The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 458

Chapter 458: 458 | A Brief Period of Uncomplicated Physics

Felicity had her head on my shoulder when Camille went to the bathroom, and I let it stay there because I had stopped pretending that removing Felicity Hardy from my personal space was a thing my body wanted to do.

The evening had loosened something in my chest that I hadn’t realized was cinched tight. Four hours ago I’d been standing in a visitor lot watching a black sedan carry away six pages of federal cover and the memory of my dead mother, and now I sat cross-legged on my own bed with Cards Against Humanity fanned across the sheets and a girl whose vanilla shampoo had become as familiar as coffee in the morning.

Felicity’s fingers traced idle patterns on the back of my hand while she sorted through her remaining white cards with her other hand, her brow furrowed in concentration that she would have denied was genuine because admitting she took a party game seriously would have contradicted her entire brand.

"You’re holding the Genghis Khan card," I said.

"How do you know that."

It wasn’t a question. Her tone carried the specific flatness of someone who had already accepted they’d been caught but hadn’t decided whether to be impressed or annoyed about it yet.

"You keep touching it and putting it back," I said. "You’ve done it four times in the last three minutes. You’re saving it for the perfect black card, and you’re going to be disappointed because perfect never comes when you’re waiting for it. That’s not how this game works."

Felicity lifted her head from my shoulder just enough to look at me with those vivid blue eyes, freckles catching the lamplight in a way that made her look younger than eighteen and somehow older at the same time. Her expression held the particular quality of someone who had been seen through and found the experience more thrilling than invasive, which was a distinctly Felicity Hardy response to being read and one I’d started to recognize as her specific brand of wanting.

She placed the Genghis Khan card face-down on the bed between us with the kind of theatrical precision that suggested this was a concession she was granting under protest. Then she covered it with her palm like it was evidence at a crime scene and she was the defense attorney deciding whether to enter it into the record.

"You’re annoying," she said, and her voice had dropped into the lower register that I’d learned to recognize in the dark of a campus cinema three days ago, the one that meant she’d stopped performing ease and started feeling something she hadn’t scheduled time for in her evening. "You’re genuinely, structurally annoying, and I want you to know that I am keeping score of this."

"Of what?"

"Of every time you read my mind without asking first. The running total is currently at forty-seven separate incidents and I am billing you for emotional damages at the end of the semester. I’m thinking five hundred per violation. That’s twenty-three thousand five hundred dollars, bestie. I accept Venmo."

Her mouth was doing that thing where it tried to stay serious while the corners kept pulling upward against her will, which meant she was approximately three seconds from breaking.

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