other option was to find a hotel room somewhere to hole up in. Somewhere he could be alone to think and hide himself away from the world before he did any more damage. Somewhere he could try to remember exactly what he had done.
At least he had left his wallet in his pocket. It didn’t take long to find a shitty hotel that looked like it was hanging on by a thread. He booked the room furthest away from the others and the clerk didn’t even blink. The guy looked stoned with his bloodshot eyes, and he barely even took his eyes off the small TV on the desk in front of him.
If there was any comfort in the interaction, it was the fact that the human’s flesh was no more appealing to Ronnie than any other’s ever had been.
So he still hadn’t awakened. That meant whatever he’d done, he had done it with normal human strength.
The room was small, and it smelled like moldy socks, but there were three locks on the door, and he made use of all of them. He also pushed the desk in front of the door, hoping that would slow him down if he got any ideas to leave again in his sleep. Maybe it would wake him up.
Ronnie stripped out of his clothes and climbed into the shower that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in a decade. He didn’t even care. The water was hot, so much so it was probably a liability for the hotel. There was a stale little bar of wrapped soap he could use to scrub himself clean, at least. He scrubbed his soaked clothes, too, before hanging them over the shower rod to dry.
Long after the water had grown cold, he still didn’t feel clean enough, but he gave up and got out of the shower. He wrapped himself in the towels waiting on the rack outside the door. They smelled like mold, too, and he didn’t even want to think about the last time the bedsheets had been changed, but he had no intentions of sleeping, anyway.
He sat against the headboard, his knees pulled up to his chest, mumbling a half-hearted reassurance to himself that everything was going to be fine. It didn’t work any better than it had all the other times, but it helped him feel a little less crazy, ironically enough. Talking to himself was certainly the least of his worries.
Now he just had to figure out a way not to sleep ever again.
Chapter 31
Colt
In the blink of an eye, Colt’s entire world had changed. Once Ronnie had left for Brown, it changed again, albeit more gradually.
Stan had taken the news that his son was moving out in stride. Better than Colt had, at any rate. Susan, however, was still deeply upset, and Colt couldn’t blame her. He knew he had no right to be, but he was still feeling shocked Ronnie hadn’t even talked to him about it.
It was one thing for a college-aged guy to keep things from his parents, but Colt had thought they were closer than that. Especially after everything they’d been through.
Colt had tried to keep in touch, at least as much as his absurd schedule would allow, but Ronnie had gone from only sparsely replying to his messages to not at all. Colt only knew he was okay because he still contacted Susan every now and then.
It seemed like Evelyn was intent on throwing them into every possible social situation she could find, just to keep him distracted. Probably because she thought he was going to go running back to Jason and complicate all their lives all over again if she left him alone.
As tempting as it had been in the beginning, the news that Jason and Andrew were now dating had made things a bit simpler.
He wasn’t surprised. Andrew had been upfront about his intentions from the beginning, and he was the one who’d told Colt directly while they were meeting about something else. There was no reason for Jason to tell him at all, and Colt knew Andrew had only done it as a professional courtesy. Or maybe because he wanted to see if Colt was still unpredictable enough to fly into a jealous rage.
To be fair, he had been tempted. He was just used to resisting his baser impulses by then.
Jason had made no further attempts to contact him, and Colt was at once relieved and devastated. He had never realized just how much