Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck … fuck!
I’ve never jumped to my feet so fast in my life.
I can’t look at Beck, so I force myself to conspicuously turn away while I pretend to be re-tying my shoe. Out of the corner of my eye, I think I see him do the same, and all it makes me realize is just how truly fucked I am.
“I’m so tired,” I groan as I sit down on the train after our last visit. It’s dark outside. The chill of the winter night has seeped into my bones. It has, at the very least, done me the kindness of numbing me into a state of only half-consciousness. It’s almost enough to keep my eyes trained out the window instead of flitting constantly over to my partner.
“Me, too,” Beck sighs, plopping down next to me despite the fact that the train car is practically empty. I’m keenly aware of how his knee brushes mine. The memory of our bodies pressed together not once but twice today reappears, unbidden and unwelcome, in my mind’s eye.
I shuffle my leg a little further away.
“And cold.”
“I’m used to the cold now,” he replies nonchalantly as he kicks his feet onto the seat across from us. “But yeah, it’s pretty cold.”
I resist the sudden urge to lean against him, but he chucks his arms up onto the backs of the seats on either side of him, laying one incredibly close to my shoulders. He’s spread out as if he owns the entire train—which, honestly, he probably could. Everyone at Bleakwood is from a rich family, and I don’t know what his family makes their particular fortune in.
I lean back in my seat and let his arm brush my back. He doesn’t move. He stares across from us at the windows as the train speeds us back to town.
“Alex,” he says after several silent moments pass.
“Hm?” I jerk a little. I’d started to doze off.
“Sorry.”
“For what?”
“For the other day. In history,” he clarifies. “Saying that shit about scholarship kids.”
I stay quiet.
“It was dumb. Bad.”
I still don’t look at him, my mind still processing what he’s saying. Is he … is Beck … apologizing?
After a moment, I just nod. “It’s okay.”
It’s really not, but I also know when not to look a gift horse in the mouth. This is a genuine moment, something I might never get from Beck again. And even if I could find words to speak, I can’t trust myself.
Not, at the very least, with the way butterflies erupt in my stomach every time the slightest jostle in the train makes me brush up against his still outstretched arm.
We’re quiet the rest of the way back to school. When we file out of the train station, he insists on giving me a ride back up the mountain, which I accept only because it’s incredibly cold. We walk into school together, side-by-side.
“Same time tomorrow?” he asks, glancing once over his shoulder at the road now winding down the mountain away from us. “We didn’t get to visit everything today, what with you almost getting run over and everything.”
I let out a half laugh. “Sure. Train station?”
“Just meet me in the courtyard. I’ll drive you.”
I smile. “That sounds warmer.”
He claps me on the shoulder, grins, and walks off to his own dorm. I head to mine, my head buzzing with a heady, almost giddy rush that only sours when I finally shut the door behind me into my dorm.
FUCK.
Chapter Seventeen
This time, the note from Olive comes in the mail. I open it out of respect before tossing it right away. It’s the first one in two weeks now—hopefully a sign that she’s losing interest and turning her attention back to Jasper.