Force of Nature ▸ House of Anubis [3]

chapter sixty-seven. house of suspicion

            "Mara's not even letting me do that."

            "Probably because you keep complaining that you don't understand anything. Look, look at it this way," I offer, adjusting my position as I demonstrate with my hands. "Over here is me. Over there is you. This space in the middle is the entire time following our first kiss to the whole Senkhara thing in the library. Our relationship was open-ended, remember? Neither of us knew we were going to become an actual couple that night. We could only speculate and hope. So, put that kind of context into Jo and Mandy."

            "But Jo and Mandy never kissed."

            "But there's a lot in the script about other characters—specifically Cherry—implying they have a thing for each other but neither of them admit anything. Sound familiar?"

            "Maybe they just need a cursed Cherry to convince them to admit it."

            "Or getting kidnapped by a madman."

            Jerome leans over to kiss me, setting his hand on my knee. "Look, whatever's going on with your mystery thing and the translating you and Joy are doing... I need you to promise me that you'll stay safe."

            My eyes cast over his face, my eyebrows knitting together in confusion. "What? I thought you didn't want to talk about that."

            "I didn't, but you brought up Senkhara and Rufus and..." Jerome pauses, sighing and shaking his head. "I thought I'd say it before it was too late. 'Cause you said you're having issues with everyone and no one trusts anyone and I really don't want you pulling another stunt like going to the gatehouse alone."

            "I told you, I'm not going back to the gatehouse by myself. I wish everyone would stop bringing it up."

            "Well, it was incredibly reckless and stupid," he points out.

            "Well, I usually am incredibly reckless and stupid."

            "No, you can be reckless, but you're not stupid. Most of the time, anyways."

            I set my hand on the side of his face, rubbing my thumb across his cheek. "I promised you earlier this year that I wouldn't push you away. I haven't broken that promise, so it looks like I've got a pretty good track record at keeping my word. So I'm gonna promise you right now—I'm going to stay safe. Besides, I'm a founding member of Sibuna. And I've made it this far without losing my sanity. I'd say that's a pretty good sign."

—

            It's fortunate that the rest of the day is normal. I spent the rest of our lunch break with Jerome in the lounge, taking silly selfies and deciding to play a joke on our friends by making our profile photos on our respective social media profiles the same, because no one ever looks at the name of the person they're responding to—they recognize it through the photos we have up. So we did that and I somehow wound up with a message from Poppy on my wall that she meant to post on Jerome's (the word 'gerbil' was used). And Amber actually sent the two of us the same exact message in all caps—DID YOU TWO DO THIS ON PURPOSE???!!?! ANNOYINGLY ADORABLE YOU TWO ARE.

            Honestly, the most Sibuna stuff I heard for the rest of the school day and until just before dinner was Joy managing to crack another piece of the hieroglyphic puzzle—Osiris. I have no idea what that means exactly, but I'm assuming it's something to do with the Osirian. I mentioned it to Eddie briefly, but he's a bit more focused on the fact that we succeeded in locating one of the four artifacts.