Him.
Zach is leaning against the brick wall, his foot propped up. A cigarette hangs from his lips and he doesn’t have his jacket on, leaving him in his dark t-shirt that shows off his bulging biceps.
Oh jeez.
He isn’t even flexing them and they look menacing.
“You scared the fuck out of me,” I accuse.
An intricate-looking Victorian lantern lends enough light that I can see him. His face is turned toward me and I can’t escape the sheer grandness of his features. Sharp and cutting with a square jaw and high cheekbones, complete with dark velvet hair.
“I can see that,” he comments.
Then his corded chest swells out like a giant wave as he takes in a drag before sending the smoke out in the night.
“So are you?” he asks, looking at me again.
I creep closer to the wall and take a small step back, away from him. “Am I what?”
My only concern is to get out of here. I’d be turning back and running. But experience has taught me to never leave my back exposed and open. So I keep walking backward, slowly.
“Are you okay?”
My bare feet get caught up in my abandoned Mary Janes but I catch myself from stumbling. “What?”
In typical fashion, he remains silent and smoking. And staring.
That’s what Zach does: he stares. Like his eyes are a microscope and I’m a bug or an interesting specimen that he wants to study. That he’s been wanting to study for years or squash under his boots.
“Did you just…” I squint at him. “Ask me if I’m okay?”
“Sounds like it.”
Three years.
I’m seeing him after three fucking years and this is what he asks me.
After everything, after all the pranks and the things he’s put me through, is he really asking me that? Like I’m some kind of a stranger that he happened to find on the street, and now he’s enquiring about the fucking weather.
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why are you asking?”
His eyes go to where my injured hand is, fisted against the wall. My cut starts to throb. I feel the gash heating up, as if all my blood is rushing to it just because he mentioned it.
That’s when I remember that he touched me.
I can’t believe he touched me.
At that moment, I was so shocked that I couldn’t register anything about the touch. But now I remember that his skin was warm – somehow, warmer than anyone else’s. And it was rough and scrape-y, his palm. As if he has more fate lines than anyone else I know.
He motions with his chin. “That needs a bandage.”
I open my sweaty, heated fist. “It’s fine.”
“It was a deep cut.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“I’d like what?”
“For it to be a deep cut.”
Again, he doesn’t say anything to that, simply keeps his eyes on me.
Over the years, I’ve learned that this is his intimidation tactic. Going all quiet and intense so the other person is forced to fill the silence.
I’m not falling for it.
I’m not falling for anything he’s planned. I would think that even this meeting was a set-up, if I hadn’t spontaneously thought of stepping out.
He’s done this before, actually. His minions locked me inside Mr. Philips’, our history teacher, office after giving me a fake message that he was waiting for me. I was stuck inside that room for two whole hours until the cleaning crew came in and unlocked the door.
Asshole.
“Are you aware that you’re walking backward?” he asks at last, turning toward me, propped against the wall on his arm.
I realize that he’s right. I have been walking backward. “What’s it to you?”
“You can’t do that.”
I scoff. “Yeah? Why? Are you going to stop me?”
He shakes his head slowly. “No, but if you keep going then the potted plant behind you will.”
My eyes go wide, and I come to a jerky halt.
He’s right.
There are potted plants flanking both sides of the service entrance and I feel the brush of the leaves against my back. If I’d kept going, I would’ve stumbled into them or maybe even fallen.
“I knew that,” I lie.
“Sure,” he says with an amused voice that gets my back up; it’s an old reflex.
There’s something about him, you know. Some quality, some kind of provocation that lights my skin on fire.
“I didn’t need you to tell me that,” I insist.
“Got it,” he replies flippantly.
Even though I take offense at his tone, I decide to stay quiet. I promise myself that I won’t say anything.
I don’t. For about six seconds. Then, “What the fuck are you doing here?”
Back in this town. Back in my life. Back in my fucking head.
“Getting fresh air.”
“Right. And you had to pick this spot?”
“Yes.”
Then he has the nerve to twitch those cancer-breathing lips before taking another drag and tilting his face up. A growl surges up in my throat but it’s cut short by what he says next.