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“Looks like you’ve dialed the wrong number,” he said, his voice low and sultry. Even though it was through the speaker, I could tell he was forcing it. “Or maybe you just changed your mind about me.”
“What the hell are you doing?” I spat back. “Where’s Tara?”
“Woah, settle down, chica,” he said, just as I heard a muffled giggle in the background. “You think I kidnapped her, or something?”
“Or something,” I muttered back, narrowing my eyes back at the hallway. “Why do you have her phone?”
There was a shuffling noise as if the line became spotty, and I wondered if he Eric was just switching the phone to his other hand until I heard a different voice.
“Kat?” Tara said. My jaw dropped. “You there?”
It took me a moment to regain the sanity to reply, and even then it felt like I was dreaming. “Yeah,” I said, though it came out sounding more like a question. “What are you … doing?”
“Chillin’,” she said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Or, you know, spending time together. Hanging out. I don’t know, Eric, would you call this a date? Yeah. I think it’s a date.”
I nodded, as if it all made perfect sense—but then again, it wasn’t that far out of the question. She told me a while back that she used to have a crush on him, that she still had some feelings for him. I guess I had assumed that whatever ‘feelings’ she did have for him had vanished once she got to know Kenny, but maybe I was wrong.
“Oh, wow,” I said, trying to mimic her happy-go-lucky tone. But it wasn’t working. I was too confused. “You guys are … together?”
It had only been two days. Days. Not weeks, not months. I understood that people could fall in and out of love quickly—but even I didn’t think she was capable of this.
Besides, she had Kenny had a good thing going.
“Yeah, I’ve been sorta meaning to tell you,” she replied, lowering her voice. “Sorry, it’s just, I knew you and Eric had this thing at the start of school for a bit. We’ve been seeing each other for a couple weeks now. But, hey—everything’s cool, right?”
“Yeah,” I replied a little too quickly. “Everything’s cool.”
There was a small pause as it sounded like Tara was turning away, and I heard her giggle before she returned to the speaker.
“You wanna hang later?” she asked. “We could go on a double date.”
Again, she snickered—not laughing with me, but with Eric. Sure, she must’ve known that I had a thing with Leo. After all, she had seen me with him a couple of times. But I hadn’t really told her the whole story. I had no idea how much she knew.
It was weird. Vivian’s cousin seemed to know everything about our little rouse—the fact that there was more than ‘love’ between me and the three boys. But that was where he went wrong—maybe it had started out with hate, and been numbed to respect, but there were feelings there. There always had been.
The rest of the world might have thought that what was going on between me and Elliot, Felix and Leo, was all a show. It wasn’t.
We had evolved beyond that.
“Um, how about no,” I said, drawing my eyebrows together. I stole quick glance at Elliot, hoping to God he wasn’t hearing any of this. “I’ll come to your room later, though. Gotta go.”
“Okay, bye! Love you!”
With that, the line went dead. I lowered the phone from my ear, and let out a sigh.
“Who’s together?” Leo asked, wiggling his eyebrows. “Let me guess—your friend and that pothead?”
“My friend is a pothead,” I answered, rolling my eyes. “But no. It doesn’t matter who it is. You don’t know him.”
I went over to my bag and unzipped it. I remembered the knife that was in there just before I had boarded the plane. It didn’t make sense. No one was near my bag except for two people—Tara, and Elliot.
When I started rifling through it to unpack, I snuck a glance up at Elliot to see if he was paying attention. But he was on his phone, in his own world. He had every reason to sabotage my flight to see Pierre, seeing as they hated each other’s guts. But that would’ve been too obvious, too brash of him. If anything, Elliot had turned into the most passive-aggressive person I’ve known.
He wouldn’t threaten me. Not in that way.
“So,” Elliot said, dropping his phone into his lap. “Did you run into anyone else on your trip?”
I started tossing things out of the bag, and a bra happened to land on Leo’s shoulder just as I looked up at Elliot.