by Angel Lawson
“That was close,” I reply, and he nods, releasing me gently until my feet touch the ground. “Probably a good thing—”
“No.”
I bite my lip. “No?”
“Well, you’re right. It probably was a good thing.” The pang of hurt I feel doesn’t even make any sense. He’s just agreeing with me. Except he’s not done. “We shouldn’t do this here,” he explains, tucking a piece of hair behind my ear. He trails his fingers down my jaw, hooks one beneath my chin, and tilts my face to his. “I don’t want to screw you against a tree, Adams. I want you in a bed where I can take my time and there’s no risk of interruption.”
“Oh.” Heat rushes through me and I try to comprehend what he’s saying.
“I mean,” he smiles devilishly, “I will take you right here if that’s the only option, but—”
“We’ll figure it out,” I reply, voice a little shaky, but still sure. “But I think we should go. Neither of us can miss curfew.”
He seems in agreement, although his jaw is clenched so tight, I’m not sure what he’s really thinking. But then he reaches for me, pulling me against the solid breadth of him, and presses another one of those slow, tender kisses into my mouth. His tongue sweeps against mine, hot and hungry, but before it can get too far, he releases me with a shudder.
He commands, “Go.”
I do as he says, opting not to fight with him for once, and head across the quiet campus, back to my dorm. At the door, I stop to enter the code, sparing a paranoid glance over my shoulder. That’s when I see him, barely visible under the shadow of the trees, watching and waiting for me until I get inside.
18
Hamilton
The next few days begin something new—strange and exciting.
For years, I’ve been in the spotlight. A golden boy who everyone looks up to, the kid they want to be. I didn’t come into my popularity honestly, I was just bestowed it, simply by being a Bates. It’s in my genes, my blood, and my name. Stepping into the role of leading the Devils was natural. Excelling in sports, academics, was always a given. Things came easily to me.
Gwendolyn Adams isn’t easy, which is exactly why I can’t get enough of her.
Sending her away that night below the tree was a feat of strength—an amount of sheer willpower that I had no idea I possessed. I’d wanted her so desperately that it was borderline masochism the way I kept pulling back. I’ve jerked off ten times since then using the memory of her pressed up against that tree. The way she felt, warm and frantic up against me, the scent of her, the sounds she made. What I’d said to her was the truth. I wanted more than a quick bang in the shadows of the quad. I wanted to take my time, do it right, take and have everything, and that required self-control.
At first, we ignore one another like usual. We slide into our assigned seats without meeting each other’s gaze. We avoid one another in the hall. I continue hanging out with my friends, keeping Reagan at bay. My interest in her has dropped to zero, maybe even less. Her touch does nothing for me, and my excuses are growing shorter and increasingly flimsy as the days pass. I just don’t care. After having something I actually want, the thought of Raegan is just disappointing. My focus is on something bigger, brighter. Something addictive.
I’m doing my best not to stare at her in the cafeteria, where she sits at her usual table with Tyson, when Campbell walks in and tosses a stack of tickets on the table.
“What’s this?” Ansel asks, picking one up. He pulls a face. “A dance performance?”
Campbell shoots daggers at him. “My sister is in it and she has to sell a dozen tickets. My mom bought those, but we have to fill the seats. I need everyone to come,” Campbell explains, sitting diagonally from me. “Just show up, clap, and she’ll let us have a party at my house. My dad will provide the alcohol and everything.”
“Can we use his boat?” Heston asks. His jaw is bruised and swollen. He’s been treating me so coldly that we haven’t spoken to one another in days. This is just fine by me. As far as I know, no one has asked about the bruise or my red knuckles. Some things are best left unsaid.
“Not if you’re drinking,” Campbell replies, “but he did install a new hot tub, and that’s fair game.”
Heston picks up a ticket and tucks it in his jacket pocket. “I’m in.”
The others grab their tickets while I’m distracted by Gwendolyn’s fingers, lazily scratching just above the hemline of her skirt.
“Ham!”
I jerk my eyes to Campbell. She’s holding the last ticket in my face. I take it from her with a long-suffering sigh. “Sure, I’ll go.”
Her gaze darts over to Gwendolyn and then back to mine. “You know, her little brother is in the program. He’s got the leading role. My sister was so pissed about it. She’s pretty sure he only got it out of pity.”
I give her a bored look. “And you’re telling me all of this because…”
She shrugs. “You just seem so focused on her lately, I thought you may want to know.”
Every stare at the table lifts to me. Everyone but Reagan, who is fastidiously interested in her salad. Heston watches me more closely than any of them, the muscles of his bruised jaw hard and tense. “I’m not interested in her. Between swim and detention, she’s making my life miserable.”
I suspect most of them don’t buy it—Heston and Campbell, especially—but at this point, what can I do?
The gods seem to be on my side, because the cafeteria is filled with the sudden shriek of the fire alarm. A collective groan rumbles down the table.
Xavier mutters, “Fucking stoners in the bathroom again. Why can’t they smoke up behind the dumpsters like a civilized person?”
He’s probably right. This happens once a quarter and is almost always traced back to someone hotboxing in the third-floor boys' room. It makes it pretty hard to take any alarm seriously, except...
Dean Dewey stands at the front of the room, announcing in a strained, but artificially calm voice, “I need everyone to follow directions. Please proceed to the nearest exit, this is not a drill.”
“Definitely the stoners,” Ansel sighs. Emory’s already standing, eyes skimming the room. No doubt he’s looking for his sister. The instant he locates her across the room, he’s bolted from the table, taking off to make sure she’s okay.
I glance at Campbell and she shrugs. “You know how protective he is.”
“Overprotective,” I add. Sometimes I wonder if it’s less about the injury she sustained in the accident and more about keeping his increasingly hot sister away from the degenerates at the school.
Whichever, I use the distraction to break away from the others by just hanging back. They’re almost instantly swallowed by the crowd, giving me a much-needed reprieve. We’re squeezed into a narrow line as we exit the cafeteria, bodies bumping into one another. Some idiot sophomore wearing a gallon of Axe elbows me in the side, and then cringes away at the heat of my glare. With the cloud of bad body spray, it takes me a moment to catch the scent of smoke—something woodsy and plastic-bitter. Definitely not weed.
That’s when I see the top of Gwendolyn’s head, bobbing along in the crowd. She’s far ahead of me, to the west of the room, and I track her with my eyes.
Then, she disappears.
One second, she’s there, and the next, she’s gone.
I surge forward, pushing past people who mutter curses at me.
“Everyone stay calm,” a teacher announces, “head to the nearest exit. Don’t panic. Everything is under control; you just need to follow protocol!”
That just makes it worse, and I’m caught in a throng of increasingly nervous students, the air around us growing denser with smoke with every passing second. People start to push. A few girls cry out in panic, and I don’t recognize any of them.
Until I do.
I know it’s Gwen’s cry I hear, something shrill and pained. I can’t see her, though. She was there, I know she was. I keep my eyes focused on where I saw her last. S
he was on the other side of a tide of people, getting pushed down one of the halls. My heart hammers as I work sideways, not caring who I shove aside or run into. They yell at me to move, but I don’t, not until I’m there, not until I—
She’s crouched on the floor, arms shielding her head, and I have to push someone with an obnoxiously bulging backpack out of the way to reach out and grab her wrist.
Her hand balls into a fist, fighting against me—always fighting against me—but I don’t let go.
“It’s me, it’s just me!” I yell over the din. Finally, her blue eyes raise to mine, and my mouth parts in shock.
There’s blood.
“He kicked me.” She cups a shaking palm over her nose, eyes wide with a wild mixture of fear, anger, and hurt. “I fell and he kicked me in the face.”
I tear my eyes away from her bloody face to look around, vision going red. “Who?”
She tugs my arm, using it to pull herself upright. “I don’t know, I only saw his shoe.”
Our palms flatten, fingers linking, and I pull her with me through the mob, shielding her as we go, and I keep searching for the person responsible, despite having no information to go off of. Whoever it was, he better hope it stays that way.
It seems like it takes forever until we finally spill outside, the glare of the sun seeming too stark and bright. I instantly whirl around to her, tilting her face.
“Jesus Christ,” I breathe as I inspect her. The blood has run down her mouth, over her chin. She looks ghoulish. “Does it feel broken?”
She blinks at me owlishly, lifting her free hand to prod at it. “I don’t know?”
“It’d feel crunchy,” I say impatiently, “like a bag of pebbles.”
She prods it again, wincing. “I don’t think so. I don’t know, it just stings.”
I exhale. “Did he get you anywhere else?” I ask, eyes sweeping down her body.
She shakes her head. “I don’t even know how I fell. I was fine and then everyone was freaking out.”
My heart slowly starts to get back to a normal rate. “It was like you got swallowed.”
“Hey,” a voice says and we both turn, seeing Tyson appear from the crowd. “I got stuck in there—” His eyes take in several things in quick succession. Her bloody face, our linked hands, the blood on my sleeve from where she grabbed me for leverage.
His jaw locks, eyes growing wide with ferocity. “Oh, I know you fucking didn’t.” He drops his bag and stalks forward, but Gwen steps between us, dropping my hand like a hot poker.
“No no no,” she tells Tyson. “I fell in there and someone kicked me. He just helped me up, pulled me through the crowd.”
Tyson looks skeptical at first, eyes darting avidly between us. “If he did something to you—”
I gape at him in disbelief. “Why does everyone think I’m an abusive piece of shit this month?”
Gwen swipes the back of her hand over her mouth. “Ty, seriously. You know if he’d done this to me, I’d have his balls in my pocket right now. The guy had orange shoes. That’s all I know.”
Tyson’s gaze drops to my shoes.
“They’re black!” I lift a foot to prove it.
Tyson ultimately sags, bending to retrieve his bag. He pulls out a travel-size bag of tissues, handing them to Gwen. “Sorry, that was just kind of a fucked-up thing to see after all that. Are you okay?”
“Yes, we’ve already determined it’s probably not broken.” Gwen presses a wad of tissues to her nose, eyebrows furrowed. Her voice is firm and sure when she adds, “It wasn’t an accident. It was like he literally went out of his way to kick me.”
I ask, “Are you sure you didn’t notice anything else about him?” as my narrowed eyes take in the scattered crowd. No one’s looking our way that I can tell.
She sighs, dropping the hand with the soiled tissue. She looks exhausted, probably from the adrenaline crash. “Just that it was a guy.”
I slide my hands into my pocket, at a loss for what to do. I look at Tyson, who seems in the same boat. Except, he can do stuff like this:
“Come on.” He cups her by the elbow and leads her toward where the faculty are congregating. “Let’s see if we can get a nurse to check that out, yeah?”
She nods, sparing me a glance over her shoulder as they walk away.
Thanks, she mouths.
Tyson gives me a look over his shoulder, too, but his is a mixture of curiosity and suspicion.
Better him than any of the Devils, I think, going the opposite way. What was I thinking, going after her like that? Touching her like that? They’re already suspicious enough, and the fallout would be catastrophic. There’s no way my father wouldn’t find out, especially after what happened to Hollis.
But I do know what I was thinking. I was thinking that whatever the hell is going on with me and Gwendolyn right now, it’s simultaneously the most thrilling and terrifying thing that’s ever happened to me.
I’m not ready to give it up.
19
Gwen
“So, what was that between you and Hamilton?”
I flex my hand, because it’s like I can still feel his skin against mine. Confused, hurt, angry, and overwhelmed, I didn’t know it was Hamilton grabbing for me in the hallway at first; but then I felt the tell-tale tingling that charged between us whenever we touched, and I knew.
Even without him saying it was him, I knew.
I don’t know how he knew to come for me. But thank God he did.
Now Tyson stands before me with a million questions. I don’t have any answers—at least not any that I want to give.
“Nothing,” I reply, sitting on a bench away from the crowd. The nurse has already checked me out and determined that I’d probably have a nice big bruise bloom in the next few days, but for now it’s just swollen and sore, otherwise unbroken. “I was on the floor bleeding all over the place, and I guess he saw me. He just helped me get outside.”
Tyson’s eyebrows climb his forehead. “Dude, he was totally holding your hand.”
“Yes.” Fact. He was.
“Why?”
“Well, he was leading me through the hall because I was hurt. It was just chaotic—even you got stuck, right?”
He nods. Tyson is a new friend—my only friend. He doesn’t know everything that has gone on between me and the Devils over the years, but he knows enough. Enough to actually try getting up in Hamilton’s face when he thought he’d hurt me. There was no doubt in my mind that Tyson would have thrown down to avenge me. The memory makes me even more fond of my new friend.
“You’d tell me if something was going on, right?” Tyson studies me, frowning. “Because I told you before, I have your back. You don’t have to keep secrets from me.”
“There’s no secret,” I assure him, even though I feel bad about lying. That’s not a great start to a friendship, but whatever is going on between me and Hamilton right now, it’s no one’s business but ours. “We’re on better terms now with the whole co-captain thing. Honestly, he probably helped me so that he doesn’t get stuck with my half of the work.”
He barks a laugh. “That, I’d believe.”
A fire truck rolls into the parking lot and a flurry of men rush into the building. I’m struck with another memory: Hamilton asking who kicked me, and the look of blind, controlled fury on his face as he searched the hallway for him. Just as baldly as I know Tyson would have pummeled Hamilton for hurting me, Hamilton would have definitely kicked the shit out of that guy.
I would have probably given it a go myself.
“It’s just scary,” I say, staring pensively into the distance. “That someone would want to hurt me like that.” And I am hurt, physically, but also it just hurts in general. “I’m not, like, a bad person. I never bother anyone. I go out of my way to not make a splash here. It’s just...” I rub my temples, feeling the beginnings of a killer headache. “It’s really messed up.”
Tyson squeezes my shoulder. “Maybe it was an accident?”<
br />
My mouth twists. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
Except I do know. It wasn’t an accident. And while having Hamilton and Tyson at the ready to inflict physical violence on my behalf is nice, one thing is clear.
I need to watch my own back.
Hours later, it’s determined that the fire started in the Home Economics lab. It totally did involve the stoners, only instead of smoking in the bathroom, they were baking weed brownies. Apparently, the brownies sat forgotten in the oven for so long that it halfway burned down the kitchen.
The next day, I open my locker and a piece of paper, folded into a star, falls out. Discreetly, I pick it up and unfold it.
I resisted the other day because I was serious. I want to be with you again.
Come up with a place or I will, not sure if I can hold out much longer.
Heat rushes up my neck and I glance around to see if anyone noticed, which is ridiculous, because I’m still a ghost to most of the school. Even sporting a horrifically bruised nose that’s covered poorly with concealer, eyes still pass over me. A few kids on the swim team have relaxed around me, and obviously there’s Tyson. But as I glance around, I do meet one pair of eyes.
They’re steel gray, dark, and filled with intent.
I head to class, feeling the weight of the note in my pocket like a heady thing. Is this really what we’re doing? No longer falling prey to spontaneous lust, but planning it? Admittedly, the fact that Hamilton wants me so badly is thrilling in the most disturbing of ways. He makes me feel good—he makes me feel—which is something I’ve been afraid to do lately.
I think long and hard about answering, my teacher droning at the front of the class, while my heart beats erratically. Just before the bell, I pull out a piece of paper and scribble my reply. I walk down the hallway, jammed between the influx of students, and try to stay focused on my destination. I can’t help the anxiety building in my chest at the full hallway, memories of what happened the previous day knocking around in my head.