Inbox:you

Chapter 9

I opened the story. The image hit me square. A dark-haired girl at the center, an arm around a man I guessed was John, and John himself holding Mia. They were dancing. The DJ lights, a choreography of AI and color, scattered bursts across their skin. Mia laughed, oblivious to the fact that miles away someone was watching her as if every single flash had lodged itself in my eyes.

Her eyes stayed locked on the siren glowing on the screen, her mouth slightly open, and I, instead, couldn't stop staring at her. I was grateful Rhonda had been recording, and when Mia finally noticed, she smacked the phone away with a laugh.

Scott cleared his throat, and the video started again from the beginning.

"What," I muttered, fighting the urge to replay it myself as I looked at him.

At some point Scott left my room and came back a little later, showered and buttoned into neon yellow flannel pajamas. With his electric blue hair and the ridiculous brightness of that outfit, he didn't look like a man of thirty-nine getting ready for bed, but some grown-up male version of Coraline Jones, ready to crawl into the Other World.

He climbed into my bed and I ignored him, refreshing Rhonda's Instagram over and over until she uploaded another round of shots, the three of them with glasses in hand.

Then came a new video. A knot rose from my stomach to my throat, rough, like every heartbeat was trying to push up something that shouldn't see daylight. The music had shifted, the kind that drags you into its rhythm before you even realize you're moving. Mia followed it with insulting ease, as if she had been born to burn in the center of a crowd, as if the whole room spun around the gravity of her smile.

It wasn't just John's arm that bothered me. It was the way his hand rested at her waist, claiming ground that didn't belong to him. Everything I knew of him had always arrived diluted through her use of the word friend. But that hand sat where he could feel her heat, the tautness and the surrender that lived in her body at the same time. My jaw locked tight.

The video looped again and again, and I let it, unable to look away. Each repeat was another needle driving deeper into flesh, a corrosive mix of jealousy and hunger. I didn't want to admit it, but part of me didn't only want to tear her out of that place. I wanted to carry her somewhere else, somewhere no one else could ever see her like that.

I realized I was gripping the phone so hard my knuckles had turned white. Scott kept glancing sideways at me, unwilling to break the spell. Finally I let out a breath that tasted of defeat.

"I have to see her," I murmured, more to myself than to him. In that instant I knew it wasn't a passing thought. It was a sentence, and I had just accepted it.

"I haven't seen that look in your eyes since... what, fourteen years ago? With Melissa," he said. My first response was a low growl. I had no interest in opening that drawer of shit. Melissa, the only woman I had ever really loved, and who, without hesitation, crushed my heart. She left without a word, no reason to cling to, and days later I found out she was with a man. A week after that, she married him.

"Hey," he went on, leaning closer like he wanted to make sure his words hit home, "remember you haven't dated anyone in almost a year. So what's your plan? Show up at the university, walk up to her, and say, 'Hi, gorgeous, I'm Silversteel'?"

I let out a humorless laugh, just a breath. Not at the joke, but at the absurd image it painted in my mind.

"You like the girl. Do you think there's a chance?"