Page 26 of Shattered

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You don’t know? How do you not know?” He squinted his eyes. “I thought we were friends.”

“We are,” I said. “You’re like a brother to me, but that doesn’t mean I want to fuck you.”

He pinched his brow. “I can’t believe this.”

“Believe what?”

“That you’d betray me like this.”

I held his arm. “I’m not betraying anyone. I just don’t know how I feel about everything that happened.”

“Whatever,” he said. “You liked it when we were doing it.” I wish I could confirm or deny it, but I didn’t remember anything about it. Not even what he looked like naked. He shook his head. “Just please, if I really am like a brother to you, don’t tell anybody about it, okay?”

“Did someone say something about it?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he muttered, “Just don’t tell anybody and I’ll be fine.” He scurried to the main floor, and I shook my head, sad to see the agitated way he walked. Had Rourke gone to talk to him? Or was my guilty conscience rising to the surface for talking about Jake to Rourke? Had I given Jake a death sentence?

In the Greenhouse, I poked my head into Iris’s bedroom. She perked up, practically lunging at me. “There you are!” she said. “You want to go on tonight? Teagen isn’t feeling well.”

I blinked at her. I hadn’t performed on the stage since before Aldrich.

“I haven’t prepared anything,” I said.

“We’ve got some of those red candles in the Terrariums. You can use those, right?”

Candle wax was a pain to clean up, but it would be doable. “Yeah. If you need me to.”

“Good! Good.” She put a hand on my back, bringing me down the hallway to the main floor.

“Wait,” I stopped her. “Do you have any black button-up shirts? An extra one for Jake?” Iris raised an eyebrow. “He’s wearing blue right now.”

“I don’t really—” she hesitated, looking around to see where he was. “I know you’re friends, Mel, but he’s kind of a creep.”

A creep? “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t think he’s trustworthy.”

This was news to me. I thought Iris liked everyone on staff.

“Did something happen?” I asked. She looked behind her, back to the bedrooms, then faced me again.

“Nothing I can talk about.”

That didn’t clear anything up. “What about that ‘boyfriend’ shirt you sometimes wear?”

“Mel, I don’t think—”

“Please.”

She shrugged. “Might not be big enough for him, but I’ll grab it.”

It was an oversized button-up shirt meant to make Iris look like she had spent the night and had nothing left to wear but her lover’s clothes. Of course, that meant it was a button-up shirt to match the club members’ usual attire, but in her color of choice, black.

After we found her shirt crumpled at the bottom of her dresser and delivered it to Jake, we went to the Terrariums and found the fetish room where the candles were stored. As I carried them to the stage, I saw Garrett sitting at one of the round tables, leaned back into his seat. He was wearing a slim-fit dark blue suit, the jacket tailored to show off his toned physique. The atmospheric lighting made it so that he looked ethereal, as if a misty dream was soaking him up. His thick lips were pressed into a stoic expression. In control. Relaxed. Waiting.For me.

What was wrong with me? I wasn’t attracted to him like that.