Page 29 of Dark Little Game

Thank the fucking gods above.

Finally, my brother isn’t with him.

I see him duck in through a pair of double doors on the side of the big campus gym, and I follow after him.

As usual, the gym building is crowded. Rayne is holding his phone against his ear, and I catch snippets of his conversation.

“It’s going good, Mom,” he says, and a flare of bitter jealousy creeps through me.

Every time Rayne’s mom dropped him off at school or at our house, growing up, I was jealous.

His mom was perfect, as far as mothers go.

Loving, kind, and supportive of her son. Her hair was chestnut brown just like his, and she always wore it in a messy ponytail as she went off to work shifts at the diner. They didn’t have money, but Rayne could never understand the depths of how lucky he was to have a deeply caring parent.

My mother was gone since before I could start forming memories. My father said she broke his heart, but I’m convincedhewas the one who cheated on her, driving our mother away.

She sent us Christmas cards every year from her house in Sweden.

That’s all Wes and I have ever really heard from our mother.

“Semester’s been a banger so far,” Rayne is saying to hismom now as he walks down the long hall in the gym building. “We’ve been having a lot of fun. Classes are kind of hard, but that’s always true. Yeah. I love you, too.”

Interesting.

He isn’t telling her about the attacks at all?

Maybe he doesn’t want his dear old Ma to worry.

Rayne disappears for a moment past a giant group of cross-country runners, freshly changed into their uniforms and walking down the gym hall like a flock of tall, wild birds.

I manage to catch a glance of his hair as he heads into a separate room, and I duck in a moment later.

It’s a tiled room full of more rows of lockers and private showers in the back.

Inside the room, it’s not as crowded, and I only see one small group of guys hauling duffel bags out the door as I head in.

For a minute I think I’ve lost him.

I go to the back of the locker room and hear a shower running, but when I look inside the stall, no one is in it.

I catch a whiff of Rayne’s sunscreen, a smell I’ve gotten used to after sharing a room with him this week.

I whip my head around.

In a flash, he’s on me.

“Fucking following me?” he says in a low voice.

Suddenly his palms are pressed flat against my chest as he shoves me hard into the row of lockers behind me.

My back slams into the metal front of a locker, clattering through the room.

It’s empty in here now other than us.

He’d already taken off his shirt, probably getting ready to shower before he caught sight of me. I glance down atthe fresh black lines of the tattoos on the front of his collarbone.

“Only because I like how you smell,” I tell him. “You wear that for the SPF or because it makes you smell like the beach?”