Page 51 of Night Shift

And for him, it was all just a plot to get laid on his birthday.

“Kenny, listen to me,” Nina presses on. “Everything is going to be—”

“Holiday!”

I have to take a deep, steadying breath before I turn and meet the footsteps coming our way. When I do, Vincent stands above me, all broad shoulders and broad smile. He looks confident. Of course he’s confident—his friends are watching from the other end of the hall, by the front door. I feel frozen with something suspiciously like stage fright.

He told them. He told them about me, about what we were doing in his room, and now he’s come to—what? Claim his prize? Reveal the whole deceit like some kind of archetypal villain?

He wouldn’t do that, I want to scream.

But what if he did? What if he hurts me, and I walked right into it?

And even as a knot of cold dread forms in my stomach, the sight of him melts something in me. Magenta and cyan lights from the living room dance floor spill into the hall, catching in Vincent’s hair and twinkling in his eyes. The sight of his face shouldn’t be able to set off this many fireworks in my chest.

You could be my worst mistake, I think.

“What do you want?” I ask, voice barely audible over the pounding music.

“Come to the bar with us,” Vincent says, still smiling, and holds out a hand.

There’s a third tally mark on his forearm now. The logical part of my brain knows it’s probably just because he did another shot. The paranoid part of my brain wonders if that wobbly permanent marker line is me.

Does he actually want me to come, or is he just trying to parade me around as his conquest?

If I were brave, I’d ask. I’d tell him I’m scared, and that I don’t know how to do this. I don’t come to parties. I don’t straddle boys and ask them to touch me. I’m in way over my head. He was so patient with me upstairs. He listened. I felt like I could say anything. But now? With all his friends in earshot? I won’t embarrass myself like that.

So, I just inch backward and say, “I’m not twenty-one.”

Vincent’s confidence cracks, just a little. I see it in the downward tilt of his mouth before he catches himself.

“Are you free tomorrow, then?” he asks. “Before your shift? Or sometime this weekend?”

“I’m actually not free ever.”

Nina nudges me with a sharp elbow to my ribs. I grunt but don’t stand down. Her rose-tinted romanticism isn’t going to thaw my ice-cold panic. My walls are up. The drawbridge is shut, the turrets barricaded, the moat crocodile-infested.

Vincent Knight isn’t getting anywhere close to me. Not now. Not like this.

His mouth parts, then closes. He glances at Nina, then back at me, looking lost.

“Are you okay?” he asks, shuffling a step closer. I feel the heat of his body and have to take a bolstering breath. “We can go somewhere quiet, right now. If the bar sounds too overwhelming, or if you just want to talk—”

Vaguely, I’m aware that he’s offering to pick me over his team and their birthday celebration plans. I feel myself trying to latch on to that.

“No,” I blurt, folding my arms tight over my chest. “I don’t want to go anywhere.”

I feel too exposed, too out in the open, but I know that if Vincent gets me alone again, I’ll just fall back into that strange sense of security that leads me to do impulsive and ridiculous things, like kiss him and ask him to touch me and demand that he take his pants off. But I don’t say all that. I just stare at him with every ounce of distrust roiling in my body.

I don’t like how he’s looking at me. It feels like he can see straight through me—and like somehow, I’ve hurt him and not the other way around. It’s not fair. And then whatever emotion is written across Vincent’s face falls away and is replaced with that cold, confident, brooding thing he does. His mask. His defense mechanism.

Or maybe it’s not that at all—maybe that’s who he really is.

How many villains start out looking like the good guys?

“So that’s it,” he says. “You got your story, and now you’re done?”

I flinch. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

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