“But you don’t even know if he’s going to run it!”
“That’s why I need your help.” I stood up and went over to him, trying to hold his hands again, but he jerked them away from me. “You can be as pissed at me as you want. That’s fine, I get it. Hate me. But right now, if you don’t help me out, my family and I are going to be destroyed and possibly put in a lot of danger. Then we’ll never be able to be together, you and me.” I swallowed hard, hoping he would still even want to be with me.
Jesse exhaled and dropped his head into his hands, running his fingers through his hair before they got tangled midway. “So this Collective,” he said. “Do you, like, smuggle arms and drugs?”
“More like the complete opposite. We stop it.”
Jesse glanced up at me.
“We do things that make the world better. I was in Iceland all summer, cracking the safe of a human trafficker.”
He froze. “You were?”
I nodded. “We’re not the bad guys. We stop the bad guys. And if we can’t do that anymore, you don’t want to know what the world will look like.”
Jesse looked down at me like he was seeing me for the first time. Which, in a way, he was. “You told me,” he said after a minute, “that we would always be honest with each other. Do you remember that? Because I think about it every damn day.”
I nodded even as my eyes filled with tears. “I remember. I said that we should be as honest as we could. And I was. And now I’m telling you everything because there’s a lot at stake.
“I’ll leave if you want me to,” I continued. “But if you want to help me, then I need your dad’s laptop.”
“Why?”
“Because I need to read his work e-mails.”
“You’re going to hack into my dad’s computer?” Jesse cried. “You can’t do that, that’s illegal!”
“Well, I think we can all agree that bidets are weird,” Roux announced as she strolled back into the room. “What’d I miss? Are we fighting evil together or what?”
Jesse and I glanced at one another before looking away at the same time. “I’m not sure,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking. “That’s Jesse’s decision.”
He looked away and started petting Max. “I think you need to leave,” he said again. “Both of you. Right now.”
No one spoke for a few seconds, then Roux tugged at my arm. “C’mon, Maggie,” she said, as serious and somber as I had ever heard her. “Let’s just go. It’s a lot to take in.”
I nodded even as tears swam in my eyes and I gathered up my coat with fingers so nearly numb that they tingled. “I was as honest as I could be,” I told him.
“Mags, c’mon,” Roux whispered.
Jesse was quiet, and for a minute it felt like my life hung in the balance of his silence. And then he spoke.
“I didn’t know that honesty had a gray area.”
The tears in my eyes spilled over. “Neither did I,” I admitted, and then I let Roux guide me out the front door and take me back to her home.
Chapter 29
The next morning I was in study hall, still puffy-eyed and swollen from the night before. Roux had sat next to me in her foyer as I cried and cried about what a terrible girlfriend and horrible spy I was, and she even brought me a small glass of water. However, when I started to sip the water …
“Roux! This is vodka!”
She looked confused. “You don’t want it?”
I wiped my eyes and handed her back the glass. “Water, please.”
“Fine, fine, suit yourself.”
Study hall was a more muted kind of misery. My exhaustion was tempered by the espresso that Roux had somehow managed to produce that morning, but my sadness was still raging and had nowhere to go. I had ruined everything and now it was rubble, unable to be put back together.
I was so lost in thought that I didn’t even hear the library doors open, so when someone dropped a bag on the table in front of me, I nearly fell out of my chair. “What the—!” I gasped, clutching at my chest, then looked up into Jesse Oliver’s eyes.
“You better hurry,” he said. “I snuck it out while he was at work. I have to get it back before he comes home.”
I blinked at him. “Are you serious?”
“Can I sit here?”
“Um, yeah, of course. Yes, sit, sit.” I shoved a chair toward him and he sank down.
“So, you’re really …?”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“My whole life.”
“You realize how crazy this sounds, right?”
“Yes.” I was so scared he would leave again that I could barely form polysyllabic words.
He chewed on his bottom lip. I’ve noticed he does that when he gets upset. “I’m still mad at you, you know.”
“I know. I’m mad at me, too.”
“I’ll help you, but I’m not sure I can get over this.”
“Can I … can I just say one thing?”
Jesse nodded.
“Two things, actually. First, I am so, so sorry that I wasn’t honest with you, but sometimes, it’s literally a matter of life and death. If I could have told you everything from the very beginning, I would have, I swear to God. But I couldn’t.”
“And the second thing?”