Victory at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys #5) - C.M. Stunich Page 0,60

ago: I’m in love with you. Desperately so. Those words weren’t said lightly. They were laced with truth and thrown around me like a lasso, drawing me in so deep I have no hope of ever escaping. “If you’d wanted to get out of Prescott, you could’ve been a model or … something.”

“Or something,” Oscar says, his voice dark as he stares down at me. “Now, out of the casket.” He extends a hand, one that’s literally dipped in ink. There are black crosses and crows, people without eyes, gravestones and a crescent moon. I look at his hand, but I don’t accept it.

“Stacey deserves the best,” is my response when, really, I could and should say something profound here. “I want her to have a nice place to rest.” Usually, I’m a fan of natural burials or cremation, but … this is what her crew wants, so it’s what her crew will get.

“That doesn’t mean you have to test it out,” Oscar hisses, kneeling down beside the casket and curling his fingers around the edge. His eyes blaze with a fury that’s difficult to understand, so … I decide to do the grown-up thing and ask him the fuck about it.

“What’s the matter?” I sit up, pushing the curtain of my hair back so I can look at him properly. “This isn’t triggering for you, is it? Because if it is, I’ll get out.”

Oscar stares at me for nearly a full minute before responding. But that’s okay. It’s better when somebody actually thinks about the words that leave their mouth before they blurt them out—not that I don’t do my fair share of blurting.

“I don’t like the idea of you being dead,” is what he tells me. We stare at each other, and that heartbeat of mine that was racing so fast before picks up speed until I feel like I might get dizzy. He may as well have just told me that we’re soul mates or something. There was that much romance in his weird, stilted sentence. Sometimes, with broken people, you work with what you get, you embrace it, and you love them for what they can do.

I look back down at my lap, at the jeans with the holes in the knees, the ones that I wore through all on my own—no pre-ripped denim for this bitch. Not judging, just saying. If you don’t have enough trauma and bullshit to rip your own jeans on the day-to-day, you can buy ‘em, but you’ll never be south Prescott.

“I’m processing,” I tell Oscar, rubbing my hands against the pink satin interior. Why does it have to be so pretty and so comfy, just to put a corpse in? My throat constricts as I think about my sister, about her beautiful corpse wrapped up in blankets with a bottle of Pam’s pills on the nightstand … White flickers take over my vision and I scrub both hands down my face.

To say that I haven’t fully processed the idea that my mother murdered my sister is an understatement.

Neil raped her.

Pam killed her.

Oscar’s hand reaches out, tentative but steady, and falls across my own as they sit in my lap.

“Don’t force it. Sometimes, it takes years.”

I glance over at him, thinking about all the things he said about his father, how he tried to strangle him, how he killed his mother and siblings. That’s a lot to process. And, apparently, we have a lot in common.

“Your hair …” I start, removing one of my hands from underneath his and reaching up to finger the silken black strands. He flinches, but just barely, putting his tattooed hand back over mine and pinning it against his skull in a way he never would’ve done before. “You dyed it again.”

The door opens at the far end of the room and Aaron appears, pausing when he realizes he’s just walked in on a moment steeped in intimacy and connection.

“You guys are okay?” he asks because, really, we’ve been in here a long time. We were supposed to walk in, pick out a coffin, and pay the bill for Stacey’s funeral with the money I dug up from Pam’s backyard. That’s it. Instead, here I am, sitting in a coffin and talking about Oscar’s blond-to-black dye job. Even as a child, when we met at age eight, he had black hair which means that somebody dyed it for him. Who? Why?

“We’ll be out in a minute,” I say, and Aaron withdraws, heading back outside to wait