Everything stilled. My arms dropped to my sides. My heart thumped painfully slow in some sort of calculated rhythm as I stared at her heaving chest. Wait a fucking minute. I paused before meeting her face. “That’s… That’s why you stopped talking to me?”
Madeline paused too. She looked away quickly, glancing at her window so all I could see was the dainty little curve of her nose. “Get out of my room, Eric.”
“Not until you answer my question.”
Silence fell between us, but it wasn’t the quiet kind. No, it was loud and heavy and cold.
“That’s why you stopped talking to me, isn’t it? Because you found out my dad was fucking your mom.”
She whipped her head over, her blue eyes piercing me. “Yes, now get the fuck out of my room.” She stomped her way over to her bedroom door, unlocked it, and threw it open.
I didn’t waste any time. I needed to be far, far away from her right now. One second I was fucking fuming, wanting to throw shit across her room, and the next I was itching to wrap my hands around her hips to fuck the heightened emotions right out of her. I was hot as hell on the outside but freezing cold on the inside.
I strode angrily all the way to her door but paused right in front of her. I stared at the dark and empty hall right over the threshold of her room before giving her a questionable look. “Why did you ask
that?”
Her eyes dipped for a moment, but her voice was still as sharp as a butcher's knife. “Ask what?”
“Why did you ask if my dad hit me? Or my mom?”
Her mouth opened, the sound of her lips parting falling in between us. “I… What?”
My brow furrowed. There was an invisible hand wrapped around my throat, squeezing and squeezing until I couldn’t breathe anymore. “Does…” No. Don’t go there. Don’t ask.
“Careful, Eric,” she whispered. “You’re starting to act like you give a fuck about me again.”
A sinister laugh came out of my mouth before I moved in close, invading her space, breathing down onto her half-hidden face. “We wouldn’t want that now, would we? Otherwise, I might just see through that thick wall you put up to keep everyone out.”
Madeline didn’t say a word.
Before I stepped into the hall and descended down the stairs, I whispered loud enough for her to hear, “I wonder just how fucking ugly it is behind that pretty face of yours.”
I wasn’t sure if Madeline said anything in response, because I booked it out of there before I gave her the chance.
Madeline was more fucked up than I thought, and apparently, I was too, because all I wanted to do was fuck her senseless and crumble each and every last wall she had put up.
Chapter Eleven
Madeline
When you didn’t get an adequate amount of sleep, your decision-making skills lacked. When you didn’t get an adequate amount of sleep, you started questioning things that you shouldn’t even be questioning. When you didn’t get an adequate amount of sleep, you started imagining things that weren’t true. When you didn’t get an adequate amount of sleep, you grew weak—and I didn’t just mean that physically, but emotionally too.
It’d been four days since I found Eric in my bedroom.
My thoughts were scattered around like ashes in an ashtray. I kept going back to our conversation—or should I say argument. Eric and I couldn’t have a normal conversation without spitting insults at each other, but I kept questioning his reactions that night. He watched me like a hawk, his eyes tracing over my body, running his attention all over my face, trying to decipher my every move. He wanted to know what was going on with me.
But it was truly none of his business. It wasn’t anyone’s business.
Sure, it was lonely dealing with things on my own, and it was exhausting pushing everyone away and creating this hateful aura around myself, but it was better that way.
Soon, I’d be off to college—Stanford (my father’s wishes)—and I would start over. No one would know me as the mean girl of English Prep. No one would call me a slut, indicating that the apple (me) didn’t fall far from the tree (my mother). I wouldn’t have to lock my door at night or peer out my window each morning, wondering if I needed to escape down the drainpipe to avoid a trauma-inducing run-in with my mother’s fuck buddy. I could leave this place behind and hopefully get some decent sleep without a nightmare.
Anxiety was a wicked bitch, creeping in at the last second before I fell into a deep slumber, awakening me with fear clawing at my throat.
I felt small and inferior.
My gaze wandered over to Hayley Smith.