“If only you hadn’t seduced our only school counselor months ago, then maybe someone with an actual psychology background could analyze me and my feelings.”
Isaiah smirked. “As if you’d let someone get close enough to you to analyze your feelings.”
He was right, but I went back to our earlier conversation and said, “You don’t know why,” before ripping my jersey off along with the long-sleeve shirt underneath it.
Isaiah threw his head back as he rested on the bench, stretching his long legs out in front of him. “I do know why. You’re trying to protect her, just like I was trying to protect Gemma. Staying away isn’t always the best form of protection, though. And it’s up to her. Not you. Tell her the truth about you, and our past, the threats that are lurking like moles out there in the fucking dirt of this corrupted earth, and see if she wants you.”
I turned around slowly, putting my back to him as I walked over to the showers. “You don’t even know the truth, Isaiah.”
The sound of his long strides came next. “What do you mean I don’t know the truth?” I didn’t have to look back at him to know he was expelling anger from every pore. That was just Isaiah, and to be honest, I was the same. “Cade, is there something I need to know? That you haven’t already told us? Did someone contact you? Your father?”
I turned around, now fully naked. “My father is in prison. So is yours.”
Isaiah threw his head back in mock laughter, stripping down to take the shower beside me. “We both know that just because those fucks are in prison, it doesn’t mean a single thing. What about your mom? Has she reached out?”
I almost laughed at the thought. Although my mother was totally coherent, unlike Isaiah’s, who had suffered brain damage from being a casualty in his father’s sick games, my mother left me high and dry. She wasn’t sticking around to deal with the laced threats of retribution of my father’s future behind bars, and she didn’t bother asking me to come with her. Must have slipped her mind.
The water fell like pelting rain droplets of fire along my skin, and I bristled under the scorching burn. It was surely better than feeling the icy sting of Journey’s and my earlier run-in, along with the fact that my entire family was nothing more than a speck of dirt on the bottom of my shoe.
“Burying shit never works, Cade. What’s going on?”
The pressure wasn’t leaving my chest, and the thought of tonight’s claiming party—which usually gave me a minor escape—was doing nothing but making me antsy. Will she go?
“Cade.”
I shut my eyes under the stream, allowing the water to drown me for a moment. When I opened my eyes back up at the sound of the locker room door opening and the chattering of my teammates, I gave Isaiah a quick look, and he met my gaze instantly.
“You afraid it’ll happen again?”
“Am I afraid what’ll happen again?”
Flashes of that night were coming back, and it made my skin itch under the heat. She was lifeless, and the regret and guilt were so heavy that night I could hardly stand after the paramedics took her.
I shut my eyes again, trying to shove away the visual of her and the way my heart screamed in agony, but the more I stood under the hot water, the heavier the memory grew.
The note crumpled in my hand for the fifteenth time, and the pen was smeared from the constant crushing and smoothing. My back rested along the hard wall of the hallway, hidden away from everyone that would become suspicious about what I was doing out of bed after curfew. Not that I didn’t leave my room after curfew often—we all did—but I was sitting here like a recluse, holding a crumpled piece of paper in my hand, feeling as if I were the one torn instead of it.
I knew that Journey was where I told her to go, and I had no way to tell her that I wasn’t coming, which would ruin everything anyway. She didn’t have a phone, and with the threat laying in my shaky fingers, I didn’t even want to risk going out there. Someone wanted me to leave Journey alone, and I had no fucking idea who it was, which drove me mad. I’d eyed everyone with total distrust, even my friends, which was complete and utter bullshit. I needed to tell them what was going on, but I’d found myself in a position that went against everything I’d promised.
I wasn’t supposed to get attached to someone. The Rebels and I didn’t have plans of settling down with anyone, especially not at this godforsaken boarding school full of misfits and girls who were daring enough to break the rules. It was supposed to be a one-and-done type of thing, but…Journey. She was different. The slight curve of her lips sent me into overdrive. The blush on her cheeks did nothing but push me to make her blush deeper. The sweet sound of her laughter as I flirted with her in secret was like a rehabilitation to what I was raised to become. She and I were a ticking time bomb. I had known it from the beginning.
My stomach tightened even though I knew I was doing the right thing. Pushing her away was necessary. It hurt me to do so, which was scary because I didn’t often feel pain. For someone that had been punished for feeling much of anything his entire life, pain was always brief. But tonight, it was staying, and it was potent. I had to force myself to swallow the guilt of hurting her, because this was going to fucking hurt.
I glanced down at the note again, knowing I had a dozen more stored away in the linen closet. For a while there, I was just waiting like a wolf, prowling the forest for its prey. I figured whoever was fucking with me would slip up eventually. I’d been raised for this: to find a threat before it was even created and destroy it immediately with my own bare hands. But no one had slipped up, which made me wonder if my father had somehow gotten wind that I had something that I cared about. I wouldn’t put it past him to take her away from me just like he took everything else.
My head flung back onto the hard wall behind me, sending a jolt of pain through my skull. My fingers clenched tightly, and a sweat broke out along my temples. The longer I sat here, knowing that Journey was out in the courtyard with a heart full of hope and eyes burning with excitement of spending her night underneath me, the more I wound up. I was strung as tight as the metaphorical noose around my neck to the point that I stood up and was seconds from pounding on her and Sloane’s door. Sloane could go out there and get her. Sloane wasn’t stupid. She knew something was going on with Journey and me. Half the school likely did. My friends did, too; they just thought it was the typical fuck-and-done deal. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t at all. I wanted to keep her forever.
I turned on my heel, shoving the torn paper in my back pocket, but I paused at the sound of sirens. My brow crowded, and I rushed over to the window of the small nook I was hidden away in and peered outside. Who needs an ambulance? My heart was twisting as it fiercely beat against my ribcage, and the second I landed on a limp body in my best friend's arms, it died all together.
“No,” I muttered, turning and rushing down the girls’ hall. My feet skidded against the carpet, and I skipped steps with suffocating panic filling my lungs. I couldn’t breathe, and my vision was growing blurry with stress. What the fuck happened? My plans were going up in flames at my back, and I suddenly didn’t know right from wrong or what direction I was supposed to be heading in.
The warm night hit my heated face as I rushed past the headmaster’s open office door and out to the front of St. Mary’s. Not a single stone step hit my feet as I leaped over them all to land on the hard ground, and the second Isaiah rounded the side of St. Mary’s, holding the only thing that had ever made me feel something in his arms, I had to physically force myself to stand.
The ambulance was flying up the winding road, rushing past the iron gates of our stowed-away, castle-like school, but the only thing I could hear was the echoing words of the note stored in my back pocket and the rushing of my blood to every inch of my body like a dam being broken in half.
“Journey,” my voice cracked as I stared at her lifeless body. Isaiah was speaking to me, yelling something, but I couldn’t move. Journey’s head was flung backward, and her pretty, long locks of hair had flakes of dirt in them, as if she was thrown on the ground in the courtyard as she waited for me. Her flawless, kissed-by-the-sun skin was no longer a golden tan but pale with streaks of blood covering both arms and her shirt.
I tried to rush over to Isaiah as time passed too quickly but too slowly all together. The headmaster’s hands wrapped around my torso, stopping me, as I clawed to get closer. “Wh–what, what happened?”