Tough Guy: A Bully Romance (Providence Prep High School Book 2)

by Jacob Allen

  The bell rang, signaling we had five minutes to get to our next class. I hadn’t even gotten to my locker yet.

  “So no, you don’t get a second chance because you already had one,” I said. “And I may be a nice girl, but I’m not a pushover. Not anymore, at least. No third chances.”

  I moved past Kevin, who stared at me dumbfounded. I didn’t bother to look back and see if he was still looking by the time I got to my locker.

  The time for caring about what Kevin thought had passed.

  I was never able to quite put the weekend out of mind.

  During class, I kept drifting back to what had happened. Why had Kevin drank so much? Would he have actually come into my house if I’d invited him? Was he serious about apologizing, or was that just another power ploy on his part?

  I tried like hell to shake the thoughts from my head. I really did not want my week after Sadie Hawkins to be spent thinking about Kevin Torres and all the ways that he seemed to control me. I really wanted to just end the semester by thinking about what little time I had left with Emily and Samantha before the former went to Vanderbilt and the latter went somewhere out of state.

  But I just couldn’t do it.

  When lunch came, I thought of going someplace different than the library purely so I wouldn’t have to deal with Kevin. He knew where I ate, having split his time between the Broad Street Boys and me, and I didn’t want to have another encounter. But I didn’t know where else I would eat, and I didn’t want to face the student body who may or may not have heard of Kevin’s drunken escapades. I picked a different spot in the library, but it wasn’t like this was a huge place; every chair was visible from the entrance, and only by hiding in the stacks could one be temporarily invisible.

  All went well for the first eighty percent of lunch. And then I saw Kevin enter.

  I tried to hide my eyes, casting them down at my phone, but it didn’t seem to deter Kevin. He just kept moving forward, kept coming to my table, kept on insisting for some reason on talking to me.

  When he slammed a bunch of books down in front of me, I had little choice but to look up at him.

  “What is this?” I said.

  “Look at the titles.”

  I looked. They were all biology or vegan books, all books that I hadn’t read before, all books that I had expressed an interest in. It was kind of a sweet gesture.

  But it also felt very manipulative.

  “How much of your money did you just spend on this?” I said.

  “Most of it,” Kevin said without hesitation. “After Sunday, I saw my father. I confronted him. I realized that I needed to push for what I liked, not shove it away. I like you, Jackie, and—”

  “Stop,” I said, cutting him off. “Look, I appreciate the gesture, but you can return these books. We are not Emily and Adam. Some grand gesture is not going to work on me.”

  “But—”

  “Please,” I said, holding up my hand.

  Kevin begrudgingly acquiesced, going silent.

  “Adam’s gesture worked because they had a history to fall back on,” I said. “They dated and were in love in middle school. It was sweet. They knew it was possible. But we don’t have that. Before this past month, all I’ve known of you was you as a bully. You had your chance, but I’m sorry. You ruined it.”

  I could hardly believe the bluntness with which I spoke. I didn’t think Kevin did, either, because his wide-eyed expression was like that of a boy who had just heard his parents swearing for the first time.

  “Look, I know I’m not Adam,” Kevin said, moving his hands with every word, as if he was trying to temper his own language or emphasize it. “I don’t have his money. I don’t have a home life as good as his, which is saying something. I don’t have the girl right now. But I had the girl. I had you. I still want you, Jackie. I’m so sorry for Saturday. I’m so sorry for getting so drunk I don’t remember it. I’m so sorry that I have treated you like shit for much of our time at Providence Prep. I just…”

  He sighed. He brushed his hair aside, and for one of the few times that I could remember, I was looking at both of his eyes right now.

  “I don’t want to be like my father. I want to chase that which I care about, that which I could almost say I love. That’s you, Jackie. Can you please give me a chance? I’m not asking you to date me right now. I’m just asking you to give me a chance at taking you out again.”

  I was touched. I really was. Kevin might have been trying to save his ass Sunday and this morning, but to more or less get humiliated with my constant rejections and come back to me as he was felt kind of nice. I didn’t think he could have humbled himself like so.

  But unfortunately, it just wasn’t enough.

  “I’m sorry, Kevin,” I said.

  He bit his lip, glumly nodded, and walked away. He had just done too much to prevent me from saying yes.

  For now.

  The bell rang for last period a short while later, and I got through that last period even more distracted than usual. It was a good thing that my grades didn’t much matter now, so long as I didn’t fail anything. I couldn’t stop thinking about what Kevin had done, couldn’t stop thinking about how much he had humbled himself.

  Did he deserve another chance? Was I really going to let him get that shot again?

  There was a part of his last words to me Saturday night that I hadn’t spent much time thinking about, but now that I reflected on them, they seemed even more pertinent than before. You want me to go home and get beaten? Fine.

  I still didn’t know much about his father, other than that Kevin hated him, but there was no way that he meant those words metaphorically. Kevin was definitely getting abused by his father. If that were the case, was it any wonder that me saying he had to go home was a trigger for him getting outraged? Was it any surprise that he would tell me to fuck off for doing that?

  I wasn’t yet ready to forgive Kevin for throwing up on me or give him a second chance. But I was beginning to understand him a little bit better.

  Still, if we were to ever have a chance of being anything more than former dates, I had to have him be more open. I had to know more about his past. And it had to come from him; I couldn’t find out from anyone other than Kevin himself.

  When the bell rang to signal the end of the day, I went to my Jeep without incident, thinking that maybe Kevin would get that chance if he could start—

  He was waiting for me at my car.

  “Kevin,” I said with a weary sigh. “I appreciate the effort, but—”

  “I just want a chance, Jackie,” he said. “I just want a chance. I don’t care if you go into the chance thinking there’s no way we can ever hang out again after that. Think of it as my chance to make things right. To make sure that when we have a night out, that I end it right. That I end it more maturely than I did on Saturday.”

  I took a deep breath and looked up at the sky. It was a sunny day, the kind of day that would roast a light-paled skin guy like Kevin up. But it was also the kind of day in which you could make out birds flying above in the sky with almost majestic ease.

  Have an open mind.

  “Fine,” I said. “But.”

  I hadn’t thought of my conditions yet. They came, though, with incredible ease.

  “No touching any alcohol while we’re out together,” I said. “No pregame, either. If you want to drink with the Broad Street Boys, you can do that. But while you’re with me, you stay sober. You understand?”

  “One hundred percent,” Kevin said. “Let me take you out Friday.”

  I was about to agree to that when I realized something.

  “But that’s the night before Adam’s party.”

  “And?”

  “Those are your boys. Won’t you have to plan and prepare?”

  But Kevin just shook his head.

  “They’re very good friends of mine,” he said. “They’re my best friends here. But the whole ‘Broad Street Boys’ thing? It’s not me. I’m n
ot rich, nor do I want the flashings of wealth. I just want to be real with you. So I’ll take you out, and if we have time after, I’ll go set up the party. But they can do fine without me.”

  Stunned underestimated how I felt. Was Kevin abandoning his group for me? He couldn’t have possibly come up with this idea without running it by Adam. He couldn’t possibly have given up so much for me on a whim.

  “You’re serious?”

  He nodded. I had to fight a smile—I didn’t want him to stop being on edge. I needed him cautious and honest.

  “Alright,” I said. “Then I’ll wait to see what you have planned for Friday night.”

  20

  KEVIN

  THE LAST TIME I had a date planned with Jackie, I struggled until almost the last minute to come up with a plan.

  This time, though, before Jackie had even agreed to it, I already knew what I was going to do. I was going to lay out the truth. I was going to put it all out there.

  As soon as classes ended Friday, I asked Jackie to follow me to my Honda Civic. She did so with a little trepidation, but when I showed her that the interior was much cleaner than she had ever remembered, she went along with it much more easily. I was silent at first, but as soon as we got out of the parking lot, I started speaking.

  “I’m going to take you by my home,” I said. “I want you to understand where I come from. I want you to understand my upbringing. I want you to know the truth about me, so that whatever you decide, you make the best informed decision.”

  When I’d thought of telling all of this before, I had always felt sick to my stomach, a sort of sinking nervousness that could not be described in any way other than “hell no.” But now, with Jackie, it just felt like something that I had to do and that I didn’t feel nervous about doing. It just felt right.

  “My family has always been poor,” I said. “My father is a car mechanic. Well, he was. My mother died when I was young. Even then, I knew that my father had a temper and he loved his alcohol, but as soon as my mother died, it got worse. He’d drink all the time. He threatened to hurt me even more if I told anyone. What made it worse was that he got smarter. At first, he hit me in the face. But then, after a teacher said something, most of his hitting came to my body. It was only when he was stupidly drunk that he would hit me on the face, like at the beginning of the semester.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to look at Jackie as I told this story, but I could hear her sniffling from the passenger’s seat.

  “One thing I learned quite quickly, growing up in that household, was to always know where my father was,” I said. “If I knew where he was, then there was no chance that he could attack me without noticing me. That’s why, that one day, when you came up behind me, I reacted as strongly as I did. My father trained me to fear anything that approached me from behind. If anyone really surprised me, I was bound to attack them. I’m glad I didn’t hurt you, but it could have happened.”

  My eyes welled up when I said that. The thought of continuing the pattern of abuse my father had given to me was terrifying, and yet I had just openly admitted it could have happened very easily.

  But I refused to cry. This wasn’t meant to be a pity party. This wasn’t about making Jackie feel so bad for me as to date me. This was just about telling the truth and nothing but the truth, and then letting Jackie decide for herself what that all meant.

  “I only confronted my father for the first time on Sunday,” I said. “I don’t want to say the hangover did it, because that would be suggesting it was a good thing I got as drunk as I did. It’s not a good thing. I don’t need to be repeating my father’s decisions and mistakes. But regardless, only then did I face him. Only then did I realize just how bad his life is. He treats me like shit because his life is shit. He told me to move far away if I could help it.”

  I just shrugged, as if I was choosing to answer the question myself right now.

  “Right now, I don’t know what I’m going to do for college,” I said. “I could go in-state and just pay off the minimal loans. I applied to Vanderbilt, but that’s a joke. I might be smart enough for it, but there’s no chance I’m going to be able to afford it. If that’s true for Vanderbilt, it’s true for all the out of state schools. I know what my father said. But there’s also a part of me that can’t leave him, at least not so far as to be a plane flight away. If I do that, who is going to take care of him? Who is going to look out for him?”

  No one, that’s who. Because everyone else who ever cared about my father in any capacity had since run as far away as possible, gone in the opposite direction to avoid having to deal with Mr. Torres.

  “This is my world, Jackie,” I said. “You need to know everything within it. You need to know that I don’t think I’m a bad person. I do bad things. I am responsible for those things. I come from a bad place. But I don’t think I’m a bad person. I just think I’m a person who’s scared to discuss the truth for how it might look.”

  A few minutes later, I pulled up to the front yard. My father was asleep on his chair, his head bowed, a can of beer by his side. It probably said a lot that my first thought was “at least it’s not liquor.”

  I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I’d planned on just getting here and figuring it out. I didn’t think my father would have caused a scene in front of a woman like Jackie.

  But now, starting at him, I really didn’t want to go inside. I didn’t want to wake him up. I had a man about twenty feet from me who hated his life and sometimes hated me; I had a woman about two feet from me who acted very nicely to me and was fair, even when I deserved to be shamed for what I did.

  It wasn’t much of a contest. In fact, it wasn’t even a contest at all.

  “And here’s the thing about it,” I said. “It’s not just that I come from a broken home. It’s that you come from a beautiful home. I knew that by the way you smiled every day upon walking into school. Someone had to have taught you that, because I was like that before Mom died. When I came to your home, it confirmed it for me.”

  “Did you ask to come to my house for that reason?”

  “No, I just didn’t want you to see my home,” I said. “The fact that I got to meet your parents was a bonus.”

  I finally looked over at Jackie, who was looking at my father contemplatively.

  “And here I was, thinking that you were going to mock my parents,” she said.

  I reeled back in surprise.

  “I mean, maybe I’d have made a joke about meditation, but I never was going to make fun of your parents. I loved your parents. Your parents give you love and support in a way mine don’t. Whenever I acted out against you, it was out of jealousy. It was never to mock you.”

  I sighed, realizing just how badly I had come across before.

  “But I promise to be better.”

  I looked at her hand, a hand I wanted so badly to hold and caress as my own. I wanted to take it, kiss it, and beg for forgiveness for all that I had done to her, ask for understanding of all of the horrible things that I had done.

  But it took two to tango, and Jackie still had a little bit of coldness to her body language.

  “This is good,” she said. “I appreciate you sharing this. But I need more from you, Kevin.”

  She already knew the question before I even asked it. I supposed I appreciated this aspect of her. I appreciated that she was answering the question before I asked it, which saved us both the gamesmanship of having to put forward a relatively uncomfortable question.

  “What you did on Saturday at Sadie Hawkins, I can’t pretend it didn’t happen,” she said. “I know you want another chance at us being a thing. I know you don’t want to stop here. And I guess…”

  “You need to see more, but you don’t know what more is?”

  Jackie nodded.

  “Are you coming to the party tomorrow?”

  “To Adam’s?”

  “Yep.”

  Jackie stared straight ahead, looking once more at my father
. I followed her gaze. My father was still asleep on his front porch. If I didn’t know better, there might have been good reason to assume he was dead.

  But he wasn’t. The old man just couldn’t die, at least not for a long, long time.

  “Do you want me to go?”

  I looked at her with an amused smile. What, did she think I had asked all of this so that I could surprise reject her?

  “Yes.”

  “Then yes, I will come to the party.”

  I smiled with hope and gratitude. I might yet get my shot back to have her. I knew I had to do something more than a “grand gesture.” It had to be grand, but not in a public way like Adam had done his. That would never work.

  No, I had to think of something more personalized. And, practically, it had to be free.

  But what?

  “So what now?” Jackie asked.

  “Oh, honestly, I didn’t have anything else planned,” I admitted with a hesitant chuckle. “I was afraid after you saw this that you’d just ask to end it and that would be it.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really.”

  “Kevin,” Jackie said, touching my arm and send a voltage shock of energy through my arm. “I judge you because of you. Not because of who your father is and what horrible things he’s done. I like you for you. I’m glad I know this about you, but you are the one I pick.”

  I like you for you. Not “liked.” Present tense.

  There’s still hope.

  “OK,” I said with a soft smile. “I should take you back to the car, though. I honestly didn’t have anything else planned for today.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, and besides, I think I’d like some time to plan for tomorrow,” I said. “Not for the Broad Street Boys’ party. But for us.”

  “What, like they’re distinct?”

  I already knew the answer to that. I just didn’t want to say it out loud and put pressure on Jackie. That would come tomorrow.

  “Let’s go.”