Jesus Christ.
“And those,” he continues, letting out a low wolf whistle and grinning, “are two of the sexiest chicks on the planet.” Clapping me on the back, he laughs and steps away while I stand there like an idiot drooling.
Sunday’s hot. We know that, she knows that, everybody with eyes knows that. But seeing Stella get out of the driver’s side of that incredible car? That was something different, something beyond hot.
That was pure sex.
It punched me right in the gut and sent an electric charge to my cock at the same time. I’m actually speechless as the two of them walk up the steps toward us—I couldn’t say a word right now even if she’d listen. I let my eyes wander hungrily over her beautiful face and perfect body. Those full lips slicked with cherry red—it’s all I can do not to groan out loud. Both she and Sunday ignore the shit out of me, not even looking in my direction before the four girls turn and head through the double doors together.
I put my head back and stare at the sky for a second when Payne lightly kicks my foot and pulls my attention to his curious and suspicious face.
“What the fuck did you do?” he asks quietly. Giving my head a shake, I ignore him and follow the girls inside.
We stood back and watched as Stella claimed her rightful place in the Heirs and gave Hali the smackdown of her life to boot. I spent all morning getting the stink eye from three of the girls, while Stella herself wouldn’t even look at me. My calm, already in short supply these days, keeps getting wound tighter and tighter.
At our lunch table, I know she purposely sits as far away from me as she can. Girls on one side and guys on the other, I’m at least happy to hear her joke with Raff and Heller—it brings a bit of normalcy back to our group. Until Wes Garvin walks right on up and has the balls to ask her out.
Not a chance, buddy.
“Move along, Opie. She’s neither available nor interested,” I all but threaten the guy, leaning back in my chair and crossing my arms over my chest. Stella looks like she could spit nails she’s so pissed, and after letting him down gently, she drives one of those nails right into my heart by reaching out and fucking caressing his arm. After Wes goes on his merry way, she turns to me, a vicious gleam in her eye, and tells me exactly what she thinks of me before storming out of the cafeteria.
I sit and pretend nonchalance for the next five minutes, listening to my friends try to talk about anything except the shitshow that just happened. Finally, I can’t do it anymore, shoving my chair back and standing.
“I’m out.” Is all I say before striding from the room. As luck would have it, there’s a tension breaker waiting for me just outside the door—leaning against the wall, patented loser sneer in place, is Bingham Ramsey.
“Looks like you and I are in the same boat now,” he sniggers. “Both kicked to the curb because that Bradleigh twat is a tease.” Anger burns away every other emotion, and all I want to do is hurt somebody. Pivoting on my heel, I take two strides toward Stella’s would-be rapist and punch him once right in the center of his preppy face. Feeling bone snap under my fist brings a satisfied smirk to my lips, and I turn around and walk right out the front doors, the smarmy fucker behind me whistling blood through his broken nose.
Before I get to my car, Payne, Raff, and Heller are suddenly surrounding me.
“Cut the shit, bro. It’s time to tell us what the hell is going on,” Payne demands. With a tired sigh, I tell them my story.
The guys and I collectively decide to blow off half a day’s worth of classes and go back to Payne’s place after I give them the basic rundown in the school parking lot. Once the whole mess is out in the open, I’m grateful they don’t hold my decision not to tell them right away against me.
That’s one of the things I love about my friendship with Payne, Raff, and Heller—when one of us fucks up, we explain, we apologize, and we move on. We don’t hold grudges between us, and we call each other on our bullshit, even if it takes a few days.
The shitty thing is, punching that douche Ramsey in the face should have made me feel better. Okay, maybe not better, but it should have at least released some of the tension I’ve been carrying around.
It didn’t.
I’m still wound as tight as I was before my fist met his face and I don’t know what to do about it.
Chapter Twenty
Thursday morning I wake up feeling sad and small and alone; tears that fell in my sleep now dry on my cheeks. My dreams from last night haunt me. Not in the traditional scary nightmare kind of way, but in the ‘am doing the right thing’ kind of way. The ‘did I make a big mistake’ kind of way.
The past few days at school have been a special kind of torture. While nothing else has happened, seeing Poe every day and not being with him is taking a toll, and I find my anger at him getting harder to hold on to. Sunday asked me yesterday why it was so easy for me to forgive my aunt but not Poe. I thought about it and explained as best I could. That what he did somehow felt more like a betrayal—more like he’d violated a trust that I have never willingly given another man in my life. I also explained how much holding onto that anger is wearing on me. That underneath it, I miss him.
Lying in my bed, I check the clock on my phone and see I have about fifteen minutes before my alarm goes off. I use that time to do some deep breathing and pep talk the shit out of myself.
Get it together, Stella. You have every right to be here. You deserve to be here. Pick up those shards of your love and your trust and tuck them all away in a little box deep inside. You’re not going to throw away this opportunity because of somebody else’s bullshit. You know exactly who you are, so embrace it. Your name is Stella Evangeline Bradleigh and fuck if you’re going to let anybody else lead this damn parade anymore. Your life may be a shitshow, but it’s your shitshow, and you decide who gets to stay and play and who can get the fuck out.
My alarm trills, and I roll out of bed, as ready as I can be to face another day.
I walk in the front doors, trying my hardest to appear confident and strong. By my side, Sunday's filling the space around us with tidbits of gossip and movies and her mother’s latest craziness on her quest for eternal youth. We wind our way through the halls to our lockers, and I see the guys roughhousing and laughing together up ahead. Almost like magic, Poe stops and looks up, finding me in the crowd immediately. Our eyes meet for a few brief seconds before he looks away, returning his attention to his friends.
Sunday and I close our locker doors, the sound of metal meeting metal cold and hollow, and make our way to homeroom, my hard candy shell revealing nothing of the mess I’ve become underneath.
My skin mourns the loss of Poe’s touch. The only one who knows the tightrope I’m teetering on right now, the only one who clearly sees, is sworn to secrecy. She looks at me now, sadness in her eyes even as she smiles and chatters on next to me—my beautiful best friend, the moon to my velvet night sky. As long as I have her by my side, I can get through anything, right? It doesn’t matter that it feels like my insides are slowly dissolving and that one day soon, there will be nothing left of the Stella I was becoming, the one I had hidden inside the whole time. The one I was always supposed to be.
My phone vibrates with a call in our second-period class. Pulling it out of my blazer pocket, I keep it lowered in front of me and check who it is. When I see the hospital's name on the display, I let it go to voicemail but raise my hand and ask to use the restroom. I’m half-way down the hall when Sunday pokes her head out of the classroom door and looks right and left. Spotting me, she slips out and jogs over.
“Who was it?” she asks breathily.
“The hospital,” I answer, and we both stare at each other for a second.
“Test results,” we say in unison. Dialing my voicemail, I listen to the message asking me to please stop by the clinic at my convenience in the next day or two as they don’t give results over the phone. I disconnect the call, and Sunday is already back at the door of our classroom.
“What are you doing?” I whisper yell to her.
“Grabbing our stuff,” she says back. “There’s no time like the present, right?” My stomach churning, we stow our books in our lockers and head out to my car, not even bothering to sign out.
The drive to the hospital is short and quiet. Once we’ve parked, we find our way back to the clinic that took my blood on Monday. The same kind nurse is there, and she asks if I want Sunday to stay with me or if I’d rather get the results in private. I tell the nurse there’s no way I’m doing this alone, and she nods in understanding. Ushering us into an exam room, she hands me a document.
“If you have any questions, please feel free to ask me, okay?” She smiles reassuringly and leaves the room, closing the door behind her.
Trying desperately not to overthink what these results typed on this report could mean, I sit down to read it and my eyes are immediately drawn to the words printed in red.
THE ALLEGED FATHER IS NOT EXCLUDED AS THE BIOLOGICAL FATHER OF THE TESTED CHILD. BASED ON TESTING RESULTS OBTAINED FROM ANALYSIS OF THE DNA LOCI LISTED, THE PROBABILITY OF PATERNITY IS 99.9998%.
I’m not sure what I expected to feel once I had the results, but I don’t think it was nothing. Rage, maybe. A little sad. But I feel nothing. It’s not even that I’m numb, it’s just I don’t seem to care either way, and that’s weird.
“Are you okay?” Sunday asks quietly.
“Yeah. Strangely I think I am.” I fold the sheet of paper in half and stuff it into my purse. “Hey, Callum is here, right? In this hospital?”
“On the floor that is normally reserved for the Founding Families, yes. Payne’s dad’s security firm has him under twenty-four-hour guard in case he wakes up from his coma and tries to do something stupid.”
“Can I ask you a huge favor?”
She nods.
“Here’s my keys. Can I meet you back at the car? I need to go see Callum. Just for a minute,” I explain. Sunday looks surprised.
“Are you sure? And if you are, are you sure you want to do it alone?” she asks.
“It’s not really something I want to do, it’s more something I need to do,” I answer, and she takes a good hard look into my eyes.
“Okay, but if you’re not outside in ten minutes, I’m coming back in for you.” She hugs me, and we leave the clinic after thanking the nurse. Sunday goes right toward the parking lot, and I go left toward the main administration desk. After speaking with the clerk there and armed with the room number and access code required to get into the unit, I find the correct elevator and push the button for the twelfth floor.
The doors whoosh open softly, allowing me to step out into something that looks more like a hotel than a hospital. Looking around in surprise, I walk up to the unit clerk seated behind a large desk. She asks for my code, and once I give it, she pushes a little button on the wall, and the sizable automatic door beside her swings open. Wandering down the long hallway, I stop when I reach room 1207.
This is it.
Pushing the door open, I’m shocked to see two people standing next to Callum’s bed, one on either side. If they were doctors or nurses, I wouldn’t have thought twice. But one of them is a blond man, a little older than I am, who I vaguely recognize though I’m also nearly positive I’ve never seen him before. And the other one is Holt Halliday. They both look up at me standing there, and though they smile politely, I feel like I’m interrupting something, and my instincts are screaming at me to leave. Spinning on my heel, I let the door fall closed behind me and sprint back down the hall to the elevator and then all the way out to the car. I slide into the driver’s seat, out of breath, and Sunday looks at me worriedly.
“What the hell are you running from?” she asks, looking back to where I came from.
“Nothing,” I wheeze, my breathing starting to return to normal. “Nothing at all.”
After dropping Sunday off at school to pick up her car, I go back to Tweedvale, my mind racing and my emotions a jumbled mess.
Callum Torsten is my biological father.
I am a child of rape.
Hali is my half-sister.
I’m not sure which of those things is worse. All of them are awful, but not entirely unexpected. Maybe that’s the reason they’re not the most pressing issue for me. What I really want to know is what was Holt Halliday doing in Callum’s hospital room? Who was the guy with him, and why did he look so familiar?
Cecily is out at some luncheon with one of the women’s groups she volunteers for, and Spry drove her, so I have the house to myself. I strip off my school uniform as soon as I get upstairs and crawl into my bed in my underwear and an old t-shirt, hugging my old, floppy, stuffed dog. My brain hurts, I’m overwhelmed, and I just need to sleep for a bit.
When I wake up, it’s dark outside. My aunt must have come in to check on me at some point—the lamp on my bedside table is on, and there’s a glass of water next to my phone.
God, I’m tired. The weary sort of tired that seeps into your bones.
Hauling my ass out of bed, I carry the glass of water to the wingback chair, taking a few gulps before setting it on the wide window sill in front of me. Pulling my legs up to my chest, I sit in my pretty teal colored chair and watch the darkness outside.
My anger trips over sadness on its way out the door, leaving me a soggy mess. The emptiness I feel is so wide and cavernous it has its own echo and its own zip code.
Forgiveness is a bitter pill to swallow sometimes. Can I forgive the man who started this wheel turning? The one who ripped away everything my mother should have become? No, there is no forgiveness for the evil thing that hides inside that bag of skin and bones. Can I forgive the boy who made me trust against my will and then broke it all apart? His sins are those of fear and protection, not wanting to see me hurt and not knowing how to say the words without stabbing a hole through my heart. His sins are without malice. Maybe that deserves forgiveness.
It’s the strangest thing to need another person. Once fully able and willing to be yourself without anybody else's help, and now somehow less without them. The sound of their voice can alter your mood instantly. A shared grin from across a room full of faceless, pale mouths constantly speaking but never saying anything, and suddenly the room floods with color.
Is he waiting for me? Does he even care? Or has he taken his life back to when it was easy, and a fuck was just a ride that was always over in the light of day?
How do I tell him I need him?
How do I tell him I made a mistake?
Chapter Twenty-One
I don’t know why I agreed to come tonight. This party was Sunday’s idea, not mine. I haven’t gotten out of the car yet, and I’m already beginning to regret letting myself get talked into it. At least I drove, so escaping early shouldn’t be too difficult.
My aunt and my best friend have both been spending a lot of time worrying about me—I can see it in their eyes. After the big paternity reveal on Thursday and my decision to forgive Poe, I’ve been sort of lost in my head trying to figure out what to do. Friday was a total loss—Poe didn’t even show up for school. When Sunday begged me this morning, in front of my aunt no less, to come to the party at Payne’s tonight, my initial response was to brush her off.
“Uh, Sun, I don’t do so well at Folkestone parties. Remember the last one?” She shushed me and assured me this one would be totally different. Fun and safe and something I desperately needed. Looking to Cecily for help, she shrugged and agreed with Sunday.
So here I am.
Sunday turns the rearview mirror away from me, toward where she sits in the passenger seat.
“Payne’s dad has some big security symposium in London, and he took Mrs. Emerson with him so they can visit her family at the same time,” she explains, smoothing her hair and pulling her lip gloss from her pocket.
“His mom’s British?” I ask, having never actually spoken to the woman myself. She was at the Halliday’s house back in September, but I d
on’t think I had the chance to do anything more than nod and smile when I was introduced to her.
“Yep. I keep forgetting you haven’t been around that long. It feels like we’ve known each other since forever,” Sunday says. “His parents met in England when they were teenagers. Payne’s grandfather did some work for the British government or something, and Mrs. Emerson’s father was one of the people he was working with. She ended up coming here to the States for college, and they hooked back up. The rest, as they say, is history.” She finishes touching up her lips and turns the mirror back to face me.
“Are you ready?”
“Can I say no?” I ask hopefully.
“No, you can’t say no. In fact, you’re only allowed to say yes for the rest of the night. ‘Yes, I would love a drink.’ ‘Yes, I’m single.’ ‘Yes, I know these pants make my ass look fabulous.’ You know, the usual.” She manages to say all of this with a straight face, and I can’t help the grin that spreads across my mine.
“Alright, alright. Let’s go inside before I change my mind.” We vacate my car and head into the house. Once inside, my senses are overloaded with wall to wall bodies, ear-splitting music, and a vague hint of pot smoke.
“Holy shit,” Sunday shouts at me over the noise, “Payne’s outdone himself this time. I can’t believe how many people are here!” She hooks her arm through mine and acts as my tugboat and tour guide—pulling me through the crowd of people and stopping along the way to introduce me to some new faces.
We finally make it into the main living room, which, if the last party I was at with the Heirs is any indication, is where they will be. Though I fully expected it, actually seeing Poe here is still a punch to the gut. Sprawled on a regal looking loveseat that’s a deep shade of crimson, his long legs encased in black leather and his black long sleeve collared shirt open at the first few buttons are sinfully sexy. His sleeves are unbuttoned and turned up, revealing muscular forearms and that damn tattoo that makes me swoon all on its own.
Fractured Things (Folkestone Sins Book 2) Page 15