by Shel Stone
Still, she felt more crappy about all of this now. Abby had been one of the few people not in her inner circle that hadn’t ripped her to pieces before, but she certainly was now. Enough so Cecily actually wanted to flee, go back to her room and cry her heart out. But no, she had to go sit next to him now.
With heaviness weighing down her steps, she walked to class, arriving just at that cutting point between acceptably late and tardy. Mr. Anderson gave her a warning look and Cecily quietly walked to her seat, not looking at Adrian as she did.
Paying attention was impossible and Cecily ended up staring out the window at the birds that sat on mostly bare tree branches.
A murmur started and Cecily realized that Mr. Anderson wasn’t talking anymore. Her intentions of getting good grades were slipping.
Adrian was tapping his pen on the desk beside her, and she turned to him. “It’s never going to happen again,” she stated.
“I’m pretty sure you said that before—with more conviction.”
Maybe she deserved that for her weakness, but she fully meant it. Not surprisingly, he didn’t think so. She would just have to prove it. Obviously she wanted to address the him not telling people issue, but she didn’t know how. “Oh and if you’re waiting to hang it over my head. Don’t bother. I’m not putting up with your bullshit. If you want to tell people, go ahead and do it.”
“And have them all think worse of you than they already do?” he said with a smirk.
“Can’t get any worse, right?”
“I think it can.”
“And I’m not sure I really care about these people’s opinions. Why would I? A couple of fair-weather friends and a bunch of people I can’t be fucked dealing with.”
“You care what Morgan thinks.”
“Not enough to put up with you.”
“Oh, I think that would hurt her feelings.”
“So you’re perfectly happy to torture Morgan now just to keep this bullshit going with me? Well, I’m signing out. Have a happy life, or don’t. I don’t care.”
He was still tapping the desk with his pen. “We’ll see,” he said after a while.
Rolling her eyes, Cecily waited for the bell to ring. She was sick of this place, of all the bullshit. Of him. Frankly, she was drained. Christmas was coming soonish and she would be out of here for a while. Hopefully she could instill the firm belief that this hell was temporary. Mere months and it would end. Might be it was a contender for the worst year of her life, but all she had to do was get through it, because things were probably going to get worse with the pitch-fork yielding villagers.
Whatever. She’d written them all off. This whole town. Morgan was the only person she wanted to keep, and it was up to her if she forgave. As for her real friends, maybe it wasn’t terrible that things were more complicated between her and the guy who had screwed her over so severely. Then it wasn’t just this drive-by ruination, but a tactic in a whole messier thing. The dick ex-boyfriend rather than some stranger. Even thinking of him as her boyfriend made her chuckle, but maybe it was worth spinning it that way. It wasn’t as if she was the only girl with one of those.
Adrian would probably be mortified if he knew she was planning to spin him that way to her friends in Europe. And it mortified her, but on the other hand, she didn’t feel bad using him to minimize the mess he had caused. So yeah, he’d been in love with her and he’d betrayed her as part of a super messy relationship that ran crazy hot and freezingly cold. Technically it was true, particularly the hot and cold part. The relationship part was a downright lie, but whatever.
Chapter 33
CECILY REALLY HAD blocked him now. There were no answers to his texts and it annoyed the fuck out of him. He’d called her every cowardly-sounding name under the sun. In class she was unresponsive to his taunts. It was as if she just wasn’t there. Unengaged in every way. She was just hanging out until she could leave.
Worse was when he saw a photo of Morgan and Cecily, smiling broadly at some club, Cecily in a short silvery dress, practically in Monty Gibson’s lap. How dare she smile like that, as if she didn’t have a care in the world. And Mishti was there in the background too—something Adrian felt she should be punished for.
Blood and adrenalin had rushed through his body when he saw it and he felt like throwing his phone. What the fuck was she doing with Monty? Especially after what they’d done. It was just wrong. And what kind of pictures was she posting on her social, the ones he couldn’t see?
No, this couldn’t be tolerated. Fucking Monty. When it comes down to it, they didn’t even suit each other—Cecily as some jock’s girlfriend, going to all his matches. Not exactly cheerleader material. No, she had to be doing this because she couldn’t find a guy that would piss him off more than fucking Monty Gibson.
But what could he do about it? Leaning on Mishti was the closest he could get to her, but Cecily was wary of Mishti now after how she reacted when the video had dropped. Cecily probably wouldn’t extend to deal with any pressure coming from Mishti. And Morgan wasn’t an option. Neither was Monty. Cecily had effectively isolated herself. An isolation he was the cause of.
Obviously, he could relay the events of the Vollich party, but that would be an impotent discharge of his last piece of ammunition. He literally had nothing else on her, and now no way to reach her, except in English Lit, where she firmly ignored him.
His mood was dark as he entered the cafeteria. Another place she had isolated herself from. She came in and bought stuff, but then left, typically hanging in the square, but it was raining today, so he didn’t know where she was. Apparently not with Morgan, because he saw Morgan sitting at a table with Mishti and Tory. So where the hell was Cecily?
Searching the large room, he sought the jocks and sure enough, Monty was conspicuously absent too. A growl escaped him. He wasn’t happy about this. There had to be something he could do, something he could enact to stop this. It was a tricky thing, though, because it couldn’t be harsh enough that she would be excluded from the school, or choose to leave.
While having her leave had been his objective when it started, it wasn’t now. He wanted her pinned, not slinking off somewhere to pretend he didn’t exist. Because the things that had changed was that he wanted to be what she saw, what she thought about when she went to bed and woke up in the morning. It would only be fair, wouldn’t it?
Who knew where she was hiding right now, maybe even canoodling with fucking Monty. Morgan would know. Looking over at her, he saw her laughing, relaxed as though she had no care in the world. Was she happy about this development? Cecily and Monty? Was she pushing Cecily in his direction?
Not that he would lower himself to go search for her, which left him sitting there, stewing in his own anger, even as he knew anger was a useless emotion. You never planned well when angry. He needed to calm down, to expel this energy out of him, which typically meant drinking or fucking—and he couldn’t really tolerate the voice or even the touch of a random girl right now. Didn’t want the affirmation of where his mind would wander. How could it be anything but disappointing?
Sometimes he was wondering if life was simpler if he could approach girls as superficially as Seb did, but that was boring, frankly. It had all been boring—until Cecily had turned up. Now he had all this energy, all this rage and he had nowhere to direct it to.
He just wasn’t up to sitting around with this bullshit for the rest of the afternoon, so he got up and left, walking out the front doors of the school. At some point the school would call about his absence, but he didn’t care right then. He needed to move, not sit in fucking class.
Making his way home, he went straight to the gym and lifted weights. Either that or go for a run, but he just didn’t want the annoyance of seeing other people right then. Worked until his muscles gave out and he simply couldn’t do any more.
Dusk was starting to darken the scenes outside his window when he finished, and he sat on the bench with a water bottle. Truthfully, he didn’t wan
t to go out. His mood was too foul. Getting up, he stepped in the shower and washed away the sweat from the workout, then went to the bar and poured himself a generous portion of whiskey. Today, he wanted the burn of it.
It was dark by the time he sat down in the quiet living room. Maybe the way to deal with this was to exert pressure on Monty. It couldn’t be direct, because Monty wouldn’t listen, so maybe through one of his teammates. Unfortunately, Adrian had never given enough of a shit about the jocks to bother with them in the past. They’d just been irrelevant.
Sapphire had dated one of the jocks. There was potential there, but it felt as if he was grasping at straws and he hated it. The weakness in the relationship was Monty’s search for the perfect, pristine, match-loving, family-values girl. Cecily was anything but perfect and eventually that will cause problems in the relationship. But waiting for that to come around felt like a hollow victory.
Adrian drank until he slept, waking to a text message from his father asking him to explain why the school had bothered him with his son’s unauthorized absence. The asshole couldn’t even pick up the phone to call. With disgust, Adrian threw away the phone. Another fucking day. Unfortunately, he couldn’t tolerate being the total loser that dropped out of school—if only for the fact that his dad would get stuck on that like a broken record in literally every conversation they had from now until the dick died.
*
His mood didn’t improve much as he got to school the next day and people seemed to pick up on it, because they stayed out of his way. He’d love someone to rip into right then, but no one was stupid enough to volunteer.
For a moment, he wondered if he should go to the cafeteria for breakfast, but he wasn’t sure he could stomach it. Clearly it was too early for a drink.
“Hey,” Seb said, appearing by his locker. “Where’d you disappear to yesterday?”
“Just needed some time out from the bullshit.”
“I get it. What you doing after school?”
“Why?”
“Thought we could maybe go play some pool.”
“I’m not spending the evening watching you pick up girls,” Adrian said tersely.
“Why? Have you got something better to do?”
Maybe he needed to chill out, go hang on a beach somewhere for a while. Things were… pressing on him and he couldn’t alleviate it. It had something to do with Cecily. He knew that much. Maybe it was the feeling of not winning. Obviously, he’d already won, but for some reason, he didn’t feel it. “I’ll think about it,” he said and closed his locker. English Lit. The part about school that had him least bored at the moment. Curiosity drove him to see what she would come with today. Yesterday had been dismissal, as if he was so easy to dismiss. Didn’t work that way.
Making his way to class, he saw her, but she was standing with fucking Monty, looking up at him with that come-hither smile she did. Oh, she knew what she was doing when she flirted with guys. And Monty was basking in it.
Neither of them had seen him watching them. Slight touches between them, but they weren’t close. They weren’t fucking.
Anger coursed through his blood, but he wasn’t going to skulk around the shadows. If she was going to flirt, she was going to have to do it in the open. Actually, he wanted to pummel Monty, but he wasn’t one hundred percent he would come off the winner in the fight. And it was beneath him. He wasn’t the dude that got into fights over girls. Girls came to him, because they wanted to—or they needed to.
Leaving them behind, he stared murderously at anyone who so much as caught his eye, hating that he was reacting this way. How did he cleanse these fucking reactions out of himself?
With heavy determination, he took his seat and waited for her to stop mentally sucking off Monty. Just as the bell rung, she walked in, looking flushed and alive—more so than normal. There wasn’t even that pause when she normally saw him. Instead, she slipped into her chair and pulled out her textbook.
Comments whirled around his mind, but he couldn’t settle on anything to say to her. How mortifying that he was actually tongue-tied. Class started.
Chapter 34
EXCITEDLY, CECILY sat down at the window bar of the chosen café where she was meeting Mont, having lingered in the nearby stores while Mont was busy at practice. Now they were meeting up. It had been his idea and she’d agreed. Things were going in the right direction. He seemed to be genuinely interested in her.
Obviously, she wasn’t going to rush this. No need to confirm any lingering suspicions she was an easy lay. Although she had been a completely easy lay a few weeks back. Getting it on with Adrian was still something she couldn’t explain and he hadn’t spread it around, for some reason. Probably because he was going to try to coerce her with it.
It wasn’t going to work. But in order for her to stick with that, she needed to come clean to the two people who she actually gave a shit about. Mont being one of them. It wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have, but with dicks like Adrian running around, trying to harm her any way he could, this was going to come out one way or another. It was up to her to make sure it was a dud as far as bombs go.
There he was, crossing the street, his blond hair still wet from his shower. God, he was cute. She could definitely fall for someone like him. Unfortunately, Adrian’s warning was hard to shake. As much as she wanted to dismiss everything he said as sheer bullshit, Morgan had in a weird way confirmed it by her caution. Obviously, she thought Mont was a great guy. Everyone in the school, except for Adrian, thought he was a great guy. Hardly surprising as he was basically anathema to Adrian. Total opposites. Mont was cute, he worked hard, he treated people well—he treated her well, even when the whole school was tearing her to pieces.
“Hey,” she said with a bright smile as he came in. Wherever his gear was, he didn’t carry it with him. Instead wore a letter jacket with the school logo on it and his number. Fourteen. That classic American jock look wasn’t something done in Europe. It was like a uniform the athletes did. That wasn’t done in Europe either. Not that she minded. He looked great.
“Hey,” he said in return. “What do you normally go for?”
“I guess a macchiato,” she said. The waitress was coming.
“A macchiato and a green tea.”
Cecily pressed her lips together. Maybe she should have gone for the healthy option too. Being an athlete, he was careful what he put in his body. His body being his temple and all that. Well, it was worship worthy. It was better than Adrian’s. It just was. With Adrian, it was the sheer force of his personality. Too sheer, too much. Mont was more… ethereal. No that wasn’t the right word.
He was just perfect, and maybe with him, she could be perfect too. “No, actually, green tea sounds perfect.”
The waitress gone, Cecily smiled at him. She felt nervous in a good way and it had been a long time since she’d felt that way. “How was practice?”
“Good. Hard. We have a match coming up.”
“I know.” Of course she had planned on going to watch, even as Morgan refused to. It just wasn’t her thing. While Cecily barely even knew the rules. But then, she was there to watch Mont more than the match.
“We have a get together after with some drinks. Do you want to come?”
“Of course. I’d love to. But there is something I need to tell you first,” she said, wringing her fingers under the table. This could go really badly, but it just had to be done. She just hoped his understanding extended this far.
Mont’s head shifted a little to the side. She couldn’t read his expression, but there was nothing for it but to bite the bullet.
“You know that bullshit between me and Adrian Morecroft,” she started. “Well, it was a bit more complicated that it looked on the surface.”
“Complicated how?”
“Well, it wasn’t just a one-night stand as it appeared. The guy plays serious head games, and there were moments I was drawn down in that quagmire. And he’s still trying. I’m out—fully out, b
ut he’s still trying to engage, if that makes sense. I seriously don’t know what his problem is, but he has a bit of the ‘you don’t get to walk away until I say so’ thing going on, if you know what I mean.”
“Is he bothering you?” Mont asked, the concern clear on his face.
“You mean beyond shaming me on the Internet the worst possible way?” she said with a snort. “No, I mean, I am totally immune to his bullshit, but he’s probably going to say things to you. Anything he could do to destroy our friendship, he would. I just want to you to know.”
“Morecroft’s always been an asshole. Never thought he’d go this far. You should report him.”
“I have. And ‘officially’,” she said with air quotes, “he’s apologized. Pursuing it would just be years of legal ickiness, which probably suits him quite fine. Any way he can extend this grossness, he will. I just want you to know.”
Mont looked concerned and disgusted. It was so nice that someone thought Adrian was a disgusting pig. More probably did, but they were too scared of him to say so.
“I just want to mind my own business,” Cecily continued. “Spend the rest of the year hanging with good, true friends, who don’t get into the bullshit drama at this school. You know?”
“Yeah,” Mont said. “I get it.”
“So if you still want me to come the after game thing, I’m all in. I just wanted you to know that I come with some crap baggage I am trying to ditch.”
“Well, he’s definitely not invited, so you can relax.”
That had gone as good as she’d hoped. At least he hadn’t got up and left, and hopefully Mont was inoculated if Adrian decided to strike. If Adrian had any brains, he wouldn’t, because Mont wasn’t the kind of guy who idly stood by when someone was trying to bully and terrorize. And that was one of the things she adored about him.