I grit my teeth.
“Fine.” I look back to find Callum on the back of the couch, still crouching, but somehow moved from the counter to this new spot. His face says, if Oscar went any further, I was here. I shiver and move back over to my bottle of wine, lifting it up in a salute. Victor is seething, Aaron is pissed, Hael is reeling, Callum … I think he's just observing for now. “To our wedding.”
“To our wedding,” Aaron says, and nobody misses the way he emphasizes the word our in that statement.
I throw back that bottle like a champ, wipe my lips on the hoodie sleeve again, and accept a baseball bat from Cal's outstretched hand. Well, shit, it really is signed by Babe Ruth. Sorry, man. I flip the hood up on my borrowed Aaron hoodie, climb on top of the counter, and heft the bat in both hands.
“Fuck you, Coraleigh Vincent!” I shout, slamming it down on a glass cookie jar in the shape of a mermaid. Porcelain shards explode outward, ricocheting off the backsplash, off my legs, the side of the refrigerator.
“Fuck you,” Hael agrees, popping the top on another bottle of wine. He chugs as much of it as he can, wine dribbling down the sides of his mouth, and then exhales sharply. “Fuck Oscar. Praise the fatherhood of Brittany's spawn—that is, praise the fact that he isn't me.” Hael chucks the bottle on the floor again, letting it shatter and soak a very expensive looking rug.
I hop from the kitchen island to another counter, swinging the bat and smashing a framed photo of Leigh and her husband, all cuddled up in a casino and holding a fan of green bills in their hand. I mean, come on? Come the fuck on? Once the glass is broken, I tear the picture from the wall and throw it.
Callum just laughs and laughs as Aaron lights up a cigarette and then puts it out on the fancy linen couch, marking the fabric with a permanent black scorch. He lights up again, takes a drag, and then does it again. When he's done with that, he parks the smoke between his lips, and takes out the knife that he wielded on Ophelia from his back pocket.
When he stabs the sofa and fluffing comes out, I start laughing, too.
Victor just watches us all with a dark gaze, sipping his wine and enjoying the mayhem.
“Oh come on, boss,” Cal urges, grabbing a floor lamp and ripping off the shade. He hefts the metal length of it up and offers it to Vic like a weapon. Victor accepts as Cal moves over to a small concrete statue of a turtle, lifting it up and chucking it against the kitchen island. It hits the stone countertop, cracking it and knocking off a substantial piece.
Vic pulls back with the metal lamp, as if it were a baseball bat, but pauses when Oscar comes back into the room, looking slightly mollified. His eyes flick to mine as I kick a ceramic crock full of spatulas onto the floor and break it.
“Come not within the measure of my wrath,” Oscar says, quoting Shakespeare again before he grabs a lamp from a side table and throws it against the wall. We're all very careful not to break the front windows. I mean, we couldn't really hang out in here the rest of the break if we did, right?
We smash the place to pieces, and then we drag the Vincents downstairs to look at it all.
“Do you see what you've done?” Oscar hisses, grabbing Coraleigh's chin in tight fingers and making her look at the destruction. True tears roll down her face, and I almost expect Oscar to lick one off. Instead, he shoves her face away and rises to his feet. “Where is the wine?” he asks, and Hael bounces off to comply, holding up a bottle from a laundry basket that he's filled full of them.
“How about this one?” he asks, turning the bottle over to check the label. “Screaming Eagle, it's called. I Googled it and it says it's worth about twenty-eight hundred bucks.”
“Smash it,” Oscar says, taking over the interaction with the Vincents as I sit on top of the counter, hood still up, baseball bat lying across my knees.
“Wait, wait,” Marcus says as Leigh just quietly cries, her brunette hair stuck to the sides of her face. “We can work this out. There's room for all of us in this thing. We can split our takes with you guys. Half and half. Fifty-fifty.”
“You can be rich,” Leigh pleads as Hael chucks the wine bottle into the big apron sink. It breaks, of course. “Think about it,” she continues, licking her lips as Hael pulls out another bottle.
“This one's in German, so I'm not even gonna try to read it. Aaron?” Hael calls out to my ex-now-current, uh, boyfriend? Anyway, he grins down at his phone before looking up.
“Worth about thirteen and a half thousand bucks, my friend.”
Hael takes it by the neck and slams the end of the bottle into the counter, flooding the floor with liquid.
“No!” Leigh screams, struggling violently in her chair. Isn't it incredible how attached some people are to things? So much so that they'd trade others' lives for more? “Listen to me. You can be out of South Prescott within the month. Alyssa is worth a lot of money. You—you—you—” she stutters as Hael takes out a black bottle and frowns at it.
“This is the cognac,” he says, glancing up at Aaron. “Cost?”
“That one …” Aaron starts, looking it up on his phone as Callum hops up to sit next to me on the counter. “Wow. Thirty-five K.”
“Thirty-five thousand dollars for alcohol?!” Hael chokes out, snorting a laugh. “Well fuck me, we drinkin’ this one, my friends.”
“That was a gift!” Leigh cries out as Hael pulls the glass top off and takes a swig. “Put it down!”
“Damn, that's smooth,” Hael purrs, passing the bottle to Cal. He takes a drink before leaning toward me. It takes me a second to realize what he wants, but as soon as I do, I feel my face flush. My eyes flick to Victor, but he just stares back at me as Leigh screams. My attention shifts to the endless blue of Callum's eyes as I lean in and tilt my head to the side.
The heat of his perfect pink mouth finds mine, but when I lift my fingers to touch his chest and neck, I can feel the roughness of his scars. Perfectly imperfect, I think as he gently parts my lips, stinging my mouth with the burn of the cognac and the heat of his tongue.
We lean into each other as someone tugs the bottle from my hands. I'm too focused in on Callum to notice or care. Oh, shit. Maybe he thought I didn't notice him all these years, that he could sit across from me in that cafeteria and act like he didn't know my name. All of those things are lies.
You square danced with me that day I cried in elementary school. You found me during the eighth-grade dinner dance and encouraged me to join you on the floor. The only reason I remember that day is because of you.
“Bernie,” Cal murmurs, pulling back slightly and touching his forehead to mine. That's a big thing with these boys, all of this touching. I don't think any of us has ever been hugged or cuddled or loved enough. “I told you we'd make them pay, didn't I?”
He leans back enough that I get lost in the blue of his eyes, and then hops down to the floor.
“Give me the knife,” Cal says, gesturing for Aaron to hand it over. Without hesitation, he does. Callum approaches the Vincents and pauses behind them. He then starts to hack their perfect hair off, pressing the blade dangerously close to their skulls. They both scream, like something's actually hurting them, but it's all bullshit.
Callum doesn't shed a single drop of blood.
“Get the girls and let's go swimming,” he says, handing the knife back to Aaron as soon as he's done. “And when we're finished, we'll drown the Vincents and dispose of their bodies.” Callum is bluffing, obviously, but his whispered words do the trick. The couple starts to scream as Hael and Aaron drag them back up the steps so we can lock them in their room again. Cal glances my way, and I swear to fuck, my lips tingle in response to his dark look.
It isn't dark with violence though; I've seen that expression on his Disney prince face plenty of times in the past.
No, this time, his expression is carved of hunger and lust and things unsaid that are better left in the dark. He has secrets, I bet, Callum does. Since Havoc isn't supposed to have any, if I asked, do you think he'd tell me?
I wet my lips with my tongue.
“For real though,” Cal says, letting out a husky laugh. “I'm dying to see you in a swimsuit, Bernie. Hope you don't mind my saying that.” He winks at me, picks up the lamp, and smashes the sofa table, with it, the muscles in his arms rippling with the power needed for such a move.
Meanwhile, I just hide inside of Aaron's sweatshirt, soaked between the thighs at the sight and holding a baseball bat worth more than most people's cars.
“It's what I've always wanted: Bernadette.”
I swing the baseball bat at a vase of dried flowers and try not to think too hard about that statement. Not yet, not today. Because Victor needs time, and this dangerous dance of beautiful boys … I'm not sure I know the choreography just yet.
The Vincents don't have a turkey in that massive fridge of theirs—we go out on holidays, so says Coraleigh—but that's okay because the couple is really into Keto right now and their deep freezer is chock-full of ground turkey.
“Jennie-O for the motherfucking win,” Hael says, praising the brand of meat and spinning a knife around his fingers in a very impressive sort of way. “Tacos, it is.”
“Tell me …” I start, sliding my butt onto one of the still-intact stools at the kitchen peninsula. See, it's like a landscape in here: an island, a peninsula, a frozen tundra of mini-freezers beneath the countertops. It's also totally and completely destroyed. I mean, it's functional enough but Heather's eyes nearly fell out of her face when she saw it.
“You are not getting your security deposit back after this, Bernie,” she told me with all due seriousness. So fucking cute and naïve. I pop a bit of brownie into my mouth and hope that Callum's guess on how special this special brownie really is, is accurate. That, or I'm going to be so stoned I don't remember my very first Havoc Thanksgiving.