Page 12 of Riot Rules
Fuck. We took it in turns reassuring each other that there would be nowayany of them would show up tonight. We must have repeated ourselves a thousand times and then some. It was the only way I convinced her to wear the tutu. And now she’s looking down at the frothy purple tulle bunched up between her legs like it’s a carnivorous animal, halfway done with eating her. She presses the swathes of material down, trying to make it less noticeable, but for every bunch she pushes down, three more spring up. It looks like she’s playing Whac-a-Mole.
Pax casually surveys the three of us, his steely, unreadable gaze bouncing from me, to Mara, to Pres. He lands on Mara again with a vicious smile slowly spreading across his handsome face. “He’s around here somewhere, y’know. I’m sure he’d help a girl out.”
“I—I don’t—” Mara never stutters. She stutters now. “I’m not—interested—in—”
Pax steps forward, the muscles in his jaw ticking, and Presley lets out a strangled whimper. “Sounded like you were pretty interested in…” he says. “Sounded like you wereveryinterested in…”
“I was just making fun of Ca—"
Oh, hell no. I cannotlet her speak my name. I pinch her, hard and quick, and she yelps, rubbing at her arm.
Pax looks us over like we’re all mad. “You’re Wolf Hall girls.” He delivers this statement like it’s a threat. Lord knows how he manages it.
I square my shoulders, groaning under my breath. This is a bad idea, but I’m still going to do it. “You know we are, dude. You saw me at the hospital, like, four days ago. What do you want?”
Pax blinks. Shifts his weight onto his right hip. Cants his head to one side. “I didn’t want anything. I was minding my own business, when I heard some sex starved pussy cat purring my friend’s name like he was shafting her in public.” He shrugs. “S’cuse me for wondering what the fuck was going on.”
I saw on the National Geographic channel once that you should always make eye-contact with a bear or a wolf if they’re about to attack. Make yourself as big as possible. Make as much noise as you can. Donotturn and run. Seeing as I’m only five foot five, and Pax is six foot fifteen or something stupid, I doubt I’ll scare him off with my slight frame. I’m not going to start screaming in front of a bunch of strangers, either. That would be insane. But Icanstand my ground. I can look the bastard dead in the eye and refuse to back down. “We were messing around, that’s all. No harm, no foul. You can leave now.”
Laughing breathily down his nose, Pax runs a hand over his shaved head, rubbing his palm against the base of his skull, like he enjoys the way it feels. “Dismissingme, Carina Mendoza? Didn’t think you had the stones to pull off that kind of attitude. I always thought you were more of a ‘head down’kinda girl.”
“What? Now you have something against quiet girls,Pax Davis?” I weaponize his name the way he weaponized mine; the two words come out hard and unfriendly, which makes him laugh even harder.
“Far from it. I like ‘head down’girls. Usually makes ’em ‘ass up’girls. They know when to hold their tongues. What Idon’tlike is when a quiet girl suddenly turns out to be a loudmouth. That,”—he shakes his head—“I am not a fan of at all.”
Mara’s recovered from the shock of Pax finding her fake-fucking Dashiell Lovett the Fourth amongst a sea of beer pong cups. She folds her arms in front of her chest, angling her chin up at Pax defiantly. “Who let you off your leash, anyway? Are you lost? Aren’t you normally trailing behind Wren like a good little boy?”
Goddamnit, Mara. Couldn’t keep quiet, could you…
I was antagonizing the guy, but I wasn’t openly baiting him. He bares his teeth in a savage approximation of a smile. “You’ve got a nasty little tongue in your head, haven’t you, sweetheart?”
“You should see it,” she says. “It’s forked and everything.”
At this—either because this comment might as well be an open invitation for Pax to make the rest of our time at Wolf Hall a living nightmare, or the fact that the guy’s been standing four feet away from us, close enough to reach out andtouch, to lean in andsmell, for two whole minutes now—Presley lets out another poorly timed whimper.
Pax jerks his head in her direction. “What’s her deal?”
“Nothing. She’s fine. Hiccups.” The answer flies out of me a little too quickly.
Those mercurial, winter-storm eyes narrow again. “Presley Maria Witton-Chase…has thehiccups?” He doesn’t sound convinced. “Poor Presley. D’you need a fright?” He steps closer to her. “You need a good scare? You should try me on for size, Red. I guarantee you’ll beterrified.”
I’m pretty sure the only other time Pax has spoken directly to Presley was when she handed him a worksheet in English class. The terse, ‘thanks,’he threw at her has been sustaining her for the past two years. Such a slew of words from him now, all of them directed right at her, six whole, if short, sentences, sends her into a complete meltdown. She covers her mouth with one hand, sobs randomly, blushes beet red, then gathers up her purple tutu in her arms and bolts from her seat to the front door like a hare streaking across a field.
Pax watches her go with a placid, completely unperturbed look on his face. “Well.Thatwas weird.”
“Just leave us alone, for fuck’s sake,” I mutter, shoving past him.
“Hey! Carrie! Where the hell are you going?” Mara yells. She shouldn’t need to ask; she witnessed Presley’s freak-out and subsequent disappearing act just like I did. Halfway to the door, I see Wren strolling down the wide, carpeted staircase to the right, wiping something red from his hands on what looks like a washcloth. Some dark-haired, pale-skinned wraith. Some ghost. Some wickedly beautiful, heartless god. His eyes skate over me like I’m nothing. Like I’m less than nothing. He’ll be within view of Mara any second now, which means any hope that my friend might join me in looking for Pres just went flying out of the window.
Perfect. Seriously. Just fuckinggreat.
* * *
“PRESLEY!PREEEEEEEZZZZ!”
The path that leads down to the side field where all of the cars are parked is narrow and rocky. A girl would have trouble navigating it safely in sneakers without falling ass-over-tit and winding up with a mouthful of gravel. In wedges, it’s basically a broken ankle waiting to happen.
“PRESLEY!” For fuck’s sake, where the hell did she go? My eyes have adjusted after leaving the well-lit house, but still all I can see are the dim, lumpy, dark shapes of cars to my right and a lazy smear of black on the horizon (much darker than the indeterminate grey of the grassland that stretches away from the house) that marks the entrance to the surrounding forest.
