3 Book High School Romance Bundle: A Kiss at Midnight & Prom King & Under My Skin

by Zara Rivas

  "Where does she live?" he asked, as we drove north along the highway. Sinclair'd offered to drive us there but I didn't feel like giving him directions and it was always a trip I took on my own anyway.

  "About an hour and a half outside of town. Is that a problem?" I asked, casting a sidelong glance at him. He shook his head.

  "Not at all. I figured we'd be hanging out for a few hours anyway." He glanced out the window. "Tell me about your mom."

  "She's…bright," I said, trying to put a person into words. "Sunny. Always a smile, the need to help people. She's a surgeon, but she's magic with people, you know?"

  "Seems like you really admire her."

  "I do."

  We made a good part of the rest of the drive in silence. Sinclair would ask me occasionally about something, or change the radio station, which I didn't mind. He could sense that I wasn't in a very talkative mood and kept to himself mostly, sometimes commenting on the scenery. It was beautiful out this way—all hills and trees, greenery even though it was still pretty much winter. The evergreens were beautiful no matter what.

  I decided to use the back entrance to her residence so as not to freak Sinclair out, and when we exited the highway we went on a road full of twists, turns, and small bridges over a river that wound around the property. I parked the car under a large tree, still bare of leaves, and reached into the back seat to pull out the bag I'd brought. Sinclair stepped out of the car and looked around in wonder—even in winter, this place was still extraordinarily beautiful.

  "Where's the house?" Sinclair asked, looking around curiously.

  "Come on," I said, trudging over to an oft-used path through a small tree grove. "You'll see."

  I led him through the path, looking over my shoulder occasionally to make sure he hadn't gotten lost. He kept up with me, though, and we finally arrived at our destination.

  We moved through the break in the trees and I heard him stop short, but kept going. I didn't really want to see the horrified look on his face, and I knew he'd follow me eventually if I just ignored his discomfort. Cold, maybe, but it worked. After a few seconds I heard him catch up to me.

  We walked through rows and rows of flowers, finally coming to a halt in front of a particularly beautiful tree with ivy winding its way up. Double edged sword, I thought, knowing the ivy would one day kill the tree. Sinclair stared at the ground and I knew he put two and two together the moment we entered the clearing, but it still disconcerted me a little bit to see him standing in this particular place with me. With my mother.

  He stared down at the headstone that clearly read PENELOPE CAMELLIA LOCKE-LEXINGTON and the years of her life and death. I sat down silently, twining grass through my fingers and watching him. He looked at me inquisitively and took his place beside me. I opened my bag and handed him a sheet of paper.

  "Sloane…" he begins, and I shook my head.

  "It was years ago," I said quickly, and I was surprised at how even my voice sounded. "In town. She wanted to be buried here, though. It was her favorite place." I gave a short laugh. "Not the cemetery, of course, but this land. It's where she grew up, and my father acquiesced to her wishes when she died."

  He stared down at the sketch in his hands, his face a blank mask.

  "That's a drawing I did of her the summer she died. Before, obviously. She was playing with my sister, Daphne, and they were having so much fun. My mother loved to climb trees, so she and Daphne were acting like monkeys. I don't think they knew I was on the roof watching them with binoculars. Talk about creepy." I gave a light laugh.

  "She's beautiful," he said, and I could hear the honesty in his voice.

  "She was," I said, and my voice cracked a little. I took a deep breath and rallied my internal resolve. "So, Sinclair, want to hear all my secrets?"

  He didn't say anything for a long time. He just stared down at the sketch in his hands. It was still the most lifelike sketch I'd ever drawn, and sometimes I thought I'd inhibited my own abilities when working on other projects to keep it that way. I didn't want anything I'd ever done to surpass the laughter in my mother's and sister's eyes.

  Sinclair finally looked up at me.

  "If you want to tell them." He handed me back the sheet of paper and I carefully slid it back into the bag, pulling out a file in its place. I set it in his hands and opened it for him.

  "That's everything, pretty much," I admitted. "You and a few of my close friends are the only people who know about this besides my family. Everybody else just thinks I was gone from school for a while for an exchange program. Hotchins let me do all my schoolwork from the hospital."

  The file was thick, spilling over with oft-read papers and photographs, things I'd never quite been able to let go.

  "Aren't these files supposed to be classified?" he asked, rifling through the papers. Photographs of horror, police reports, hospital records.

  "Money buys a lot," I said flatly. That was the only explanation I bothered to give, and he didn't ask for more.

  He didn't ask me to tell him anything more, but I knew there was only so much he could get from the police reports.

  "My mum and I took a trip," I said, "just for the day. You know how sometimes I talk about Impulse Days? I got that from her. Whenever she'd feel like skipping off and doing something, she could afford to. So she'd call me in sick at school and we'd go do something random—go to a carnival, an amusement park, a day trip to a lake for a picnic, and we'd go with the whole family. Sometimes it was just us. That day the two of us decided to go to an amusement park and ride roller coasters until we couldn't walk in a straight line anymore."

  I smiled a little at the memories, my face feeling oddly tight, and couldn't really see Sinclair in front of me: my vision was too blurred by vendor stalls and the sound of laughter, the smell of cotton candy, but I trudged on through the story anyway. Sinclair did not interrupt.

  "We had a blast. It was always fun hanging out with her."

  I reached into a side pocket of the bag and pulled out a little coin with a leopard about to spring on it, on a small chain, and passed it to him. He let it dangle in the sunlight and the rays glinted off of it.

  "She won that at a stall, throwing darts at balloons." I shook my head ruefully. "She was more into the stall games than I was. I just wanted to be hanging upside down two hundred feet in the air."

  "Sounds like between the two of you, you had the whole place covered," Sinclair smiled.

  "We did." I returned his smile a little more easily than before. "It was late when we decided to head home, though. The park had just closed, but people were already filtering out anyway because a storm was moving through."

  I took the necklace back and turned it over in my hands while Xavier watched me. On the other side, the date was marked, and the name of the park.

  "We got back into town and it was raining really heavily, but we could still see enough to drive safely, you know?"

  He nodded. There was really no input required for that and he knew it.

  "We were about ten minutes away from home, in that intersection right next to the park…the one with the jungle gym."

  I could tell he knew which one I was talking about, so I continued.

  "We had a green light. We didn't see the other driver, so by the time we got into the intersection it was too late to do anything about it."

  "And somebody ran a red light," Sinclair finished, looking appalled.

  "Drunk driver," I confirmed, looking down at my mother's tombstone. There was a beautiful scene engraved on it with mountains and trees and life everywhere. I hoped she would have loved it. I designed it for her at my father's request.

  I ran my fingers over a treetop and tried to continue.

  "They hit my mother's side of the car head-on," I said, my voice sliding into a steady monotone. "She died almost instantly. Their truck drove our car into a pole on the passenger side." I traced over the scars above my jeans. "I don't remember much after that. There was just a lot of blood�
��and screaming. I think the screaming came from me but I was never sure."

  "Sloane," Sinclair said, stricken. He ran his fingers through my hair, resting them on my neck. The pressure of his fingers felt good, but I still felt the urge to flinch away. I resisted, knowing it would only confuse him if I did. I didn't say anything for a long time.

  The wind picked up a little, making the edges of my hair flutter, and a few birds chirped in the tree overhead. I looked up into the branches, surprised that there would even be birds out this early in the year, and gave up trying to find them when they quieted.

  "The driver of the other car was unhurt," I said, anger tinging my voice. Sinclair's fingers tensed. "It still doesn't make any sense to me. He's in prison now. The passenger in the other car went into a coma. As far as I know, he hasn't woken up and I haven't bothered to check. I don't want to know."

  Still silence from him. What can you say to something like that? Some things cannot be fixed.

  I pulled out the rest of the drawings, sketches, and paintings I'd done about the accident over the years. I handed them to him and he went through them one by one, eyes permeated with sadness.

  "The paramedics thought I was unconscious," I said lightly, "and one of them said 'why are we even going to bother, Gabriel? She has no chance', and the other said 'then let's give her one.'" I tilted my head back so my blurry eyes didn't spill over with tears. "I guess I owe Gabriel my life."

  "Have you seen him since?" Xavier finally asks.

  "No," I shrugged. I didn't tell him that my eyes were so full of blood streaming down from my head that I couldn't get a good look at him. Unnecessary details, I told myself. He doesn't need to know everything.

  "So…what about your dad? What happened there?" he asked tentatively, setting the drawings gingerly on the grass. They fluttered a little in the breeze but didn't blow away.

  "He lost it." I put the papers back in my bag once again and tossed him an apple. He took it but didn't bite into it. "He couldn't function without my mother. I don't think he knows how to live without her, so he just left us. For some reason, he took my little sister along. I've seen her four times since then. That's it." I shook my head.

  "I did something so stupid yesterday. When I told you I could come over, it's because I'd just stormed out on dinner with my father, pretty much screaming at him for abandoning us. I'm not sure he could help it any more than Dominic could help taking over responsibility for me, but…he shouldn't have left. I can't help but hate him sometimes."

  There was a slightly plaintive note in my tone, like I was looking for approval for my actions, and Sinclair definitely noticed it.

  "You were so young, Sloane, he shouldn't have left you," he said firmly. I wiped my nose with the back of my hand and nodded my head jerkily.

  I laughed suddenly, quelling a small hiccup along with it. I felt lighter somehow, more free, and I knew I'd wanted to talk about my mother for a long time, but it was difficult.

  "So that's my sob story," I said with a small grin. "Family history overload, much?"

  "I think I can handle it," he said dryly, finally taking a bite of the apple and offering the rest to me. I crunched a small bite out of it and tossed it back.

  "I've been wanting to come here for so long," I said, taking a look around at the woods. The trees rustled in the breeze and it was comforting somehow. "I don't know why I didn't."

  "I've heard you talking about it. I figured she just lived a long way away."

  "She does, now."

  I said it distantly, and I realized that even though it still cut, it didn't hurt so much, anymore.

  We sat there for a long time in silence, just watching the wind whisper through the grass. At some point I fell asleep, and when I woke up my head was in Sinclair's lap, and he was running his fingers through my hair gently. With his other hand, he turned the coin over, and over, and over, staring down at it with furrowed brows. I pretended not to see.

  oOoOo

  Sinclair stared at the photographs hanging up and drying in the darkroom. They were far from finished, but still beautiful. He preferred Sloane's laughter and lightheartedness to the mute, depressed Sloane from the meadow cemetery, because the former made his throat clench.

  He knew she must have tormented herself for months, if not years, after the accident with those files, because they contained all the photography the police had collected for the trial. Including the car being wrenched apart, the bloodstained interior, the twisted metal. It made him almost physically ill to look at them and know two people had been inside that car when it was crushed like a can.

  And then there was one.

  She looked lost, broken. Xavier watched her tell her story but she still distanced herself from it, trying to keep herself separate from the jumble of pain and confusion of the night her mother died.

  He internally smacked himself for keeping so quiet through the whole thing, but he had no idea what to say. Nothing would comfort her, he knew, considering the stakes were so high and what was done couldn't be changed, but he at least should have been able to find something.

  The police reports showed that the car had to be wrenched apart by some sort of machinery for them to pull Sloane out. The photographs showed the bloodstained interior of both vehicles, but there was far more blood in the Lexingtons' car than in the truck that demolished it.

  He left the darkroom, careful to draw the curtain around the door before he opened it, and went back upstairs to his room. He stared at the journals along his bookshelf and wondered if Sloane would expect repayment for the secrets she'd freely given away, and then felt disgusted with himself by the thought. That wasn't the kind of story you shared when you wanted information out of someone. It was too personal, too close.

  Still, he felt like he owed her somehow.

  oOoOo

  "Come, Finn, I need to have some fun," I said, eyes sparkling mischievously. I surprised him at his dorm that night and tried to drag him out of bed, but he resisted all my efforts.

  "You've had your fun, you ran Logan off," he said into his pillow, resisting my attempts to rouse him from sleep.

  I yanked his blankets off him and watched him curl up, trying to preserve his body heat, and then balled them up and smacked him in the head with him. "I took Sinclair to see mom."

  He was up like a shot after that, wide awake and watching me from his bed while I rummaged around in his closet for some pants.

  "Did you tell him everything?"

  "Yeah, mostly," I said vaguely, throwing clothes at his head. He caught them, unfortunately.

  "What brought this on?" he asked, intensely curious.

  "Impulse day," I said.

  He understood. "Got it. Have anything in mind for tonight?"

  "Not really. I just wanted to come see you."

  His face lights up with a smirk and he eyes me devilishly. "I think I know just the thing."

  Thirty minutes later, we were creeping through a dark room lit with blacklights while holding weapons, hunting out our enemies. I gleefully took out a guy who looks like a college senior, whooping quietly when his vest lit up and he cursed.

  "I didn't even know they had twenty-four hour laser tag around here," I whispered to Finn, who just shakes his head and grins.

  "Me either until a few days ago. Perfect, isn't it?"

  "So far beyond perfect it's astounding."

  I heard a noise behind me and quickly turned around, expecting an attack, but there was nothing there. Eyes narrowed in suspicion, I hid behind a rock and waited for someone to appear. Bad move on my part. My vest lit up and I heard someone whooping with laughter behind me, and when I turned, I discovered it to be Finn. Surely he wouldn't have shot me, though. He was my teammate.

  Finn pointed to someone to his left, and I followed his finger and nearly growled at the sight before me. Dominic stood there, grinning, gun lazily pointed at the ground, leaning nonchalantly on a pillar next to him. He raised his gun and blew idly on the end of it
, as though blowing smoke away.

  "Losing your touch, sister dear?" he asked, smirking.

  Sixteen

  The smiley face was painted over on my locker before I got to school on Friday, and I didn't particularly care. It didn't even surprise me. If it was supposed to be some sort of message, though, it failed miserably because I had no patience for someone who played games like that.

  Dominic, Finn and I had a fantastic three a.m. paintball fight when we finished our laser tag, so I was kind of wandering around school in a lethargic haze by the time classes started.