by S. J. Sylvis
From underneath my arm, April spoke up.
“Hayley isn’t lying. I heard you tell her that after you stole her clothes in PE the other day.” April’s lips curved upward. “Did you forget that I was in PE with you, too? Careful, Madeline. You’re burning bridges left and right lately.”
A high-pitched growl left Madeline’s mouth. She looked as if she were ready to pounce on April.
“Get out,” I said calmly.
“You’re making a mistake, Christian.”
I slowly walked over to her like a lion on the prowl. “No, you made a mistake when you tried to play me. I don’t like liars, Madeline. Now get out. It’s my fucking birthday, and seeing your face makes me want to vomit.”
She rolled her eyes and stood back, trying to appear like she wasn’t fazed, but I knew better. I could see right through her; she was all sorts of nervous on the inside. Her words came out rushed. “Funny you say that. You seemed to like my face last time we fucked.”
I tilted my head. “Did I? I could have sworn I took you from behind for that exact reason.”
She gasped softly, her face turning red. People snickered around us, and someone yelled, “Oooh. Burn, baby, burn.”
I leaned down into her personal space, looking her dead in the eye. “What you did was dirty, Madeline. And I never want to get my hands dirty again.” I turned around and walked over to April, claiming her hand in mine. Then, I looked over my shoulder before heading out to the hot tub. “And if you ever fucking mess with Hayley again, you’ll find yourself at Wellington Prep with the accused rapist, and let me tell you, he knows exactly what you did.”
Her mouth opened in shock, and mine almost did, too. Did I just fucking stand up for Hayley in front of everyone?
Eager to erase the moment, I pulled April through the back door, letting it slam behind me. Everyone could see through the thin layer of glass separating us from the rest of the party as I pushed her body up against it and claimed her with my mouth, not even giving a fuck that this wasn’t part of my plan. I meant to use April as a way to push Madeline further into rage, taunting her with an enemy, but now I was taking it a step further because I was desperate to make up for my thoughts of Hayley.
I was infuriated with myself and eager to replace all the images of Hayley I’d subconsciously taken throughout the day and stored away for later. My tongue pushed into April’s warm mouth, her cherry-tasting lips only distracting me for a second. Her jean-clad leg wrapped around my hip, pushing me closer to her center. She moaned out a noise and tangled her fingers through my hair.
Get. Out. Of. My. Head.
I ground my dick against her, needing more pressure—anything to get me to stop thinking. But it didn’t work.
Why did Hayley look so worried when her friend tried to lift her shirt?
I groaned and pushed away from April. I turned my back and walked farther into the autumn night, the leaves crunching underneath my shoes.
“Christian?” she asked, tip-toeing after me. “What happened? Things were just getting good.”
Not good enough.
“There’s something I need to do.” I walked back into the cabin after mumbling a half-assed sorry to April. My chest was heaving, and my hands ached from clenching my fists so tightly.
I ignored everyone who tried to stop me to talk about Madeline and our little show and stepped in front of Ollie, who was doing his best at getting into Bristol's pants for the evening. He grinned when he looked up at me. “Bro, nice show. Madeline stormed out of here faster than Andrews scored that last touchdown.”
“There's something I need to do, and I need your help.”
His grin fell. “What? Right now?” He swept his gaze back and forth between me and Bristol and groaned. “Fine. But only because it’s your fucking birthday.”
He winked at Bristol and then began to follow me out of the kitchen. Once we were through the threshold of the house, I unlocked my car, but he stopped at the last second. “Wait, we’re leaving? We’re leaving your party?”
I ignored the question and opened my door to slide in. “Who is that girl that Hayley always hangs out with?”
Ollie climbed in after me. “The hot redhead? That’s Piper Jacobs. Why?”
I looked over at him, the rumble of my car in the background. “Do you have her number?”
He shook his head. “No, she’s way too uptight for me to pursue. Although, I would love to find out if she’s a natural redhead, if you’re catching my drift.” He wiggled his eyebrows up and down.
I was being unpredictable right now, running on instinct and instinct only. “Find her online. Find out where she is. I need to see Hayley.”
Ollie didn’t move to grab his phone. He didn’t do much of anything but blink.
“What?” I barked. I wished I knew Piper myself; I’d have left Ollie here and hunted her down alone and demanded she tell me what was going on with Hayley.
I had no idea why I cared. I didn’t want to—not even in the slightest. I wanted to hold onto the resentful feeling I had for her. But there was something burning inside of me, urging me to dig deeper. To learn all of her secrets and hold them close.
“I’ll help you,” Ollie finally said, leaning back in his seat, but he made no attempt at digging out his phone to search for where Piper might have been tonight. “But you’re going to tell me why. You’re going to tell me why you told Hayley it was her fault Mom died.” He stared me down, his usual humor gone. “Because unless Hayley was shoving the pain pills down Mom’s throat…it wasn’t her fault.”
It felt like my rib cage was wedged open and it was seeping the bloody truth all over my clothes.
I placed my hand on the steering wheel and started to back down the gravel road. I swallowed the thick spit lodged in the back of my throat. “I’ll tell you on the way.”
“On the way to where?” he asked, pulling out his phone.
“On the way to wherever Piper is. And then to Hayley.”
They say the truth will set you free, but I highly doubted that. Apparently, it was sending me straight to Hayley.
Why won’t she pick up the phone? I paced back and forth in my bedroom, tripping over the stupid basketball on the floor. It’d been two hours since she called me frantically, saying her parents were fighting again. When I’d asked what they were fighting about, she said she was going to get a better listen and she’d call me back later.
She still hadn’t called back.
I worried about Hayley. Not just because I had a crush on her, but because she was my friend, too. One of my best friends. She played video games with me and happily hung out with Ollie even when he was being annoying. She said she had always wanted a sibling, someone she could hang out with when her parents were fighting, so letting him hang out with us was a must.
I blew air out of my mouth and left my room. Echoes of a cooking show were hitting my ears as I climbed down the stairs and entered the kitchen. There was Mom, baking something for our school’s bake sale, which was a nice sight since she’d been out with friends the last few nights. She had flour smeared on her face when she turned around, and her light hair was tied in a bundle above her head. “Hi, honey, what’s up?”
“Mom, can you drive me to Hayley’s?”
She looked concerned for a second. “Why? It’s almost 8:00. You should be getting to bed soon. You can see her tomorrow.”
Fear prickled at the back of my neck. “No, I think something is wrong with her. She called me about her parents, and now she won’t answer.”
Mom measured out some sugar in a cup and poured it into the bowl, not looking up at me. Thunder boomed in the background, and it did nothing but heighten my anxiety.
“Christian. I’m sure she’s fine. Doesn’t she call you all the time about her parents?” She sighed. “I’m sure Hayley is fine.”
“Mom,” I urged. “Something is wrong. I can tell.”
She shook her head. “Christian. It’s almost time for bed. I’m in
the middle of baking, Ollie is upstairs in the shower, and—” Another bang of thunder. She pointed to the window with her spatula. “It’s raining. The answer is no.”
Anger clawed at me. Something was wrong, I could tell. I pulled out my cell phone again and tried to call. This time, it went straight to voicemail.
“Mom, please!” I begged. My stomach began to tighten.
“No!” she shouted. “Now, stop. Go see if Ollie is out of the shower. You need to get ready for bed, too.”
“Fine. I’ll freaking go by myself!”
I hurriedly ran over to the door, pulled my shoes onto my feet, ignoring my mom’s protests, and pulled my jacket on. If she wasn’t going to drive me over there, then fine. I’d take my bike.
I jumped on the seat and tore out of the garage, flying down our cobblestone driveway and heading for the gates of our neighborhood. Rain danced in front of my vision, and my wheels were sliding everywhere along the slick asphalt, but I didn’t care. I could feel it in my bones.
Something was wrong with Hayley.
Something was wrong with Hayley that night. She watched her father get murdered.
And I watched my mother get hit head-on by a Trailblazer as she drove through the storm to find me. I was the one who left that night, ignoring her. If Hayley would have just kept her business to herself or answered the phone when I had called back, I never would have left. I never would have disobeyed my mom, and the crash never would have happened. My mom wouldn’t have been prescribed pain pills for her injuries, and she never would've gotten addicted.
And she never would have overdosed.
I glanced at Ollie in the passenger seat, and he looked as if he was barely breathing when I finished telling him. He was probably too fearful to do anything, afraid I’d stop spilling the ugly fucking truth. We were parked outside of the same house we came to last weekend when I’d come to teach Cole a lesson.
“Christian,” Ollie started, his voice raspy and broken.
I prepared myself for the worst. He was going to hate me. He now knew that I was the reason Mom was out driving that night. No one really questioned what she was doing or how I saw the wreck from my point of view on the sidewalk. Things were a whirlwind after that night. Mom in the hospital, then her recovery. She was never the same after that wreck. She suffered a mild head contusion, and maybe that was why she was different. Or maybe it was the pills.
Either way, she was never the same. We saw less and less of her at the house. We later found out that she was seeing multiple doctors for her “injuries” and possibly spending time with them outside of office hours, too. Though, I wasn’t sure if that was necessarily true—it was just from my assumptions over the years.
“How can you possibly hate Hayley for that?”
My own voice was unrecognizable. It was strained, hardly audible, weak. “Because if I blame her, then I don’t have to blame myself.”
Ollie scoffed. “Blame yourself for Mom dying? Are you kidding?”
My chest bled a little more. I squeezed the steering wheel. “No.”
He shifted beside me, but I kept my gaze on the house.
“It’s not your fault, Christian. It’s not Hayley’s either, but I’m guessing deep down you already know that. You were thirteen years old, worried about your best friend. No one could have predicted Mom would get into a wreck when she followed you. And no one could have predicted that she would get addicted to pain pills. If you blame yourself for her dying, then you might as well blame me, too.”
I shot my gaze to him. “Why would anyone blame you?”
He shrugged. “Maybe because after I watched you leave through my window, I told her to follow you.” My brows furrowed, and he nodded. “Yeah, I told her to go after you. She wasn’t going to. She kept saying you’d turn back around once you got wet enough, but I knew better. I didn’t know where you were going, but you were the most determined person I knew, and you never let anything get in the way of what you wanted. Not then and not now.”
His words were soothing to the cut in my chest, but it didn’t really fix me. Every time I looked at Hayley, I was reminded of that night. That dreadful, rainy fucking night that was the start of something terrible. She was a reminder of all the bad in my life.
Yet, there was still something inside of me that yearned to know she was okay.
It had always been that way with her and me. There’d been five years that we were separated, and every day, the little voice in the back of my head thought of her and wondered where she was.
Ollie’s voice brought my attention back. “It’s your best quality, you know.”
I cleared my throat. “What is?”
“Your determination. It’s why we’re sitting outside a mansion, trying to find the girl you pretend to hate. You’re determined to make sure she’s okay, no matter the consequences.”
“And what consequences are those?”
Ollie smirked. “I don’t know. Maybe walking into this party to snag Piper, knowing very well you’re likely to get jumped by a band of pussy-eating Wellington Prep boys because you beat one of their own last weekend.” He gave me a side look. “Not your best idea.”
Oh, right. That. Minor problem. “That’s why you’re going to go in there and pretend like you’re buddy-buddy with Piper.”
He laughed. “Can’t make any promises.” Then, he climbed out of the car and jogged up the steps, giving me a salute before entering the house.
“I can’t fucking believe that I fell for that.” Piper was sitting in the backseat of my Charger, red hot and fiery. Ollie was sitting smugly in the passenger seat, a big grin etched on his face. “I knew not to believe you. The biggest flirt in the school. As if Hayley would really be out here in Christian’s car, wanting to talk to me. She wouldn’t send you. Ugh.” She huffed. “I blame the alcohol.”
“Tell me,” I demanded, keeping my hands wrapped around the steering wheel. She had been in my backseat for twenty minutes and hadn’t budged once.
“I’m not telling you shit, King Christian. You hate Hayley. How do I know you’re not trying to get info out of me to use against her at school this week?”
I peered through the rearview mirror. “What was wrong with her today? I saw you trying to lift her shirt, and I also saw her wince when she climbed into your car after school.”
A coy smile worked itself onto her face. “Wow, for someone who hates Hayley so much, you seem to know a lot about her actions.”
“Fucking tell me.” I smacked the steering wheel with my hand.
“Nope,” she said with a pop on the letter P.
Ollie smirked when he looked back at her. “God, you’re even hotter when you're feisty, Piper.”
Her face twisted. “Ugh, shut up. I’m still angry with you.”
“Tell me right now, or I swear to God, I’ll drive right to her house and ask her myself.”
Piper laughed, sitting back further into the seat. “Fine, but you’ll have to climb through her window. Maybe then I’ll believe you have her best interests at heart.”
“Fucking fine, let’s go.” I turned the ignition, and my Charger rumbled to life.
“Fine! I can’t wait until she tosses your ass back out onto the ground for butting into her business!” she shouted.
Ollie twisted back around to me. “Bro, you can’t just fucking climb through her window.”
My head slowly swiveled over to him. “Watch me.”
Chapter Sixteen
Hayley
I curled into a ball on my mattress for the third time in twenty seconds, and yep, still freaking hurts.
Pete didn’t look in my direction once when I had gotten home. Not even when I took a bag of peas out of the freezer and carried them upstairs to my room. Jill wasn’t home again, but I really didn’t think she’d even care if she knew he had kicked me. She allowed him to hit her, so why would she care if he had hit me?
Piper had emailed me all evening. She’d begged for me to sneak out s
o I could get away from Pete. She even tried to bribe me with ice cream, but the thought of climbing out of the window with a footprint-sized bruise on my ribs? Yeah, no thank you.
She was worried about me. Her mortified expression imprinted itself into my brain after I had showed her the bruise. Piper knew something was wrong when I whimpered while carrying my backpack that morning. She tried to lift my shirt up in the middle of the hallway, upset that I wouldn’t tell her what happened, so I finally dragged her into the bathroom and reluctantly lifted my shirt.
I sighed as I flopped onto my back. The bag of peas was long gone. They thawed hours ago, and then I ate the cold, uncooked peas for dinner because there was absolutely no way in hell I was going back downstairs to see if there was dinner for me. I’d have rather eaten the stuffing inside this shitty mattress before I took anything from Pete.
As soon as I started to doze off, my eyes peeled open. Did I just hear something? I lay still, unmoving, my eyes adjusting to the dark room. The moon from the window gave away a soft glow, so I could see small glimpses of shadows along the wall. I focused on my locked bedroom door, fearful that the knob would turn and Pete would stumble in here. Wouldn’t be the first time someone stumbled into my room, hoping to get something that wasn’t theirs.
Placing my hands on the mattress, I slowly sat up, wincing at the bite in my side. And that was when I saw it. A dark figure standing over by the closet door, immobile, lurking in the dark.
Panic seized me, and I rushed to my feet, yelling out with pain. My breath shortened, but I was ready to fight. Did they really come for me?
“It’s me,” the voice said. My brows drew tighter, and I still wasn’t sure if I should scream.
“What are you doing in my room?” My voice was a whisper, but it was dripping with anger. The tiptoeing of my feet padded over to the small lamp on the floor, and I flicked it on, a soft light giving away that Christian was actually in my bedroom.