#devinsky

Henrietta's early morning scenery is a stunning mixture of lush green grasses glinting with a kaleidoscope of dewdrops, sun slanting off the reddish rooftops, and trees waving lazily in the breeze. Too bad this natural beauty is overshadowed by your mood going to school. You can think of a dozen activities you'd rather be doing – dishes and laundry among them – than entering the tedium that is Aglionby.

Yet you promised Gansey, and some moronic honorable code dictates you be true to your word. Sometimes being unable to lie is a huge pain in the ass, but it's still a point of pride for you.

You pull into the parking lot. At the edge of the campus you spot a lone figure hunching in the shade behind the buildings. As you park, someone slinks around the corner, hunched and nervous. You imagine greetings and other things to be exchanged: there's a quick sweep of the area, a clasping of hands, a friendly cuff on the shoulder, then the newcomer hurries away.

You haven't seen Kavinsky on school grounds for weeks, but then again, your own attendance record is not a stellar example of punctuality and sticktoitiveness. He may well have been here when you weren't, and there's no way to tell unless you asked around, which you damn well are not going to do. It doesn't interest you. Nor does it matter.

Still, his presence draws you in like a current, despite your resentment and your insistence on avoiding him during daylight hours. He's a different creature then, at once too strange and too familiar, a grown-up version of the boy you used to chase over the green meadows stretching out beyond the Barns.

He looks all wrong now.

You prefer to encounter him at night, when the darkness obscures the angles of his face and the alcohol makes it light up from within. It's easier then to ignore the loss of innocence – not that he ever had much to begin with, but there used to be a boyish side to him that got excited about more than just self-destruction.

As ridiculous as it sounds, you still miss the old him, the one you flew kites with, built mud castles with, ditched homework with in favor of playing in the fields till evening yawned into night, this scarecrow of a boy, all stick-limbs and sinew, yet with a softness about him you're beginning to think must have been imaginary. There's no way this sharp-boned skeleton you're approaching is the same boy you used to tussle with, tip cows over with, lie in the grass and dream together with.

You'd rather avoid him after your fight this weekend. But you promised Gansey.

His mouth splits into a sickle grin when he sees you, the neutral one he flashes everybody, regardless of what business they have with him. You're not special anymore.

"Dickhead," he greets you, and it's the friendliest he's been in a while.

"Shit-for-brains," you shoot back.

"What brings you here?" It's almost lewd, the way he sucks on his cigarette, and your eye tics because of how much you want to punch him for making your eyes wander to his lips. "Need some love potion for your girlfriend? Think that get him to finally let you screw him?"

By way of reply, you slam his back against the wall. It doesn't faze him. He just laughs in your face.

"My bad. Of course you'd let him screw you." He tips his head in defiance and the glint of his sunglasses blind you.

"I'm not here to talk about Gansey." This close, you catch more than a whiff of his knife-like aftershave under the cloud of weed and cigarette smoke. It, too, is less repulsive at night, when it had hours to disperse or mix with exhaust fumes. Sometimes you wonder if he's trying to mask the rot that has infested him, if he even notices how far it has spread.

"But you would let him screw you," he laughs at you again and it is grating. "There's no shame in this, you know. If either of you have performance issues, you can tell me, I'll help you sort it out."

"I said, that's not what I'm here to talk about. Are you deaf as well as stupid?"

"Okay, okay, I'll bite," he says and snaps his teeth. "What are you here to talk about?"

Your fingers tighten around the lapels of his school uniform. "Cabeswater," you say, because that's a conversation you still need to have, one he's been refusing to have, and you're running out of time.

He rolls his eyes ostentatiously and lets his head thud against the brick behind him. "Don't you ever quit? I already told you no."

"No is not an option."

"It's gotta be, because that's the one I'm going with."

"Don't be that way, asshole. I'm not telling you to quit, I'm asking you to help me figure out how to make it safe. It used to be, man, and I'm sure it can be again."

He's staring at you for a while, eyebrows scrunched together behind his sunglasses and lips slightly pursed. He sucks in his bottom lip and chews on it.

"Want to stock up for tonight?" he asks finally, but you barely catch the sounds coming out of his mouth.

"What?"

That's not the answer you've been expecting. Or the question.

It's been a while since he invited you in person. Most of the time you just went, like everyone else, but unlike everyone else, you don't cluster around him like a swarm of flies. You don't need his attention. You have it anyway, in a sort of negative, I know you're there but I'm waiting to see what you'll do sort of way, unless he decides to give you the time of day – or night.

You hate how sometimes being at his parties feels like begging.

He was yours before he decided for whatever shit reason that you weren't good enough anymore and started hanging out with other people. You're still sore about that. You fucking used to dream together, build things together, an entire world of dreams, but now he seems to be content with providing his cronies with all the pills and weed and booze they can ever need or want? Fucking waste, if there ever was one.

"You're coming, right?"

"I've got better things to do," you sneer and immediately regret it. If he's offering you a chance to talk to him, you ought to take it.

"Such as Gansey, I know, I know." He slaps his palm on your head and rubs his thumb over your buzz cut. It makes you dangerously aware of how close you are and how deliberately he has been derailing the conversation. "I'm sure if you ask nicely enough, he'll take you himself. Making sure to keep a tight leash on you. How do you put up with the chafing, anyway?"

"None of your concern."

"C'mon, just ask him to take you for a walk. I'm sure no one would be surprised to find you on all fours beside dear old Dick."

"Fuck off." Your fuse is dangerously close to blowing. You jam his shoulders harder into the wall behind him.

"That's cute, coming from the asshole accosting me when I was minding my own business."

Before you remember to pull his hand away, his fingers smooth down your head to clamp around the back of your neck. And just like that you're transfixed, unable to move when he pulls you in, crushes your nose against his shoulder and his cheek against yours where his stupid sunglasses dig into your flesh, and all you feel is skin and heat and an elevated pulse that's rushing him to an early grave. Your own pulse is not far behind.

"Be there tonight," he murmurs so his breath plays about your earlobe and you shiver. "And bring me something fun."

With his other hand, he presses something small and rounded into your palm. You don't need to look to know it's one of his dream pills. You have an assortment of them hidden away in a drawer; you prefer to go about dreaming your tried and true way.

"On the house." He folds your fingers over it and leans close as if kissing the air above your scabbed knuckles.

Something turns over like an engine in your chest, or maybe your head, because not a single thought sparks and all you can focus on are his goddamn pretty lips – which he must have noticed too, because he's raising his shades from his nose and he's grinning in a way that would signal danger if you had your wits about you, but you don't, and the bruise around his eye has faded since the weekend, and before you know it you're touching it, your palm against his cheek, your thumb brushing over his discolored skin, his fingers curling over your wrist, dipping into the cuff of your uniform, tickling the sensitive skin there, and you're certain that if you don't stop this right now, he'll twist the moment like a knife in your gut, unthinking and inevitable, just as that last time, when he ruined what friendship was left between you and gave you no choice but to push him away completely.

Maybe you thought you could salvage something that way, or maybe you were just trying to save your skin.

"Still a chickenshit?" he asks, nose brushing yours, mouth a hair's breadth from your own. You don't appreciate the reminder, but what the hell, you've been living with the consequences of it every day.

Is this your chance at a do-over?

Off to your side, someone coughs politely.

"Am I interrupting something?"

Your first instinct is to shove Kavinsky away, as if that would undo the past minute and a half; your second is to freeze where you stand because fuck, this is Declan. Your own brother saw you nearly make out with your childhood friend. God Jesus Mary fucking shit, he's going to think you're jealous or something.

Kavinsky just settles back against the wall as if nothing at all had been happening, as if his fingers weren't still burning on your wrist, as if Declan were just another desperate fuck willing to sell his soul for whatever services Kavinsky provides.

"Not if you plan on joining in," he says, bold as brass.

Declan smiles thinly, but his eyes are on you. You're aware of the fire in your cheeks, how your brother can't miss it. "That's not exactly how I planned on spending my free period."

"Let me guess," Kavinsky surmises with a dirty grin. "You need another batch of blue pills to please your latest lady friend, am I right?"

Your lips compress. The jab at Declan's promiscuity ticks you off. There's something those two can talk about. They were fucking made for each other.

You rip your hand free and turn around; whatever their body language is about to betray, you don't want to find out. "I was leaving anyway."

Before you can, however, Declan pulls you aside. His voice is perfectly fucking neutral when he says, "Stay away from him. He's not your friend anymore."

Anger flashes hot inside you, blood pounding in your ears. Your face grows hotter still. It pisses you off how effortlessly Declan can pretend to be unaffected by what he'd just witnessed. It pisses you off how he doesn't care that you might have been encroaching on his territory. It pisses you off how he's so goddamn casual about his sex life, like none of his partners matter to him.

It pisses you off that you have these thoughts at all. This wasn't what you bargained for at all.

Fuck Declan and fuck Kavinsky, too.

"Don't worry. He's all yours."

With that, you stalk off, heart in a snarl of anger, ache and annoyance. When you piss off your brother, you want it to be on your terms, not a crazy happenstance that brought you all together in one place.

Kavinsky must have been trying to stop you, because Declan tells him to leave you alone. You're not sure how you feel about Kavinsky listening to him.

"Don't forget tonight," Kavinsky calls after you.

You flip them both off over your shoulder.

But with you out of the picture, they've already moved on to other topics. You've been in their way the entire time.

"So, you do want me all to yourself," you hear Kavinsky say. "I get it. Okay, shoot. What can I do for you, handsome?"

"Don't," Declan hisses. "Not on campus."

The rest of their conversation is lost in the rustling of the leaves overhead. You keep your gaze resolutely in front of you. You don't want to turn around and see your brother finishing what you started.

Your insides are boiling. You don't know what you're most furious about: the fact that Kavinsky still hasn't agreed to stay away from Cabeswater, that you nearly fell prey to him, or the fact that your brother interrupted your nearly falling prey to Kavinsky.

That you wanted to fall prey to him.

School is out of the question now. Sorry, Gansey. You can't show your face near him anymore, not before you haven't wrung a promise from Kavinsky and certainly not in this state. You need an outlet for your growling anger, preferably one that includes smashing things to pieces.