Page 20 of Into the Light

“He did.”

I snapped my head in Santiago’s direction. “What do you mean?”.

“He just was too scared to hurt you, but he checked in on you.” This changed everything . . . literally everything. “Sometimes in grief, people don’t know how to function. Everything was thrown at Rain all at once, being forced to figure out a death and come up with some alternate ending when it was clear what happened.”

“Wait, how do you know all of this?” I asked. I figured Santiago had connections with the Cartel, but this felt like some top-secret shit he was confessing.

“I worked for Mr. Ortiz for a while. That’s how R-Ash found me.”

Hold on a moment . . . did he just say . . .?

“R-Ash?”

“Ash, Ember. Don’t read into it. We were talking about Rain for a moment, I got it twisted,” Santiago explained. I cocked my head in his direction. Something was awry here.

“Okay.” I agreed, determined to figure out the solution to all of this.

“Let’s go home?”

“Yeah, let’s.” We walked back to my apartment.

“Do you ever want a girlfriend?” I asked Santiago, and he laughed.

“No. Too tóxica.”

“We are not,” I blurted to defend womankind.

He narrowed his eyes at me, then laughed. “Ember, you were upset when we left the fraternity even though you snuck out on me. Could you imagine if I had a woman? The drama that would ensue?” I punched him in the elbow, and he let out a snicker.

“I bet there will be someone out there for you,” I murmured.

“I’ll take that into consideration,” he said as we got to the building and took the elevator to the third floor. As the doors opened, the small foyer was filled with erotic noises coming from Marissa’s apartment.

“They’re back from the party, I guess.” Santiago stuck out his tongue like he was gagging, and I giggled as I said goodnight and walked into my apartment, promising that I wouldn’t sneak out again.

To be honest, I was exhausted, and it was well into the early morning hours anyway.

I stripped my clothes off, threw on an oversized T-shirt, and laid down in bed, staring at the ceiling and thinking about what Santiago had told me. Somehow, I got the feeling that Rain was far more involved in what had happened with me over the last eight months than I had thought. He had been keeping track of me in his own way, suffering in his own depths of grief, but I wished he’d take me up on my proposition. I wished he’d let me in, and together we could figure this out. Between his inside knowledge of Ash and how intimately I knew him, we could figure it out together . . .

One could only dream.

Chapter nine

The next week passed pretty seamlessly. It was Friday, which meant I had to see Rain, regardless if I wanted to, plus it was the start of our group assignment, so we needed to figure out what the prompt was.

I drove to class because it was raining, and parked behind the English building. Early as usual, a book about fae bat boys falling in love with a set of sisters caught my eye in my backpack. It allowed me to escape the world for a little and pass the time. At about twenty pages in, I realized someone else had walked into the room.

I quickly snapped my head up and saw Rain sitting next to me, slung back in his seat with a book in his hand. He was reading a famous thriller book,Gone Girl, and was probably as engrossed in it as I was in mine.

“You’re early,” I said, resting my elbows on the desk and putting my book down to look at him. He turned his head in my direction, his deep-blue eyes burning a hole through my own.

“Em,” he whispered as he grabbed the legs of my desk and pulled it toward him, the metal scraping against the floor. “I fucked up.”

“Yeah, you did,” I responded, not looking at him, but the warmth of his body seeped into me.

“Can you look at me?” I shook my head, being the stubborn ass I was, and sat back in the chair, staring ahead at the clock on the wall.

He grabbed my chin and gently lifted it so I was facing him. His eyes looked pained and sunken. He looked just as tired, if not more than, as he did when I saw him in this class last week.

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