Broken Pretty Things by Amber Faye

Chapter 34

I wake with a start,scramble to check my phone, and see that it’s just past midnight. I had been dreaming deeply about Halloween parties past at the Rayne lakehouse. About real monsters ambling from the lake, dragging plantlife and trash out with them. It reminded me that Gunnar’s birthday is coming up. October 31st. He’ll throw some party, here or at the lakehouse, and I won’t go. His Halloween parties were my favorite part of the year.

The thought must have literally woken me up. That, or the fact that I kind of need the bathroom, and I’m both hungry and thirsty as hell.

I try the door, and it’s locked. In a moment of curiosity, I try the window. Thick, sturdy, locked too. I dive back into the YouTube rabbit hole I’d gone down when Gunnar locked me in here the first time. I can pick a basic lock, but this door is old and the lock is difficult. I’d been watching tutorials. This time, with the added need for basic human rights, I manage to unlock the door in under thirty minutes with a couple of bobby pins I had in my bag.

It feels very strange to wander the Rayne house at night in my sleep shorts and tank top. I am going to be in no trouble if I get caught, this time. Unless one specific member of the family finds me wandering the halls. I find the bathroom in the dark, the same one I broke into, and then I finish up a glass of water and start to head back to my bedroom, but I find myself lingering by Gunnar’s bedroom.

He rarely sleeps in here, preferring the dark quiet of the basement so much that I’m not sure why he still even has an above-ground bedroom at all. But I guess in a house with a dozen spare rooms, there’s no reason not to. I hover, realizing I can faintly hear music. It’s nothing I recognize, and I press my ear to the door for a minute. It’s pretty. A lo-fi piano piece with an ethereal choir. Very Gunnar.

I turn the handle and slip into the room. Pitch black, but I inch my way across the thick carpet as my eyes adjust. I remember the layout, and I can see outlines. I know he’s in here. It smells like him, it sounds like him. I go to lift the comforter and get in the bed, but it’s already lifted. I see the glint of his brown eyes before they flutter shut again, and when I lie down beside him, he lowers the covers, the heavy weight of his arm, over me, and pulls me in close.

“How’d you do that?” he whispers, voice cracking with sleep.

“You think I’d let myself get trapped without trying everything?” I ask. I can see him enough now to see the curve of his lips. I let him hold me in the quiet for a while, listening to the music. He lets me trace the contours of his face with my thumb. “I miss you.” It’s so quiet I’m not sure I even made any sound. “You know what I miss the most?” I say, a little louder.

“What?”

“I miss horror movies.”

He exhales. “I have great news for you. Horror movies still exist. In fact, they’re experiencing a kind of renaissance—”

“You know what I mean. I can’t watch them anymore.”

He cracks his eyes open. “I can’t either.” I hadn’t expected that.

“They just make me think of you,” I say. In case that wasn’t clear.

“The stupid things you’d say.”

“You mean hilarious things.”

He smiles and shakes his head into his pillow. “This sucks.”

I swallow. “It doesn’t have to.”

He cups my ass and grinds into me a little, his already semi-hard dick pressing against me. “Is this what you mean?”

I punch his arm. “No, I mean you could help me figure out what really happened. To Cole. And we could help JJ get better. Do something, instead of waiting stuff out and being shitty to each other.”

He hears me out, and then leans in and kisses my bottom lip, twirling his fingers in my hair. “I kept looking.”

“What?”

“After you left, I kept looking. And another time after that. I didn’t find anything.”

“In your dad’s office?” He nods, his nose brushing mine.

“You smell so good.” His cock twitches against my hip and he hums a sigh, grabbing my hand and pressing it over him. “Take your clothes off.”

“No, I really want to talk to you.” I really mean it, but my palm moves over him independently. “I can’t believe there was so much about you that I didn’t know.” It’s hard to stick to one topic with so many distractions.

“Like what?”

“Like you have a really nice dick,” I say, conversationally. His lips twitch. “I didn’t know.”

He raises an eyebrow. “You knew.”

That makes me laugh, and I hate it. There were such clear boundaries to our friendship that don’t exist anymore, but it’s still him. Somewhere in there, he’s the same person. I didn’t invent everything, or fall for a total lie.

“You have a nice everything,” he says, pulling on the shoulder strap of my tank top. He rolls on top of me, pushing his erection between my thighs. “Perfect. I hate it.”

“You hate it?”

“So much.” He licks back up my throat, and then takes my earlobe between his teeth, bucking his hips. I feel my skin heat, but I push him away, back onto his side.

“Stop, listen. So my friend, Hero, has this idea,” I say. He’s working his lower lip with his teeth, staring at my mouth with lust-hooded eyes. I push him. “Hey.”

“Mm,” he says. Then frowns. “Your friend, what?”

“My friend Hero has this idea that we should—”

“You have a friend called Hero?”

“Yeah … her parents sound pretty weird.” He makes a face. “OK, Gunnar and Ransom Rayne. Glass houses. Anyway, Hero thinks the key could be in the suicide note. You know, since Cole’s murderer would have had to write it and slip it into his bedroom sometime after the party.”

He carefully clears his throat, avoiding eye contact. “That would be true, yes.” His hand has found my butt again, but he’s still listening.

“And, I mean, I can’t ask him for it.”

There’s a beat, and then Gunnar starts to laugh. Tired, throaty laughs. “You mean, walk up to the guy who may have broken into your house to try to hurt you, the guy who’s carrying around his brother’s suicide note like it’s some crazy … revenge totem, who blames you for the whole thing, and ask him to hand it over?”

“Right.”

“No, I don’t think that’s the way to go.”

“Can you ask him for me?”

“Like, on your behalf?” He stares at me, then rubs at his face with his fingertips. “Listen. It was hell trying to convince JJ back then that I wasn’t secretly still into you. I can’t risk him turning on me, now, too.”

I shuffle away a little. “Is that what this has been about? Staying on JJ’s side?”

Gunnar gives me a look, runs his tongue over his lip, and shakes his head. “No. Not at all. If I’d believed you, I would have defended you with everything I had. I’m not afraid of JJ Waller, but I am smart enough to know how to avoid problems.”

“You would have defended me?”

“Of course. But the evidence …” He trails off for a moment. “You have to understand, there was, is, so much evidence.”

“There seems to be quite a lot of evidence that I fucked my soon-to-be stepbrother, too,” I say pointedly.

“That’s different,” he says.

“Yeah, how?”

“I fabricated it all, and I’m incredible at stuff.” He’s barely even half joking, and it makes me roll my eyes.

“So it needs to have been fabricated by someone as incredible as you?”

He nods, and smiles. “You see how unlikely that is?”

I leave his poor taste joke hanging in the air. “I need Ransom to get the note from JJ,” I say slowly. “I need to see it. You have to just trust me on this.” He leans his head back. “Gunnar.”

“You have to admit, that would make me kind of an idiot.”

“Trusting me?”

“Yeah.”

I suck in a breath and hook my leg around his waist. “What if I—” He grips my thigh and kisses me, then laughs and shakes his head.

“Don’t do that.”

“What?”

“Whatever femme fatale thing you were about to try.”

This time I crack a smile too. “Are you saying it wouldn’t work?”

“No, it would totally work, but that’s cheap. You’re better than that.” Right now it feels just like how it used to be between us. Kidding around. I move to unhook my leg but he digs his fingers into my thigh. “You’re better than that,” he says. “I’m definitely not.”

“What did you mean still into me?”

“Huh?”

“You said JJ wanted to know if you were still into me.”

He blinks slowly, tousled and handsome, and runs his thumb down my cheek. When he speaks again, it’s more gentle than he has been with me for a while. “I think you and I were the only people who didn’t know I loved you.”

I swallow, but it’s not enough to kill the swelling lump in my throat. I swallow again. My eyes are welling up. “Past tense,” I say. Not a question. But still, when he nods it hurts.

He lets go of my thigh, and I pull away and straighten out. The joking around is done.

“I—” I start, but his phone, plugged in on the bedside table, starts to buzz. “Who’s calling you at one in the morning?” Jealousy licks at me before I even realize I’m thinking about Aurelia. What could it be but a booty call?

He presses it to his ear, letting his eyes close and rubbing circles on his eyelids as he listens. “Where?” he says. Then, “OK.” He clicks it off and sets it down, looking at me like he has no idea what to do. “I can’t leave you alone, I think.” He sighs, and gets up. “Get dressed.”

“Where are we going?” I ask, completely lost. He stretches and I see his perfect silhouette, loose shirt and boxers, before he grabs a pair of jeans.

“You wanted to talk to Ransom, right?”

So, not a booty call.

* * *

I sit in his car,wrapped in one of his hoodies. It has the words ‘Class President’ emblazoned over the front. It’s too small for him now. His mom got it for him when he first expressed interest in the title, and then she died before he was voted into student government. Too dorky to wear, too sentimental to throw away.

“Where are we going?” I ask him as we speed through the richest parts of town, skirt around the shopping district, and head towards Westerley.

“He got ditched again,” Gunnar replies. It’s hard not to watch him drive, flicking on the blinker and drumming on the steering wheel. His long fingers and the flexing muscles in his forearms. He’s just wearing shorts and a t-shirt and sweatshirt, like me, but he always looks put together. Unlike me. I dare to peek in the mirror at myself and smooth down my wild hair.

“Ditched?”

“Yeah. He’s been hanging out with some assholes.” He blows out his cheeks and then exhales. “He’s supposed to have a ride or stay sober, but that hasn’t been happening a whole lot.” He glances at me, and then shakes his head like he remembers he shouldn’t be telling me stuff. “I told him to call me and not Dad. It’s no big deal.”

“You guys are cute,” I say. He smirks, eyes on the road. “It’s weird to think of him out drinking. He’s still a kid.”

“Nah,” Gunnar says, checking his GPS and making a turn onto a quiet residential street. “Remember the shit we did at the start of Junior year?”

“Yeah, you’re right.” I lean my head back onto the headrest. We were out at each other’s houses or at a party a couple times a week this time last year. “Can’t believe he’s there already, is all.” Ransom was always a super cute, earnest kid. I have no idea what kind of person he is now.

Gunnar rolls down his window and sticks his head out. “Get the fuck in the car,” he barks, making me jump. I hadn’t seen anyone out there. But a lump rises up from the front lawn of one of the houses and slopes, staggers, really, towards the car, lets himself in and sinks way down in the backseat. Gunnar shoots a look over his shoulder before he pulls onto the road again. “If you puke in my car, Ran, I’m gonna knock you the fuck out.”

“Shut up, oh my god,” Ransom Rayne says, his voice deep and husky as he presses his hands to his face.

“Do you want me to call Dad?’

“Obviously fucking not.” He lowers his hands, snaps on his seatbelt, and glares at his older half-brother. It’s hard to remember they don’t share a mother, just from looking at them. “Thank you,” he adds robotically. Then he slumps back again. His eyes are heavy, his lower lip sticking out as he stares out the window.

“Where is JJ?” Gunnar asks.

“I told you, he left early with some girl.”

“I don’t think you should be letting him go home with random girls right now,” Gunnar says, his voice softening with something like concern.

“I can’t control him. I’m not going to control him. Everyone else wants to.” Ransom runs his forefinger down the foggy window, making it squeak.

“Don’t do that.”

I laugh suddenly, then cover my mouth. “Sorry.” Gunnar talks about Ransom with kindness and respect, most of the time, so it’s easy to forget the snappy way he talks to him in person.

Ransom juts his chin in my direction. “What, you’re chauffeuring her around?” His drunken eyes glitter as he takes me in through the rearview mirror. “Just become her full-time bodyguard, man, damn.”

“She got kicked out of her house, so she’s staying with us. I told you.”

Ransom hits the back of his head a couple of times on the headrest. “What if JJ wants to come see me?”

“He won’t. He hates coming over to our house.”

“That’s because Dad is a fucking asshole,” Ransom mutters.

Gunnar licks his lips. “You shouldn’t talk like that,” he says, low.

“Yeah, or what? He cuts me even further out of his will?”

Interesting…

“You’re not cut out of his will, don’t talk like that.”

“I am. He told me.”

“He loves you,” Gunnar says. I glance at the two of them, wondering what the hell I’ve been missing. “You’re his kid. Just stop giving him a hard time.”

Ransom starts to laugh, a breathy, throaty noise that escalates and rapidly turns into a strange, wet noise. “Shit, Gunnar, pull over,” I yell. Gunnar panics and swerves to a stop by a couple of houses, and Ransom pops the back door open, leaning his head out and retching on the street. “Oh, god,” I mutter, resting my hand on my own stomach. I hate hearing people puke.

He’s done after a minute, and slides his heavy body back inside the door, slamming it shut. “Anything in the car?” Gunnar asks.

“No.” Ransom sucks in a shivering breath and wraps his arms around his body and I watch him in the rearview mirror. He stares out the window, his eyes glittering in the streetlights. Then he dips his head into his chest, brings his hands to his face, and starts to quietly sob.

Gunnar turns to me as if to say something, but then pinches his lips shut and keeps driving, glancing in the mirror at his brother every so often. We get to the gate, the driveway, and he parks, and leans back for a minute. None of us moves to get out of the car just yet.

“You feeling OK, Ran?” I have to ask, just to cut through the weird silence.

“I miss Mom,” he says, almost too quiet to hear. Gunnar’s mom, his adoptive mom, raised him from birth. Even though he was the product of an affair between her husband and a good friend of hers, or so the gossip goes. She loved him just as powerfully as she loved Gunnar, and then she died. He rubs his face with his sleeve for a minute, and Gunnar and I have no idea what to say. “It’s on me, it’s all on me.”

“What is?” Gunnar turns around. After a minute of hesitation, he rests his hand on his brother’s knee. “You don’t have to worry about anything except school right now, OK?”

“But the JJ thing. I shouldn’t have let him go somewhere without me. What if he hurts—”

“That’s on him, not you,” Gunnar interrupts.

Ransom laughs, a wet, slurred laugh. “And on her, too, a little.” He nods at me. I turn back to face the front, chest clenching. Gunnar says nothing to defend me. Ransom is shaking, a tear tracking down his cheek, and I can’t stand it anymore. He’s always going to be a kid to me, even if he is barely a year younger than us. I get out of the car, move around it and open his door. He steps out, shakily, and I help him, then pull him into a hug.

“I’m so sorry,” I say. He has the shivers really bad, but he wraps his arms around me too. Hearing him cry is making me cry, and we’re sniffling and hugging for a minute before Gunnar gets out of the car and heads to the house. I pull away and cup Ransom’s cheeks. “I want to fix this, OK? I’m trying to fix this.”

“I want my friend back,” he mumbles, and then wrenches away from me with a bitter look on his face and trudges into the house too without looking back.

Almost too far away to hear, I am just about aware of Gunnar replying, “So do I.”

Lost and confused, I make my way back to my bedroom, but Gunnar is waiting for me in the doorway to his room, and nods me inside, closing the door behind me.

“He’s going through a hard time,” he says, leaning on the door and running his hand over his face.

“I get that,” I say.

“Someone he thought of as an older brother killed himself. Someone he respected got her name dragged through the mud.” He jerks his chin in my direction, and it twists inside me. “His best friend turned into a monster.” He leans his head back on the door. “I turned into kind of a monster. And he has no support system. No parents to speak of.” Heading to the bed, he pulls off his shorts and sweatshirt and throws them onto his desk chair, accidentally hitting his laptop and lighting the room up with its screen. I wince. He turns to me and I can see a flash of guilt in his tired expression. “I think he might be right.”

“Right about what?” I mumble. I don’t want to take another hit of guilt. I am going to fix everything. Eventually.

“I think he really might not be in the will,” he says quietly, and then shakes his head and holds out his hands. “Andie. Whatever’s going on between us — please promise me you won’t ever involve him.”

“What do you mean?” I step over to him. “You mean like in some weird revenge plot?” He laughs, sits down hard on the end of his bed. “That’s messed up, Gunnar. I would never.”

“I think I know that, but I had to say it.” He looks up at me, studying my face in the dim light from the laptop screen. “Come here?”

I wrap my arms around myself. “Why?”

He reaches out for me, hooking his fingers in the pocket of his sweatshirt. “Because I’m confused and angry and sad and guilty and I just want you to come here.” He pulls, and I let him, taking a step forward and letting myself fall into his lap. He hugs me tight, burying his head in my neck, rubbing his nose against my collarbone.

“Why would he not be in the will?” I ask, letting my cheek rest on his head.

“They have something going on. It’s complicated, but I think a lot of it is just stupid guilt.” I rub the tight muscles of his back, then squeeze his shoulders. He sighs, a hot gust against my skin. “My dad cheated on my mom, had a long affair. Then when he lost her, Ransom was just a reminder of what a shitty person he was to her.”

“That’s not his fault,” I say, feeling a knot form in my throat. Poor kid.

“No. My father isn’t a model citizen, it turns out.” We both laugh. He leans back. “But I don’t think he killed a seventeen-year-old. He would have had to sneak in and out of that party without being seen by anybody, first off. And second, that’s … I mean, it’s crazy.”

“I feel like we’re missing something and I don’t even know where to begin to look. It all seems so impossible.” I look down at him and he nods, slowly, but looks away.

“Have you completely dismissed the idea that maybe he did do it? Cole, I mean?”

I feel my lips purse, and go to get up from his lap, but he tightens his grip on me and huffs another sigh against my neck.

“Andie, what if he did kill himself, and he just invented the reason? Pretended it was because of you, but really it was something else? Something nobody else knew?”

My heart thuds in my chest and I squirm hard out of his grip. “No,” I say. “He was killed. He wouldn’t do that to me. That note ruined my life. Would he do that to me?”

Gunnar chews his lip, and I see something on his face. “Would Cole do that to you, or to anybody?” he repeats to himself. “No. No, he wouldn’t.” His eyes flick back over to me. “Unless he was really sick, maybe. Not himself.”

I can think of a thousand things I want to say to him, but they all get stuck in my throat. Gunnar gets up and squeezes my arm lightly. “I don’t want to sleep yet,” he says. It’s almost two in the morning and we have school. “I’m going to grab a snack, or something. You can put on a horror movie. I know we have a ton to catch up on.” He points to the laptop. I shrug, but when he smiles at me and leaves the room, I know I’m going to do it. Screw sleep. I miss this too much to leave.

I miss him too much.

* * *

His laptop password is ‘klavier’because he’s a huge dork. I open up his Chrome tabs and see a couple that relate to our Chemistry assignment. Curiosity overtakes me and I open up his files, glancing over my shoulder, and immediately find an appropriately named PowerPoint.

I open it up, and I’m still staring at it, horrified, when he comes back in the room with a bag of chips and some sodas.

“Hey, what did you choose?” he asks, coming up behind me and bending over to rest his chin on my shoulder.

I’m too stunned to respond. My mouth is hanging open as I stare at one of the slides. It isn’t even the worst one. I can’t speak.

“Oh,” he mutters in my ear. “Shit.” He reaches around me with both arms and taps a couple of buttons to quit the program. “You weren’t supposed to see that.”

I wheel around. “What the hell is wrong with you?” He tilts his head at me and then groans and runs his hands through his hair.

“I don’t know.”

“You do know,” I say, and point behind me. “Those things. You were going to say that was my half of the presentation, and I said all those things about you? You were going to let me stand in front of the class and act like I’d …” I take a step away. “You’re a psychopath. How can you do that stuff to yourself? Your own family?”

The slides had been lists of terrible, awful things about Gunnar. Every terrible secret I knew about him — some true, some lies. The worst one of all was how it detailed his mother’s death. Stuff only I knew. “That junkie got what she deserved” across the screen in a bright red font.

“You just told me not to involve Ransom in this,” I say. He winces.

“I didn’t think about it like th—”

“What was the endgame here? Ruin your own reputation?”

He shakes his head. “It wouldn’t have. Everyone thinks you’re a liar, but there was enough truth in there that I would get sympathy.”

“But why?”

He clears his throat. “You would have been expelled.” He rushes to keep speaking when it’s clear I’m about to scream at him. “That was a past plan. That was no longer my plan. You’re here, and we’re going to try a different tactic. You understand? You weren’t supposed to see that.”

Disgust roils my stomach and I feel like I actually might throw up. “You’re disgusting. You’re awful.” I hold up my hands and then head for the door.

“Andie, wait. I don’t think you understand what I was trying to do—”

I wheel around and he bumps into me as he hurries after me. “OK,” I say, folding my arms. “Explain that in a way that doesn’t make you sound like a fucking sociopath.”

He swallows. “I thought getting you expelled would help force you out of town. It was taking too long, trying to get you to leave or snap and retaliate on your own. So I did it myself.” His voice cracks. He has the decency to look down at the ground, a hint of revulsion pulling back the corners of his lips. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t going to. I changed my plan.”

“What other abandoned plans should I look out for?” I ask.

He wasn’t expecting that, because he clamps his mouth shut and looks at me as guiltily as a puppy. “Well …” he begins. “Does it matter, if they’re abandoned?”

“Oh my god,” I say, taking a step back. “How do I keep … why do I keep letting myself forget what kind of a person you are?”

“Because you want to,” he answers fast, reaching out for me. “Whatever is going on, I changed my mind. I want to try to figure it out together.”

“How can I believe anything you say? How do I know you believe anything I’m saying?”

He pauses, and then smiles, which fills me with unease and confusion. “Well, we don’t. But we were lying to each other before, and we didn’t seem to mind it back then.”

“You’re the worst,” I say, and this time when I head into my own bedroom, he doesn’t follow me. The door doesn’t lock. When I wake up, I’m not trapped.

Weirdly, it makes me feel kind of exposed, unsafe, when I turn the handle and the door opens without protest. I head to the breakfast bar and tell Preston that I’m sick, and I’m a little surprised when he tells me to head back to bed and rest instead of going to school today; that Greta will take care of me.

“That’s the secret to success, Andrea,” he booms after me when I leave. “Know your limits, preserve your strength.”

“Everything he says sounds like he got it from a LinkedIn status update,” Ransom leans in and says quietly. I stifle a laugh. The kid looks like hell this morning, with mussed up hair and dull eyes.

“You feel great today?” I ask.

He stretches and then nods. “Incredible. I barfed tequila in the shower. Ready for my Math test today.” Awkwardly, I reach out and squeeze his shoulder. He makes no move to flinch away or stop me. At that, I grab some tea and warm buttered muffins, and head back to my cozy bedroom for a day of TV binging.

Staying with the Raynes for the week doesn’t have to be all that bad.