Page 63 of Little Devil

I chew my lip and drop my eyes to our hands, smiling to myself at the sight of the black nail polish on my fingernails. I’m not supposed to wear this cheap crap, as my mother calls it, but he wanted to paint mine after I finished his and I let him do it, mostly for the game but also because I’ve become a love sick fool with no brain.

“Can I drive?” I ask, backing away from him to head towards the exit at the end of the hall.

He tosses me his keys and I clap my hands like a five year old, leading the way to the parking lot to jump into the drivers seat of his badass Camaro.

“Do you know what pussy whipped means?” he asks, sliding in beside me to toss our bags into the back.

“Yeah, why?”

“No reason,” he mutters, taking his phone out to connect it to the stereo. “Where’d you wanna go?”

I shrug and reach back to find my own keys, lifting them up to show him the purple devil key chain he gave me all those weeks ago. “Wanna know a secret?”

24

Xander

She looks nervous.

And excited.

Then right back to nervous while she leads me along past her bedroom, stopping to face me fully when we get to a set of double doors at the end of the hall. “This is stupid,” she decides. “Maybe we should just go start a fire or something instea–”

I shake my head at her and take her face in my hands, laughing lightly when I realize she’d rather commit arson with me than show me what’s in there.

“Baby.”

“What?” she asks, bouncing her eyes between mine.

“Will you open it now?”

She takes a breath and shoves the key into the lock, side eyeing me over her shoulder while I follow her inside. She closes the door behind us and I look around, frowning when I find nothing but blackness.

What..?

“This used to be my dad’s office,” she says from somewhere beside me, flicking a switch on the wall to bathe the room in a dark red glow. “My mom didn’t want it for anything so.. it’s mine now.”

I blink and wait for my eyes to adjust, grinning when I spot the several pictures pegged up on the three lines hanging above us. The windows are completely blacked out and she’s got three long tables set up in neat rows, the surfaces filled with bottles of liquid and film cassettes and other materials I can’t name.

“Is this a dark room?”

She nods and tucks her hair behind her ears, smiling to herself when she catches the excitement on my face. I like it when she opens up with me like this, when she shows me things she’s never shown anyone before. It makes me fucking giddy to know she trusts me over them, to know she chooses me over them.

It makes me hers.

“I like this one,” I tell her, carefully hovering my finger below the picture of us kissing on the beach that night, unsure if I’m allowed to touch.

“You mean the only one I didn’t take?” she jokes, making me laugh.

Seemingly more content than she was a minute ago, she washes her hands at the sink in the corner and then walks back over to me, reaching up to remove the photo from the line.

“They’re dry now?” I ask, and she nods, tossing the pegs into the box on the side while she moves along to do the same with the rest.

She tries to explain the whole process to me and I do my best to keep up with her, but I honestly don’t have a fucking clue what she’s talking about. She chuckles like she knows it and removes the last one from its peg, tilting her head at me to follow her to the two seater couch on the back wall. I drop my ass down and she sits back between my legs, comfortably resting her head on my shoulder while she goes through the photos one by one. She lifts her knees up to her chest and I wrap my arms around her waist, enjoying the way her body molds against mine like it was made for me.

“Where’s your dad, Jordyn?” I ask after a while, gently running my thumb over her waist beneath her shirt. “You never talk about him.”

“That’s because there’s not much to talk about,” she says quietly. “I don’t know where he is.”

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