straight-up shrine to Jack in here. Hundreds of pictures glued to the inside of the door with red construction paper hearts taped intermittently throughout the collage, like an adolescent girl would have for a member of a boy band, or something. I turned on the flashlight app on my cellphone looking over the photos and realized that Jack probably wasn’t aware that many of these had been taken.

I felt alarm scream through my system when I realized some of these were taken at Jack’s pool house from outside. Was she stalking him? I mean, obviously she was. There were also some pictures of him asleep in what looked like Casey’s bed. Did he sleep with Casey? He hadn’t mentioned it, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t. Jack doesn’t exactly have a history of being discriminating in his bed partners. When I took a closer look at the photos, I realized, he was fully dressed and looked more like he was passed out on top of the covers than recovering from a sexual encounter.

My anxiety continued to mount as I looked through more and more of what had to be hundreds of pictures of Jack. I had to tell him he was beating on Mike Crenshaw for nothing. Not unless Mike had a similar wall of photos devoted to Jack at his house, which I seriously doubted.

I grabbed the knob to close the door when I heard that quiet, now chilling voice behind me.

“Hello, Ava.”

****

Chapter 42

Jack

After getting rid of his basketball buddies with some well-placed threats about broken knee caps, I slammed Crenshaw into one of the chairs in the study, grateful once again that the size of the house dispersed the people attending the party. In fact, being in this house felt like being in one giant game of Clue.

“What the fuck is going on, you asshole?” Crenshaw barked, his eyes nervously jumping from me, to Nikolai, to Donovan, obviously not liking his odds if we all decided to unload on him. His nose was still swollen from where I’d punched him, so this act was baffling.

“Jesus Christ, are you going to play stupid? Now?”

Crenshaw’s jaw jutted out in a mutinous angle, as if he was most definitely going to play stupid, but there was a hint of exasperation to his expression that didn’t make sense. “Is this about that comment I made about Ava’s picture? Jesus, Becker, when’d you get so fucking sensitive?”

I had been prepared to start encouraging him to confess, more specifically with my fist, but I pulled back. He thought this was about what he’d said yesterday?

“No, you dickhead, this about all the bullshit you’ve been doing to me and Ava since she blew you off and started dating me?”

“Are you fucking crazy? What stuff? I don’t give a shit about you guys, except that bitch made me lose a bet. Just so you know, if you hadn’t been around, she definitely would have let me fuck her.”

“You know Crenshaw, for a guy who’s some kind of math genius, you’re not looking at your odds very carefully,” Donovan said sarcastically, gesturing to the three men standing over him prepared to pummel the shit out of him.

Crenshaw finally settled down enough to start acting less like an arrogant, entitled dickhead and more like a person who was about to get his ass handed to him if he didn’t start talking. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” he gritted out.

“Of course, you do. You wrote on her locker, slashed her tire, had Casey steal her clothes and take a picture of her in gym class–”

Crenshaw snorted and shook his head. “I had Casey do what? You don’t know shit,” he mumbled, looking at the ground now.

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