Page 19 of She is the Darke

“Oh.” Stunned, she read down. Erin had told him she was lonely, and then sent him a picture of her with her V-neck shirt pulled low to expose her perfect cleavage. She was smiling; her lips painted bloodred. God, even her blonde highlights were perfect.

He had sent back a generic response of,I will let you know later tonight. Either way, thank you for the invite.

Nice. She handed his phone back. “You sound uninterested.”

“Good, because that’s how I feel. I’ve been back in town for about one minute. I’m not trying to reunite with every divorcée I knew in high school. Sounds messy.”

Demi scrunched up her face. “You’re messy, too.”

“So fuckin’ messy,” he agreed, turning to her with a handsome smile across his lips.

She liked that he could own his mess, and liked that he could be self-deprecating. And honest. He’d given her his phone immediately, and evicted all her judgements. Tyler the boy had been shut down and insulting, but Tyler as a man? He’d grown. He was interesting.

The football game ended, Tyler’s team winning by a field goal. She expected him to quickly leave, but he asked what show she was marathoning.

“Umm…murder documentaries,” she told him in an effort to scare him off.

“Fantastic. Let’s solve one together, you psycho,” he muttered, scrolling through the murder documentary options.

She couldn’t help her laugh. Here she was, dressed in the absolute rattiest outfit she could muster, with a jock-man, forcing him to watch murder docs with her if he wanted to stay.

“Are you avoiding your parents’ house?” she asked.

“Hell yeah. You said you saw the video. I made everything tense there.”

She giggled. “You did come straight into town and cause drama.”

“Yeah, well, it was for a good cause.”

“Your dad isn’t ever going to like me. Just like my mom will never like you.”

“Chh,” he said, hitting play on a show. “Your mom can be won over.”

“I bet she can’t,” she told him.

“Are you daring me? Are you daring me to try?”

“No point,” she said. “You toilet-papered her house, and then you broke my little teenage heart.”

“Oh my God, you are being ridiculous. It was one kiss!”

“I thought you liked me. My mom saw the excited aftermath of the kiss, and then the devastation when you made out with Hannah Duffey the next day at that party. Teenage angst affects a mother, and you directly caused it. She will hate you until the day she dies. In fact, I think she is going to have ‘Fuck Tyler Durock for life’ etched onto her gravestone—when she dies at age one hundred and twenty-seven. Your legacy will live on and on.”

“Geez. Should I get her flowers?”

“If you want them immediately burned.”

“You Darkes are intense.”

“It’s genetic.”

“What’s it like?” he asked softly, relaxing back into the couch and pulling her legs over his lap.

She tensed at the closeness, but he wasn’t making it weird. “What’s what like?”

“Changing into a crow? Flying away when something gets hard?”

She got quiet and thought about what he was really asking. “Is that what you did, when you left here? You flew away?”

---