Page 38 of A Killing Cold

I haven’t smoked in years, not since my boyfriend in freshman year, a boy with a patchy beard and soulful eyes. Yet at the first taste of the cigarette, memory rushes back—I’m nineteen again and staring up at Brandon while he talks to his bandmates, his arm around my shoulders and his attention anywhere but on me. Cigarettes and bad folk rock: the things I loved because I thought it was the same as loving him.

“My dad didsomethinghere. But dying wasn’t it,” Trevor tells me. I pass the cigarette back. He inhales, and the light of it spills across his face, illuminating the harsh planes of his features for hardly more than a second. “Connor hasn’t told you.”

“Told me what?”

“He has a rosy view of our father. Really got in that sweet spot where he was old enough to worship the guy but not old enough to see what he was really like. Me, I don’t even remember the fucker, so I don’t have any attachment to some perfect version of him,” Trevor says. “He was keeping a woman here. A fuck-buddy stashed away where he could visit her without anybody knowing about it.” Rage stabs through me—how dare he talk about her that way?—but I swallow it down.

“He had—there was a woman living here,” I say.

A woman in a red scarf—blue scarf—her face inches from mine.Hush.

“Kid, too. They were up here for months.” He’s trying to sound like he doesn’t care.

“A kid.”

“I mean, she wasn’thiskid,” Trevor clarifies, and I am glad the darkness hides my relief. “She was up here when he died, you know. So Momhas to deal with her husband being a cheating piece of shitandbeing dead, all at the same time. Bastard.”

This is confirmation. Proof that I’m not just imagining things, stringing together broken memories and fantasy. I was here.Wewere here.

“What was her name?” I ask. My voice cracks.

Trevor’s head tilts, shadow against shadow, his pause pregnant with curiosity. “I don’t know,” he says. “Does it matter?”

“Do you know what happened to her?” I ask.

“Why would I know that? She probably moved on and found some other rich guy to leech off,” Trevor says. “Don’t get me wrong. I don’t blame her. You’ve got to get what you can out of life, it’s not going to be handed to you.”

Says the boy with a trust fund. He offers me the cigarette again, but I don’t reach for it, and he shrugs. “Suit yourself.”

“Your mother will be missing you,” I remind him.

“Nah. She takes a pill. She’d sleep through an avalanche,” he says. “Connor’s a sound sleeper, too, right? We don’t need to be in any hurry. We could duck back in and…” His tone makes it clear what he’s suggesting.

“For fuck’s sake,” I say.

He laughs. “Just kidding. Or checking. Gotta make sure you’re notthatkind of girl, you know?”

“Sure.” The kind of joke that’s only a joke until it isn’t. “That’s why you were spying on us? I saw your footprints under the window.”

“Don’t worry, I didn’t see anything R-rated,” he quips. He tilts his head back, releasing a thin stream of smoke. “He’s really crazy for you, you know,” he says, like this is pitiable. “Tracking you down like that. He’s never done anything like that before. You must be something special.”

“We met at a party,” I say.

“Yeah, but before that,” he says. I stare at him. He gestures, frustrated. “The photo? The art show? Alexis told me. About how he saw your portrait and he had to meet you and blah, blah, blah.”

I’d almost forgotten. Harper had a photography show, and she’d used a photo she took of me to round it out. She’d mentioned it to me in an offhand way, making sure I didn’t mind, and I didn’t. It would have scandalized anyone I grew up with, of course. I was topless, knees to my chest on a wooden chair, my spine a perfect curve, staring straight at the camera. One arm was bent, hand in my hair, showing off the bold lines of the dragonfly on my wrist.

It wasn’t a particularly remarkable photograph, but it was lovely and Harper insisted she had to have at least one “seminude hottie” to spice up the collection. I hadn’t been able to get out to the show, so I’d never seen it, hadn’t really thought about it after she got permission.

“Right,” I say. “Harper’s show.”

He reaches out. His palm catches my hip and he tugs me toward him. Startled, I come forward a step. “You’re not very pretty, are you?” he asks.

“Is this your attempt at flirting?” I ask. His eyes search mine, the pinprick of light reflected in them.

“There are millions of pretty girls. You’re something else,” he says. “People say pretty because they don’t have a word for it. It’s a lack of imagination. I thought it was ridiculous. Falling for you because of a photo. But I can see it now.”

There was a time when I would have easily toppled into the empty hole that is Trevor Dalton. All it took was that look—that look like someone saw me. What had Nick said? That Liam wanted people to worship him. If he was anything like me, that isn’t quite right. It’s the inescapable power of being seen.

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