$ᴜɪᴄɪᴅᴇ ɢʀᴏᴜᴘɪᴇ // $ᴜɪᴄɪᴅᴇʙᴏʏ$

Chapter Fourteen

It might have been around four-thirty or five o'clock in the evening. Reasonably it could have been any time at all, because I'd had my eyes closed and I was promising myself that I wouldn't open them. Not even if Ruby said something all soft and tender, I wouldn't open them. I would just lie there on the barest edge of the bed, like his body somehow grew cooties, and I waited for him to retrieve the rest of his clothes.

And though I wanted to say something to him, I wouldn't. It was better that way, with him just leaving. He could leave and go back to the tour bus, and in another hour or so I would do the same, just to make it look like we hadn't been gone together and returning together.

Yeah, we just had sex. But let's not pretend here. It wasn't like we were gonna hold hands on the way back to the bus and come clean to Scrim about what we'd been doing behind his back.

That's just not what this was.

Instead, it was him leaning over me while I brutalized myself into a fake sleep, to leave a small kiss on my cheek. You know, the way that normal people did when they had those things called feelings and wanted to express them.

The one he was trying for was called "affection".

The one I was trying for was called "denial".

Now I was just confused.

My primary objective was to witness every single show $uicideBoy$ played on this stretch of their US tour. I never expected to hook up with either Scrim or Ruby. I mean, I would absolutely be lying if I said that thought had never crossed my mind, but that wasn't really the point, was it?

I wondered, briefly, if I should just forget the rest of the tour and go home before whatever was happening turned into... something. But what was waiting for me at home? I had a job I hated, no family that I could go back to, friends who I quite honestly never saw anyways. I had saved up all of this money and took the time off work to do this.

And really, if I let myself admit it, I didn't want to leave. I had somehow gotten to a point of no turning back.

♡♡♡

I washed my face and got ready for sleep. I'd brushed my hair and pulled it over one shoulder. I wore Scrim's t-shirt, it was entirely too big for me and almost reached my knees, but it was comfortable.

Scrim walked into his bunk wearing black track pants without a shirt. He was just so covered in ink from head to toe, I was still yet to get used to it whenever I saw him without clothes. Every time I saw him shirtless, it was like I was seeing all of those tattoos for the first time because he had so many of them. I discovered a new one every day, even though it had always been there.

He sat beside me on the bed, his legs widened as he sat, his knees bent. He turned his head slightly my way, watching my expression.

We hadn't spoken since the night before, his jealousy of Ruby and- oh shit. I'd just fucked Ruby only a few hours ago and he didn't even know it. But it was never clear whether Scrim cared for me or not. Sometimes, it seemed like he did, in a strangely possessive way. But then he'd snap and treat me like a dog the very next day. He was an enigma, a lot more complex than his cousin.

And maybe I preferred that, because Scrim had walls up too, and they protected me.

He bowed his head, the strands of his dreads were messily sticking out in different directions from him running his fingers through them. "How was your day?"

I crawled into his lap and straddled his waist. He leaned back to accommodate my movement before he rested his face in the crook of my neck. His arms wrapped around me and kept me in place. His breathing didn't change, and he was as emotionless as ever. But he clung to me like my presence meant something. I pressed a kiss to his forehead and ran my hand over his dreads. "It was fine."