Page 42 of Pretty Poisoned

He shrugs. "I guess you don't until you do."

I narrow my eyes. "What if my thing is worse?"

"Do you think it might be?" he asks with a smirk.

"I don't know," I tell him. "My friends don't run around warning people that I'm dangerous, so probably not."

"That's because you don't have any," he says.

I snicker. "Okay, yeah. Well, maybe."

"Is your thing illegal?" he asks.

"Kind of. Yes. Is yours?"

"Apparently."

"And you'll really tell me? Like, actually tell me? Because the fact that you're smiling right now makes me doubt you."

"I'm always smiling, though, aren't I?"

"…I think so."

"So then, that should be normal. Not like the coat."

I sigh. I've never had to tell this story out loud before aside from therapy, but I really want this information. If he is crazy, maybe he will just tell me. And the sooner I get the information I want, the better…before I get sucked even further into this rabbit hole.

"Fine," I tell him. "But don't look at me while I talk."

"Okay," he says. He lies back on the ground, looking up at the sky.

"I can still see you smiling," I tell him.

He laughs and covers his mouth with his hand. "Okay, go."

"Okay, so. You know how I said I don't have any friends?"

"Yeah."

"Well, I was a weird fucking kid, okay? I have this sister—she's four years older than me—and she was always prettier and smarter and involved in everything in school, and I was never really anything like that. I was like…the extra. No one ever paidany attention to me or what I was doing—not my family, not people at school."

"Sounds familiar," he says.

"Don't talk," I tell him. "And you're prettier than Declan."

"You keep telling me what to do like that, and I'm going to fuck that mouth of yours."

Jesus. This man.

"Do you want to hear this or not?"

"Yeah, I do. I just…you know what I want to do to you."

"I haven't cried in over three years," I say.

"We'll see."

"So anyway, instead of having friends and a life, I had hobbies. And it started out with horror movies and novels and then I moved on to true crime and serial killers. But I got like…a little too into it. And when I was in high school, I started writing letters to convicted murderers—just to see who would write back. A few of them did, and it escalated quickly."

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