Caleb cut him short by starting to hop on his right leg. He did it with so much deliberation, so much intent, that Spencer knew he was being provoked.

“You’re going to have a lot of catching up to do,” Caleb taunted. He waved the fifty-dollar bill in the air as though fanning himself. “You’d better get in on this while the getting’s good.”

Spencer shook his head. “If you want the fifty that bad, you can have it. Hell, you can have fifty thousand if you really need it. You just have to promise not to gamble with it.”

Caleb stopped hopping as suddenly as he’d begun. The bill fluttered to the floor, where it lay like a piece of discarded confetti. Neither of them made a move to pick it up.

“You’d do it, wouldn’t you?” Caleb asked, and with a hard note in his voice that Spencer couldn’t remember hearing there before. “If I promised to be a good boy and keep my head down, put it to good use by investing it in my future.”

“Of course I would,” Spencer said, though not without wariness. He didn’t like the way Caleb’s face was so unmoving and still. It reminded him of how Ruby had looked on the porch. “All you’ve ever had to do is ask.”

“Fuck you, Spencer.”

Spencer blinked. There was no vehemence in Caleb’s voice, no anger. Just that chill, that same Ruby chill. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“I mean, fuck you. Fuck your offer and fuck your fifty dollars and fuck gambling therapy.”

“You’re the one who wanted to hop,” he protested. “Not me.”

“I don’t want to hop, you idiot. I don’t even want to gamble all that much, to be honest. It’s never been my favorite thing.”

That feeling was back—of being lost at sea, of drifting away into a world Spencer had only ever seen through a warped glass. “But you were arrested for running an illegal gambling website.”

“Yeah—one that I coded and built all by myself. One that employed three independent contractors before it was brought down.” Caleb brought his hands down on Spencer’s shoulders and squeezed. Hard. “You’re one of the smartest people I know. How you can be so stupid is beyond me.”

Stupid wasn’t a word that got slung at Spencer very often, but he was in no position to deny it. Considering how far out of his depth he was right now, he felt like the least intelligent person on the face of the planet.