Chapter Twelve

Part 4

Five minutes later I burst into Jon’s room, ready to tear into him, but the second I saw Jon lying there on his bed, my hurt was eclipsed by my disappointment in myself. I was the one in the wrong. I had done what I had promised myself all along I would never do—I had let myself to get sucked in by Jon’s chicanery. That’s what it had to be, right? He’d fooled me into thinking he liked me just to throw me off his scent.

Jon stood up from his bed and rubbed at his eyes in a drowsy way. Clearly he hadn’t been able to stay awake long enough for our little rendezvous. As if that mattered.

“You’re early,” he said with a smile as he woke himself up.

“Jon, do you know where I can score some E?” I blurted out. I couldn’t help it. There was no cunning left in me. I was going for broke.

Jon’s handsome face seemed to go flat. He muted the television and dropped the remote on the bed, then shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans and looked away. The body language of the guilty. I knew it! He was the one! Bastard!

“Mike and Tek told me you were sniffing around for drugs,” he said, running his hand over his unkempt hair. “I was kinda hoping they’d gotten it wrong. Those two have been known to just make stuff up sometimes, you know?”

My patience was beginning to dwindle. The tape that held my recording device in place itched as if it was in sympathy with my feelings. We both wanted him to say something and say it fast.

“Do you or don’t you?” I demanded. “It’s not that convoluted a question.”

“Sure, I know where you can get it. Everyone in this school knows where you can get it,” Jon said. “But you shouldn’t get involved with that stuff, Kim. It’s pointless.”

My mouth dropped open. Was he admonishing me? Was he, the drug dealer himself, telling me I was a bad girl?

“Right, like you’re not into that stuff!” I said, pacing around his room.

Jon sat down on his bed and sighed. “No. I’m not.”

“You’ve never done drugs,” I said, standing right in front of him. “Give me a break, Jon. You’re a musician!” I said, throwing my arm toward the drum set that stood in the corner of his single room. “You wear nothing but black and leather, you snowboard, you drive a jeep. You exemplify all the qualities of a user, and you’re telling me you’ve never done drugs.”

Of course he hadn’t told me that, but I had gotten to the point that I was acting completely neurotic.

“No, I’m not telling you I’ve never done drugs,” Jon said. “I’m telling you I don’t do them now.”

Something in his tone caused a response in my chest. It sounded too familiar. Like regret, anger and sadness all mixed into one. Like I felt whenever I thought about Corinne.

And I believed him. In that moment I knew for sure that Jon had nothing to do with the drug problem at Hereford. Something in his past had caused him to swear off the stuff and I knew from experience that it was the kind of vow that was impossible to break.

But if it wasn’t Jon and it wasn’t Marshall and it wasn’t David, then who the hell was it? There was no one left on Jon’s potential drug-dealer roster.

At that moment I saw a flash of red out the window. The luminous floodlights that were always on in the quad at night bathed the area in bright light. I stepped toward the window and saw a familiar form making its way as quickly as possible through the foot of snow that covered the ground.

David Rand.

He crossed the square and disappeared around the side of the girls’ dorm, headed toward the outer buildings.

What the hell was David doing out in the middle of the night, running through twelve inches of snow? It was more than a little suspect and couldn’t be dismissed as an inconsequential development. Something was afoot.

“I have to go,” I said, heading for the door.

“Where?” Jon was up like a shot and stood in front of the door, frustrating my exit. “You’re not going to track down your E, are you?”

“No. Not exactly,” I said. “But Jon, you have to let me go.”

My heart was starting to panic. If I lost David, I’d never know what he was doing out there. And something inside me told me I had to know.

“Not until you tell me where you’re going,” he said, firming up his stance and crossing his arms over his chest.

Okay, he couldn’t keep me hostage here. He was just a scrawny—if sexy—hermit and I was a state-champion fighter. I could totally take him, but what was the point? All it would do was waste precious time.

“Look, I can’t explain everything, but I have to get to the outer buildings and I have to do it now,” I said, hoping he’d hear and comprehend the urgency in my voice just as I’d heard his assertions about his drug use. He looked into my eyes and seemed to realize that I wasn’t messing around.

“Well, you’re not going alone,” he said, reaching by me to grab a couple of jackets off a hook by the wall. He took the leather coat and handed me the ski jacket.

“Fine,” I said impatiently, shoving my arms into the coat and noticing, even in my anxiety, how it smelled like him—like Ivory soap and sunscreen and sweat. I knew my mother definitely wouldn’t approve of bringing along a guy who was a civilian and a suspect, but I was touched by his chivalry and didn’t mind having a little company on this particular mission. After everything that had gone wrong that night, I felt out of control and totally clueless. It couldn’t hurt to have someone at my side, and I was not ready to call in my mother and her squad just yet.

Not until I rectified the situation and figured out where on earth I had gone wrong. I wouldn’t have minded having a culpable suspect in custody either.