I’d resented my father for a long time while in the rough of that. I mean, I was basically socially inept because of it. We’d never been anywhere long enough for me to make friends, and I couldn’t deny the fact that wherever I’d gone, trouble had seemed to find my brother and me.
That went triple for Maywood Heights.
I thought about my mother pretty much all morning the next day at school, finding it weird I was suddenly thinking about her. The dream hadn’t made sense, and it more so felt like a nightmare than anything else.
I’d actually woken up in a sweat.
My mother had never been heavy-handed or physical with me. Neither of my parents were, so whatever that was last night had been so weird. I was so in my head that morning I hadn’t been paying attention. In fact, I slammed right into someone, and had he not been a football player, all my shit would have exploded in the hallway.
“Watch it, little,” Ares Mallick growled. His lips pressed together. “Watch it, Sloane.”
My brow jumped, him actually making good on not insulting me for once.
“My bad.” I had run into him, on me.
And people were staring at us.
More than one set of eyes lingered over Ares, then me. He naturally got attention. I mean, he was Legacy, but I’d all but disappeared since Dorian and the rest of Legacy weren’t putting any attention on me. When I’d hung out with Wells and Thatcher for a time, the school had started to get me off their radar a bit in a negative way. Still, being with them definitely got a girl more attention than she wanted. Positive or negative.
I had no idea if the rest of the school knew about Legacy pretty much casting me out. Maybe they just found it weird because Ares was being seen with the likes of me. The two of us had spent pretty much all night working on the sketches for the project, and that was the first thing he showed me when he lounged against my locker.
“Figured we’d start getting things down on canvas tonight,” he said. “What do you think of the final design?”
The final was my work and his put together. What I’d worked on last night had just been mine, but what I was seeing now was the two combined.
I didn’t know if he’d worked all this out at school, after I left, or what, but he’d done a lot of work in not many hours.
And he was also asking my opinion for some reason.
“What? You fucking hate it?” He pushed a hand over his hair. “Obviously, it’s not going to look just like what you did. I had to replicate your style, but I think I got pretty close.”
Pretty close was an understatement. Hell, it was like I’d done the galaxies beneath the constellations.
“Pretty good.” I gave the pad back to him. I couldn’t help but be annoyed he could imitate a style I’d been working on for, well, my whole goddamn life.
He smirked upon looking at it, then me. “Something tells me it’s more than pretty good, but all right.” He laughed. “So tonight, then? Same time?”
I was about to tell him yeah before our audience suddenly expanded beyond the casual onlookers.
Rainbow Reed had stopped in the middle of the hallway, people passing around her. Her lips parted, she passed a glance between Ares and me.
Ares pushed off the lockers, following the line of my sight in that direction. He faced me. “Tonight?”
I nodded, but he barely waited for that before heading over to Bow. He dropped a long arm around her, walking away with her, and I didn’t know what to think about that before closing my locker. I supposed it wasn’t my business to think about it.
Chapter Fourteen
Sloane
“So, I take it Bow’s unaware we’re working on a project together?”
Ares’s head lifted after what I said, a pencil in his teeth. He’d been working out our objective tonight, i.e., where to start on getting something down on our huge canvases. We had a lot of work ahead of us, and we both needed to be smart about it.
His pencil fell from his teeth with his frown, and I shrugged.
“Bow?” I questioned, hiking back against the white muscle car. “She didn’t look like you’d told her we’d be doing this.”
Not that I cared really. Like he’d said, all that wasn’t my business, but the girl had definitely looked like a deer in headlights today.