I was wet, though. I was fucking dripping. Shit, half the time, it felt like I was drowning. Maybe that was her point. Edie was a lot of things. Stupid wasn’t one of them.

“Don’t forget your money.” I pointed at the floor, clearing my throat and averting my gaze. I was uncomfortable to say the least, and that was a fucking first. She walked over and picked it up, flipping through and pulling four fifties off the top.

“There.” She tried to hand me the rest. “I think it was, like, four hours.”

“It’s yours.” I shook my head, curling her fingers around the wad of cash. “All of it.”

“What?” She blinked, thumbing through them. The Benjamins were fanning each other like in the movies. “That’s a lot of money.”

“Twelve thousand dollars.”

“What?!”

I shrugged, staring at the pizza box on the island to keep myself from doing something stupid. “You said you needed the money. I’m not going to ask you why. But I am going to be a responsible adult and strongly advise you to get this situation sorted quickly, because it’s not an easy sum to come up with on a monthly basis.”

“I appreciate the tip, and the money, but I can’t take this.” She shoved it to my chest.

“You can, and you goddamn will.”

“No.” She took a step back, the money falling between us again. We were both too engrossed to even look at it. It wasn’t the fucking point of all this.

“Give me one reason why not.”

She started counting with her fingers. “One—it’s a lot of money I didn’t earn, two—it would make me owe you, and three—because we’re not friends. We’re enemies.”

I used the same finger method. “One—it might be a lot of money, but not for me. Two—I don’t expect shit from you, and three—it’s cute how you think you’re my enemy. You’re not on my level.”

Her stare told me she didn’t care that I’d undermined her. And for a good reason. The girl had managed to get her way and steal my shit several times. She might have been the underdog, but she sure as hell knew how to put up a fight.

I expected her to argue over this, as she had with any subject matter, but she surprised me by tucking the money into her bag. She swallowed loudly—her pride, most likely—flung her backpack over her shoulder and silently made her way to the door. Watching her made me feel like shit, so again, I looked the other way.

“Thank you, Trent.”

“It’s fine.”

“No, I mean it.”

I meant it, too. I didn’t know what the fuck was happening with her, or to her, but I knew the idea of her being in deep shit made me queasy.

The door was beginning to slide shut in my peripherals as I braced myself against the counter, and I couldn’t resist showing her that not only was I getting wet, but that we were both about to get soaked if we weren’t careful.

“You still there?” I asked.

She didn’t answer, but I didn’t hear the click of the automatic lock.

“The date. It sucked.”

I heard the smile in her voice when she said, “I didn’t have sex with Bane after you found me in the reservoir.”

Click.

I didn’t go after her. But I was still screwed because I knew that next time—I would.

LOVE IS MERCILESS.

Love is cruel.

Love is not a feeling, it is a weapon.

Love destroys.

Love destroys.

Love destroys.

I couldn’t stop reading that line on my way back from Theo. My car had stopped working two days before and was at the shop. I couldn’t afford a taxi or an Uber, so I took two buses each way. It gave me the time to read an old paperback I’d found in our library. An autobiography of a French poet who ended up committing suicide after his fiancé left him for a man she treated as a nurse in the army. The other man was a hero, so French Poet Dude’s unrequited love was swept under the carpet.

Love destroys. These weren’t just words for me. They had weight, and a scent, and a tainted color that never faded. Every single person I’d loved had hurt me.

I still had to find a way to get my hands on Trent’s flash drive. I knew he carried it with him everywhere he went—he’d told me it was in his pocket while he’d had sex with someone else—and also knew he was too smart to leave any of the things my father wanted to get his hands on, on any of his devices. That made my task impossibly hard, but at least I was beginning to find the patterns of his everyday life, which Jordan had also asked for.

I put the book down, watching the Pacific Ocean from the window.

“It gets better,” someone in my vicinity said, and I wasn’t sure whether they were talking on the phone or to me, but it didn’t matter, because I didn’t believe it. Not for a moment. I fished my phone out of my backpack and checked my messages.