“He’s no fun, is he?” Luke asked me and winked. He scooped me a bit until he could move me over and then gave himself more room. “Want to watch a movie? We’ve got time to kill.”
I didn’t have anything to do other than wait until that night. We spent some time watching a movie. Victor listened and, every once in a while, would comment on something. Luke brought dinner from the diner after.
Before I knew it, it was nightfall. Luke had gone. I was playing a game on my phone to distract myself when North walked in shortly after ten.
I looked up, finding North in all black again, wearing a turtleneck and a black cotton hat. The sight of him with the hat preoccupied me.
He scoped me out still in the school uniform. “Why aren’t you ready?”
“I am ready,” I said. I climbed out of the beanbag and stood up. The backs of my legs had red marks from where I’d been sitting for so long. “I’ve been waiting.”
Victor looked over his shoulder at North and then at me. “Oh, I forgot. Sorry. Sang, I was supposed to tell you to change into dark clothing.”
He forgot? That wasn’t like him. And we’d been here all afternoon.
North groaned and then went over to the desk. “What the hell are you doing you couldn’t break from to tell her?”
“Nothing!” Victor said and closed his laptop, but his eyes lit up and he looked at me. “There are clothes in the next room. Your bag is marked.”
“I won’t be long,” I said, dashing off before North had more reason to get after Victor. Whatever he was up to, I imagined he had good reason for being so distracted.
I left the door partially opened. North teetered in the hallway, hovering between me and Victor.
I found a pink duffle bag I imagined was for me. I opened it, finding options in dark clothing. I slipped dark pants on under the skirt before removing the skirt and putting it aside. The shirt was more difficult, but I simply turned a bit from North, took it off, set it aside and put on the dark, turtleneck. They were both very snug. I also put on dark boots, not heavy, but enough to be protective.
Spy clothes, or so it felt.
North gazed in at me through the doorway, his lips twisted.
“What?” I asked.
He shook his head and then motioned. “Let’s go. Don’t bring your phone.”
I pulled it out from my bra and thought where to put it. Then I moved around North through the tiny space between the two rooms and went over to Victor.
Victor had his laptop open, but he turned it slightly when I approached. “Be careful out there,” he said.
I passed him my phone. “Hang on to this for me.”
He nodded and slipped it into his back pocket. “The one time you hand it to me not yet broken.”
I smirked. “Not yet.”
“I give it two more days,” he said with a chuckle.
I did have a bad habit of losing or breaking them.
North held open the door for me and peeked out. “Time to move.”
North and I dashed over to the Jeep between people going in and out of the diner. Once I was in, I quickly put on my seatbelt.
North put a flip phone on the dash above the radio and then started the engine.
“I thought you said no...” I paused and then shook my head. “Oh wait, emergency.” It was something that Luke did once when we were going to do something dangerous. I hadn’t expected this to be a similar situation.
He nodded shortly and threw the Jeep into reverse. Soon we were on the road and taking a detour route back to Ashley Waters. Traffic had all but cleared out. Neighborhoods were mostly dark and quiet.
I breathed in sharply, feeling excitement creeping up through me. It didn’t sound dangerous, just monitoring a delivery and figuring out why it was happening at night.
Or perhaps it was that it had been a while since I’d spent time alone with North. His dark musk scent and the way he was unshaven and dangerous looking did something to my insides.
North made a turn onto a road and then gazed at me, giving me the same odd expression he had when he’d witnessed me putting on the clothing I was wearing now.
“What?” I asked him.
He returned his attention to his driving. “You don’t look right.”
“I look weird?”
“No,” he said. “I think it’s all the black. It doesn’t look right on you.”
“You wear all black,” I said, but he’d said something like this to me before. “We match.”
We parked not far from the school, at a small shopping center with a central grocery store. The grocery was open twenty-four hours and a fast food place nearby was open late, so we still blended in at this hour. There were a few cars in the lot, but he parked in the back of the grocery store, where there was a smaller lot for employees.
He parked and then checked the dash for the time. “We’ve got a few minutes.” He gazed out the window, checking the building in front of us. There were yellowed lights in the back, although not as many as there were in customer parking. Most of the cars were in darkness. “Victor should have taken care of the cameras.”
I checked where he was looking, at a camera angled toward the employee cars.
“Unless he forgot that, too,” North said with a grumble.
“What do you think he’s doing?” I asked. “I’d been there most of the afternoon before you came over. He seemed pretty busy. I was trying to leave him alone. He couldn’t watch the movie with me and Luke, and I thought he was working on whatever was happening tonight.”
“I think he’s buying you a house,” North said.
“He wouldn’t dare.”
He scanned the parking lot once more and then looked over at me and smirked. “Bet you a dollar.”
I didn’t think it was possible. Despite now knowing he had his own portfolio and he was using Mr. Blackbourne’s card more than his own, it still didn’t seem like he could just buy one.
He put a hand on the back of my seat near my head and turned to look at me. “If you ask us anything, we’ll do it. You know that.”
“I don’t know if I want to get accustomed to that,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I want to help, too.”
“You are,” he said. He leaned toward me and a thick, dark eyebrow lifted over one eye. “You’re helping me tonight. You were great today at the school.”
“I feel like I can do more.”
“You will,” he said. “And because of it, not a damn one of us is going to think you spoiled or lazy for wanting a house big enough to fit all of us in. You didn’t come to us asking for a three-story mansion in Hawaii or some other bullshit. You said house. And not just for you. For Victor and Gabriel and whoever else. So let Victor find a house he might want to live in.” He smirked. “But I’ll tell him we all need to approve. That’s a big decision to make alone.”
I crossed my arms over my stomach and relaxed against the seatback. “Don’t let him put it on the credit card.” I wasn’t sure that was possible, but Victor often bought things on a whim. I thought he’d do it if he could.
North chuckled. It was deep and rumbly, and with the way the dark hair on his cheeks and chin were grown out, it was downright frightening sound coming from his scary face.
He captured my chin and drew me toward him, until we were nose to nose. “You’d think I’d stop him?”