Page 25 of Shattered
CHAPTER 8
Mel
Jake rushed onto the main floor in a bright blue polo shirt. Dahlia was going to roast him for breaking the dress code. He must have been having a bad night. He stomped down the corridor of the Terrariums and then came back, barely registering that I was following him, and went past me.
“Dahlia is going to kill you for that shirt,” I said.
“I didn’t have time,” he said. I checked my phone; he was late, but not by much. Still, it wasn’t like him.
“What’s going on?”
“I couldn’t sleep last night.” He pulled at the collar of his shirt. “Had this weird feeling like I was being watched. You ever get that?” He turned to me. “Maybe after that killer was in your house?”
I hadn’t told anyone that Rourke had been to my house multiple times. Everyone assumed that he had only been there once to kill Colin, or assumed, like my mother, that he would return to kill me too.
“Not really,” I said. Then I shook my head. I was trying to be authentic, right? And that meant tellingsomeof the truth. “Wait. I lied. Yes. Sometimes it feels like someone is watching me.” Because I never knew when Rourke might be waiting around the corner, which meant I found myself looking for him even in the daylight, as if I could look hard enough, and his form would magically appear.
“It’s been like that for me since last night,” he said.
“What happened last night?”
His head shook back and forth like he was mulling over something in his mind. “Everyone’s been acting weird. The servers. All of the club members. Acting like they suspect you of something, you know? Like anyone and everyone is fair game. Like we’re all waiting to be killed. It’s royally screwed with the atmosphere of the club.”
I had noticed that change in the Dahlia District’s overall mood too, but it surprised me that Jake had noticed too. He wasn’t usually that observant.
“Did someone say something to you?” I asked.
He put up a hand and looked away. “Nothing, man. It’s nothing.” He pulled at the collar of his shirt again, then lifted it to smell whether it was dirty.
“Do you want me to see if anyone in the Greenhouse has something?” I asked.
“That’d be nice,” he said in a distracted voice. “Thanks.”
I was about to open the door to the Greenhouse when Jake put a hand on my shoulder.
“Have you ever told anyone about that night?” he asked, his eyes moving back and forth rapidly.
“What night?”
“That night we—” he stopped and looked around, “—you know. Fucked.”
“You mean when I was passed out?” I asked. He nodded. “Which time?”
“Any of them. Did you tell anybody?”
I looked up at the ceiling, blinking away the annoyance. “No. Of course not.”
“Thank the damn heavens,” he mumbled. Then his eyes widened. “Do you think I raped you?”
Had I expressed multiple times that I had no interest in Jake, that I saw him as a brother that I never had, and that I didn’t want to have sex with him?Yes.Had I gotten drunk and blacked out, not knowing where I had ended up?Yes.
Was it stupid of me to trust him each time, thinking that maybe this time, if I told him how I feltbeforewe started drinking, that he wouldn’t get me drunk and fuck me?
Was it my fault for being his friend?
The truth was that we had gotten drunk together plenty of times before, but it was only when I was in an emotional place that I got so drunk that I passed out. Like when my father died and no one told me. Or after Aldrich. I didn’t remember what had happened; only that Jake was comforting me, then everything went dark. But that didn’t mean that I couldn’t guess what had happened.
But maybe it wasn’t entirely his fault. Maybe it was mine too. I knew what would happen; it was my fault for trusting him. For thinking that a verbal declaration beforehand would work. Wasn’t it?
