Including my very bad habit of thinking about it. Whenever he’s near.
The kiss.
That watermelon-y, lemonade-y and summery kiss.
~Echo
CHAPTERFIFTEEN
The Bandit
I’d heard stories about it.
About St. Mary’s School for Troubled Teenagers, an all-girls reform school.
And I admit that like a piece of shit, I’d always assumed things about it. About the girls who go there. How wild they must be. How crazy and insane, down for whatever the fuck. I mean, you gotta be, right? For you to end up there?
I’m a pig, what can I say.
And asshole pigs like me don’t think about anything deep, anything that really matters.
Things like it’s areformschool.
Quote unquote a prison.
With brick walls and concrete buildings and fucking bars on the windows.
Things designed to trap. To suffocate.
To cage.
I realized all that later, much later. Too late actually.
After my father had sealed her fate.
And since I was responsible for that, for her life being turned upside down and shattered, I thought the least I could do was leave her alone. The least I could do was stop keeping tabs on her. Like I used to, back when she still lived at the manor and Lucas and I were in New York.
I’d tell myself that it was for Lucas.
To make sure that Lucas’s girl was okay.
And it was.
Well, probably eighty percent of it.
Okay, fine. Sixty-five.
Fuck, okay.
Twenty. Twenty percent.
The rest was all me. Me being my usual piece of shit, snake best friend.
Anyway, when she was sent to St. Mary’s though, I backed off. I left her alone.
And that’s why I didn’t know.
I had noideathat she was still trapped in that place. Where I had to drop her off tonight, and thenwatchher as she struggled to climb over that wall.