by Angel Lawson
When the guard comes into view for the final time, I try to breathe in and out calmly. This is nothing. No big deal. What had Emory called it? Just a light B&E.
Softly, Reyn says, “Hey,” and leans forward until our eyes meet. “Don’t worry. Thirty minutes to get from here to inside the building? Piece of cake.”
“Easy for you to say. I should have practiced climbing a fence or something.” I run my palms across my thighs, looking across the lot at the fence. “Don’t you need time to pick the lock? What if I’m really slow?”
“You won’t be,” he assures. “We’ve got this.”
By then, the guard has disappeared, and there’s really no way I’m wasting my precious climbing time whining about it. I’d wanted to do this. It’s time to woman up.
I pull the handle to the door and Reyn follows suit.
While he goes around to the back of the Jeep, I skulk around the side and have a miniature meltdown, heart pounding. When Reyn returns, he’s holding a big sheet of cardboard and the license plate from the car.
“In case we need to make a speedy getaway,” he explains, throwing the license plate in the back seat.
The sheet of cardboard, I discover, is for the top of the fence. I watch as he slings it into the air, draping it over the pokey bits up top.
“You’ll climb up first,” he whispers, watching me put on the gloves. “When you get to the top, just straddle it and wait for me.” I nod, but he still asks, “You good?”
Instead of answering, I grab onto the fence and test it, wedging the toe of my shoe into a knee-high diamond. My good leg lifts me up easily, and I can feel him at my back—‘spotting’ me, Emory would call it. My other foot slots into a space that’s only a couple diamonds above the first one, and I think I can see the pattern I need to take—the unevenness of it.
When I pull my good foot from the diamond, nothing but my hands and bad foot holding me up, Reyn’s whisper catches my attention.
“Hey, I’m not trying to cop a feel, okay?” Before I can ask what that means, one of his hands is on my ass, holding me up, steadying my quivering leg.
My face blooms into a fierce heat.
I get my foot into another knee-high slot and do it all over again, and this is fine. A little precarious, but fine. I’m doing it. And in about four hours, I’m going to totally die over the fact that Reyn is touching my ass—oh my god—but for right now, I just clamber up the links.
When I reach the top, I shakily swing my good leg over the edge and do as he instructed. I wait.
I watch as he watches me, an understanding passing between us.
All systems go.
He scales the fence so fast that I can only watch in disbelief. All this fanfare to get me over the edge and he does it in like three steps and a single drop. Showoff. Once he’s on the other side, landing easily on his feet, he moves beneath me, gesturing me forward.
The trip down is a bit harder.
It’s difficult to swing my weak leg over the edge, and I spend a moment trying to find the best way to brace myself. I can hear Reyn down below, shifting, like maybe he’s anticipating having to catch me. I don’t exactly have time to tell him that I’m fine, I just have to strategize. I clamp down on the top bar with one hand so that my other can grab a handful of my jeans and yank it up.
Once it’s over, I carefully turn, putting my chest to the cardboard. I grab onto the bar with both hands and carefully lower myself, hanging. It’s about three feet to the ground—an easy drop for anyone else, but not for me. Obviously sensing this, I feel Reyn’s hands come up to my hips, clutching me in his sure grip.
“I’ve got you,” he assures, but I still take a deep, steeling breath when I let go.
He lowers me to the ground without so much as a grunt.
When I turn to him, still feeling a little winded, he’s smiling—dark eyes and dimples and all. He holds his phone up. “Five minutes. See? Piece of cake, Baby V.”
I laugh breathlessly, too high on both the victory and the sight of Reyn’s signature smile to form anything coherent.
We take the cardboard with us as we hurry through the tennis court toward the first door. We decided the best way into the gym was through the girls’ locker room. When we arrive, a quick peek at his phone tells us he has about twenty-two minutes to pick the lock.
Reyn crouches down, pulling a black roll from the pouch of his hoodie. When he flips it open, there are all kinds of tools inside—picks, I suppose, though some look crude, fashioned from thick, stiff wire. Maybe even just regular paper clips. I chew on my lip as he takes one of the flatter-looking tools and eases it into the lock. Next, he takes one of the thinner, hooky-looking tools and puts that in.
It’s too dark to make out more than the sharp silhouette of his face, but I can tell his eyes are laser-focused as he works. I don’t know exactly what he’s doing, but his fingers—skilled and sure—are doing it gently, fingertips easing the rod through the keyhole, back and forth.
I step away for a moment to look out over the court and toward the large air conditioners on the other side of the building. I don’t see or hear anyone, and the time on the phone tells me we still have twenty minutes. I try not to jitter around, because I assume it’ll be distracting, so I go back to watching him.
He’s quiet, and the curve of his back as he crouches, combined with the easy movements of his fingers, begins to make something inside me go a little bit liquid and hot. It takes me too long to realize why. The memory of him on his bed, using that same hand to skillfully stroke himself, tramples right through my thoughts. I stare at those fingers for far too long, mentally pasting them into the memory, since he was too far away for such distinct details before.
“Time?” he murmurs, never taking his eyes off the task.
I fumble with my phone. “Ten minutes.”
He spits a low curse, slowly removing one of the rods from the keyhole. He ducks his head to wipe his face on the shoulder of his hoodie, but then hangs it for a moment, holding the other tool inside the hole. “Left or right.”
“What?”
He looks at me, jaw tight. “If I turn the tension wrench the wrong way, it’ll reset the pins and I’ll have to start over. I need you to choose, left or right.”
I panic. “Why me?” We only have ten minutes left. There’s no way he does all that again in ten minutes.
“I just need you to do it,” he grits out, and he looks so inexplicably frustrated that I hastily throw something out.
“Left.”
He turns it left.
His posture suddenly deflates, and I think for a second that I’d chosen wrong. But then he levels me with that dimpled smile again and turns the knob. “Lucky charm.”
We get inside the locker room with nine minutes to spare.
The room is dark and smells exactly like a locker room. I can make out Reyn’s outline as he shifts beside me, putting away his tools.
“One down, one to go.”
He precedes me through the row of lockers at first, but then seems to hang back, waiting to walk at my side. When I get there, his hand comes up to the small of my back, leading me the rest of the way. I always hate when Emory or my parents do that, but when Reyn does it, it just makes me feel all viscous inside.
Stupid.
The second door—the one that will lead us into the gym—goes much like the first. Reyn crouches down and gets to work, while I keep track of the time. Chances are, we won’t make the guard’s next pass and will have to hang around a bit.
When he whispers, “Left or right,” I don’t even hesitate this time.
“Left.”
The door opens easily.
“Damn, girl.” It’s too dark to see his smile, but I can hear it in his voice. “Two-for-two on this shit.”
I don’t say that it’s just common sense that they’d have the same sort of lock, but it’s true. There is absolutely no basis for the swell of pleasure I feel at his words and the way he says them—like I’ve done som
ething impressive, special.
“Okay,” I say, “the trophy case is through the lobby.”
We stalk along the bleachers, and I don’t even try to contain my smile. He can’t see it, anyway. When we reach the lobby, there are lights shining right in the trophy case, and it’s like something out of a movie. The Viking helmet shines under the light, our illicit treasure.
But the trophy case is locked.
“Damn.” I jiggle it, but it’s no use. “He said there were only two locks.”
Reyn gives me a look, crouching down once again. “Please. A toddler could open one of these things.” He once again removes the flat-edged thing—tension wrench, he’d called it, although it looks nothing like a wrench—from his roll of tools. But this time, he extracts one of the cruder picks. He holds both tools out to me. “You were watching earlier, right? Put the tension wrench here.” He points to the bottom of the keyhole.
“Wait, me?” I punctuate this by jabbing a finger into my chest. “I don’t know how to do this.”
“Just think, this will be the last time you can say that.” Reyn give the glass a tap. “Come on, we’ve got like thirty minutes to kill. You picking this thing will probably only kill five of them.”
I give him a dubious look, but crouch down beside him, slowly taking the tools. “This thing? Here?”
Reyn nods when I insert the wrench, his eyes watching me so closely that my neck prickles. “You’re going to put some light tension on the plug, like you’re turning the lock, but you’re not. Just kind of rest your fingers on it.”
“Like this?”
“Exactly.” He shifts a bit, so close that I can smell him, voice a rough murmur. “Now put the pick in, hook-side up. All the way to the back. Good, now…” He shifts impossibly closer, his shoulders almost curled around mine. “Drag it out, really slowly. Try to feel the pins. You feel them?”
I furrow my eyebrows, trying. “I don’t think—oh. Yeah, that little bump?” I can even kind of hear the click when the pick runs over it. “I feel two. No. Three.”
“Sounds about right. You’re going to press each of those pins in,” he explains, miming the action. “One at a time, click, click, click.” I do what he says, but it’s harder to catch the pins than he makes it sound—and look. “Just take your time, it’ll take a few tries, but—”
Click. “Oh, I got one.”
I can see his grin out of the corner of my eye. “Wicked. Do the next one.”
The second one is just as hard, but I have a better feel for it now. It only takes a handful of stabs before the click comes. I lose the third pin for a moment and have to kind of shift around. I feel more than hear Reyn’s silent puff of laughter.
“You’re out too much, go in a bit.”
Ah. There it is. I prod at it carefully, and I realize just how precise Reyn needs to be when doing this stuff. The smallest slip could mean starting over. No wonder he’s learned to be so still.
When I get the third pin, Reyn shifts again, and I can hear him lick his lips. “Okay, take the pick out, but not the wrench. There you go. Now you need to choose which way to turn it.”
I almost think of making him choose. It only seems fair. But I’m sort of weirdly attached to the idea of picking this lock all by myself now. I choose left, because it’s been such a pal tonight, and I’m nothing if not loyal.
The lock springs open.
“Sweet,” he says. “You’re a natural, Baby V.”
I look at Reyn and he graces me with another one of those dimpled smiles. You’d think if he showed me enough of them, I’d begin building a tolerance, but that is clearly not the case. Especially when he’s as close as he is now. Without my permission, my eyes glance down at his mouth, and it’s an idle thought—that it’d only take a few inches to clear the space—but it’s enough to make my cheeks heat. When my eyes flick back up to his, I find that his gaze is fixed on my lips, too.
It would be so easy, but...
We both quickly stand, shuffling away from one another. Reynolds McAllister doesn’t think about me like that. Even after our shared kiss. How many times has he called me ‘Baby V,’ tonight?
I’m just a kid, and bringing me along tonight was just another night of babysitting.
I gesture to the helmet. “You want to do the honors?”
Wordlessly, he nods, easing the trophy case open and extracting the Viking helmet. “Heavy,” he notes, rubbing the pads of his fingers over the engravings. “Your turn.”
I put the Devil horns on the shelf, adjusting them just-so, and carefully close the door.
We have to kill a few minutes in the locker room, waiting by the door. Both of us have our phones out, watching the time, but there’s been this weird shift in energy all of a sudden, like neither of us wants to talk. It’s a formless impulse, and I’m not sure if it's born of an apprehension to build on the moment or completely shatter it.
Either way, Reyn is solemnly quiet when we finally exit the door.
We get to the fence and he throws the cardboard up. I try to fight against the strange sinking feeling. I can’t exactly put a name to it, but it feels kind of like a worse version of disappointment. Like maybe there could have been a moment back there. Like maybe we could have—
But we didn’t.
Reyn stands behind me as I ascend the fence, but he doesn’t put his hand on my ass this time. Instead, he holds my hips, pushing me up.
Definitely a worse version of disappointment.
“So what’d you do last night?” Sydney asks. She’s lying on my bed, flat on her stomach, scrolling through ChattySnap. Every few seconds, she snaps a picture and sends it off to one of her followers.
“Not much.”
It’s killing me not to tell Sydney where I’d been the night before—and with who. Keeping all of this from my best friend feels more like a betrayal than any other part of this whole thing. Is it wrong that I feel less guilt about stealing the Viking horns from Thistle Cove than I do about keeping it a secret from her? Reyn’s questionable moralities may be rubbing off on me. After all, I do sort of know how to pick a lock now. Easy locks, but still.
“I called you,” she says, “around nine. I was bored and wanted tacos.”
“You did?” I ask, instinctively picking up my phone off my desk. I pretend to scroll. I had a vague recollection of seeing her missed call when Reyn and I got back in the Jeep. The adrenaline rush combined with the swooping dissatisfaction kept me from caring too much, at the time, but obviously now I’d have to face it. “I must have been in the shower or something. I passed out early.”
She looks up from her phone, eyes sweeping over me. “Are you using again?”
“What? No.” The truth is that I’d actually gone all night without a nightmare. I think doing something other than moping around my room probably wore me out for once. “I was just tired.”
Syd rolls over and pulls up the hem of her shirt, fingers grazing her flat stomach. “I really want to get a belly piercing but it’s against the rules for cheer. It violates some appropriate dress code or something. Which seems totally sexist and oppressive, don’t you think?” She turns her head to face me. “Maybe you should write an article about that. All the bullshit dress code stuff. I mean, guys wear pants and button downs and ties. Fully covered. We’re out there like some kind of perverted fantasy of knee-socks and plaid skirts.”
I lean back in my desk chair. Sydney thinks I’m working on my sports article, but I’ve really been uploading all the documents I’ve been collecting about the Devils onto my laptop. The paper files are in a folder tucked in my desk. “So in order to not be as objectified, you want me to write an article about how you should be allowed to wear a belly ring, but not forced to wear knee-socks?”
“Duh.”
In theory, she’s not wrong, but I know that, ultimately, Sydney just wants to be able to show off her belly ring in her cheer uniform. I open my mouth to tell her that I’ll consider it when she gasps and jolts up
suddenly. “Oh my god!”
“What?” My pulse quickens. “What happened?”
She holds out her phone but it’s too far away for me to see it. “Holy shit! Someone broke into the Thistle Cove gym, stole their Viking helmet, replaced it with Devil horns, and then delivered the helmet to the quarterback’s house.”
“Really?” My heart is about to launch out of my ribcage. With a shaky hand, I quickly ‘X’ out the file and go over to her. “Where did you see that?”
“I follow a few kids that go there—I met them at a party last summer—and one of them posted it. That is an epic prank.” Her thumbs fly over the keypad and she smiles gleefully. “Who do you think did it?”
I feign innocence. “I have no idea. Probably just some jocks or something. Trying to stir up the rivalry, maybe?”
“You know what?” she asks, dropping her phone into her lap. “This reeks of the Devils.”
The wind gets knocked out of me. “There are no Devils anymore.”
“Sure, I know.” She flaps a hand. “But don’t you think this has the Devils' hoofprints all over it?”
Pranks were a big part of the Devils' wheelhouse, so it’s not a bad theory, but here I am, part of this group—this secret group—and my instinct is to protect it.
“Emory has been pissed about the Devils getting disbanded for months. Trust me, I’m pretty sure I would know if it had started up again. Plus, there’s just not many of them left, anyway. They had too many seniors.”
“True,” she says, twisting her hair around her finger. “I’m not gonna lie, I’d had my eye on being a certain Devil’s Plaything this year. But it looks like someone got there first.” She shoves the phone in my face and this time I see Emory and Aubrey in a selfie together. I can’t tell where they are from the photo, but I already know regardless. Emory told me this morning that they’d successfully removed the Sparrowood shield from the stadium and mounted it over the front door of the Academy.
Not wanting to get into another conversation with Sydney about Emory’s lack of interest in her, I offer to get us some drinks from the kitchen. My brother has his head in the refrigerator when I get down there.