by Nicole Fox
“Are you being chased?” Caleb asks, sounding bored with the idea. “I thought I made it clear that I’m not saving your ass again. Fool me twice, et cetera.”
I take a deep breath as the tension of my not-very-covert operation eases away, only to be replaced by the suddenness of being in Caleb Wilson’s presence yet again. “My mom warned me to stay away from you.”
He smiles at that, clearly pleased. “Did she now?”
He turns and walks down the carpeted steps into the sunken living room, and I realize he is barefoot. There is a noticeable tan line around his ankle, separating his golden, muscled leg from his pale foot.
I can’t help but wonder where else he has tan lines.
I shake the thought out of my head and lift my gaze, only to be arrested by his damp, tousled hair. He tips his head forward and runs his hand through it, sending small droplets of water flying around like a dog shaking off after a bath … but sexy.
I realize he just got out of the shower, and as if I’m the horniest idiot in the world, my mind immediately goes to thoughts of him being naked.
This is all looking like a very bad idea.
I tear my eyes from him and kick off my tennis shoes by the front door. Caleb is so far out of my league I should be asking for his autograph.
Besides the fact that he can have any girl at Ravenlake Prep that he wants, he hates my guts.
And I’m not convinced I don’t hate him, too.
He’s a beautiful, red, shiny apple on the outside.
But as soon as you cut him open, you see the rotten core.
I remind myself of the facts: I’m only here to learn to protect myself.
That is all. Everything else is secondary.
“Do you think I’m bad?”
The question is a low rumble, breaking through my thoughts, and my face flushes immediately. So much for the facts.
“Excuse me?” I stammer.
It feels like he might be reading my mind, though I know that is impossible. Still, part of me wonders…
“Your mom warned you to stay away,” he reminds me, leaning against the back of a long, L-shaped couch. “Does your family think I’m trouble?”
I let out a small sigh of relief. “Well, after everything in the papers last year, she thinks it would be best to keep away.”
“That was Finn’s drama, not mine.”
“That’s what I told her.”
He crosses his arms, his forearms flexing. “You defended me?”
“Hardly.” I roll my eyes. “I just don’t want her to find out we are … whatever we are to each other … and freak out. If I can soften her opinion of you, it will soften her reaction when this is all revealed.”
“It won’t be revealed,” he says, an edge of warning in his voice. “Besides, you dated a Hell Prince. How am I worse than that?”
I dig my socked foot into the plush carpet, making an indention in the fibers. “My parents don’t exactly know about John. Not all of it.”
“Bumper,” Caleb corrects. “We should refer to him by his proper, ridiculous name.”
I roll my eyes and bite back a smile. “They don’t know about Bumper. They know he was a bad influence, but not about—”
“What an abusive, nauseating, dumber than a brick, conniving piece of shit he is?” he finishes.
“That about sums it up,” I nod. “But I thought you all were in a truce?”
“Doesn’t mean I don’t hate everything to do with the Hell Princes,” Caleb says flatly. “I may not be technically allowed to freely punch them all in the face, but I can dream about it.”
Everything to do with the Hell Princes. I am not under any illusions. I know that includes me.
He stands tall and cracks his knuckles, the pops echoing off the room’s high ceilings. “We should get started.”
Caleb walks around the large couch and begins shoving the rest of the furniture in the room aside. He slides a large wooden coffee table against the far wall in front of a picture window and kicks aside a few tufted footrests.
In less than a minute, there is an open area of carpeted space in the center of the room, and he waves me into it with a quick flick of his wrist.
“First things first, you need to tell me why you need to fight,” he says.
I feel exposed standing in the middle of the room with him, and nerves flutter in my stomach. I cross my arms to steady myself. “I already told you.”
“It has to do with Bumper, I know. But knowing why you want to fight will determine how we train. Are you planning to attack him unawares in a street fight? Do you want to call him out at an underground fight?” My eyes widen at the suggestion, and Caleb shrugs as if my business is my own before he continues. “Or are you looking for basic defense training?”
“The last one.”
Caleb sucks in his cheeks, the hollows beneath his cheekbones deepening, and then mumbles, “About time.”
“Do we need to talk about this before we start?” I ask, throwing my arms wide. “It seems like we might need to clear the air.”
Caleb’s eyes narrow, and his jaw clenches. “The air is crystal clear from where I’m at. I’m good.”
I know he’s lying, and there is so much I want to say, but instead, I shrug. “Fine. Let’s get this over with. I have to be home soon.”
Caleb nods, and immediately, the anger in his face is gone. He is all focus.
“We’ll with some basic self-defense moves,” he says. “You have basically no muscle at all, so we will definitely lift some weights and work on building up your strength, but even with your noodle arms, you can defend yourself.”
I frown at the insult, but Caleb doesn’t react.
Instead, he lunges forward and grabs my shoulders.
Instinctively, my entire body freezes up. My heart leaps into my throat, and my lungs feel like rocks in my chest.
Caleb shakes his head and lets go, backing away.
The second his hands are off me, my internal organs begin functioning again. “We need to work on that, too. You can’t freeze up like that.”
“It’s instinctual. When it comes to fight or flight, I’m flight,” I admit. I don’t add that the fact that he’s the one doing the touching makes things a hundred times worse.
“Except, you aren’t,” he says. “You didn’t try to run or fight back. You froze up. You went perfectly still. That’s the worst option of them all.”
Caleb resets and then lunges for me again. This time, I manage to keep breathing, though that doesn’t exactly help.
Now his hands are on me, and I can smell the warm, lemony scent of him beneath the overwhelming bodywash.
It isn’t exactly helping me focus.
“Better,” he says. “When someone attacks you from the front, you want to go straight for the crotch. Man or woman, getting hit there is a shock to the system. It’s worse for men, obviously, but a blow to the cooch is still going to slow a lady down.”
“Cooch,” I repeat with a breathy laugh.
Caleb, all business, ignores me. “Try it.”
Without thinking, I swing my leg up between both of his. Caleb bellows in pain and stumbles backwards, letting go of me.
“I did it!” I say with a clap and a smile.
“If by that you mean nearly ruined my future plans for a family, then yes, you did it.” His pink mouth is turned down in a deep scowl. “We are role-playing here, Haley. For fuck’s sake, you can’t actually kick me in the balls. It’s pretend.”
My face warms. “Oh. I didn’t realize.”
He snorts. “Didn’t realize I wasn’t going to let you kick me in the balls repeatedly for the next few weeks?”
I’m not really sure what I was thinking, but I apologize and we reset, trying the move again and again.
I swing my leg up and stop just short of the apex of his athletic shorts.
After five fake kicks, Caleb finally stops flinching and begins to trust me.
After ten, my leg is beg
inning to burn.
After fifteen, sweat is gathering across my chest and under my arms. I can feel my leg shaking, and the move is slow and clumsy.
Caleb lets go of me and backs away, calling for a break.
“Strength training, definitely,” he says, mostly to himself.
Then, he walks into the kitchen, grabs a glass bottle of water from the fridge, and takes a long drink.
My family is wealthy now, but we aren’t glass-water-bottle wealthy. Apparently, this is how the other half lives.
I wait for him to offer me one, and when he doesn’t, I walk into the kitchen and take it. I’m too thirsty to worry about the consequences. I take a drink and wipe my wrist across my mouth.
“So, why do you fight?”
He raises his brows in silent question.
“You asked why I wanted to train. Well, why did you start? Why do you go to the fights every week?”
“I like to fight.”
“That’s it? You just enjoy being beat down and hurting other people?”
“I don’t get beat down,” he says. “I do the beating. You know that.”
I don’t know what I expected him to say. Aside from the brief moments of concern he has shown me in my times of need, Caleb has never seemed especially deep. From the outside, his motives for everything are shallow and self-serving.
He likes to beat people up because he can.
He likes to sleep with lots of girls because he can.
If he has a larger purpose driving his motivations, I don’t see what it could be, and he doesn’t seem keen to reveal it. Part of me thinks he just likes being an asshole.
But I know that’s not the whole truth. Because this asshole saved me—twice. I don’t know what that makes him. And I don’t know whether I’ll ever get the chance to find out.
“Don’t fucking judge me.”
The acid in Caleb’s voice pulls me from my thoughts. “What? I wasn’t—”
“You were,” he spits. “Another thing we should work on is keeping things closer to your vest. Your every thought is written on your face. It’s annoying when you’re being judgmental, and it’s dangerous in a fight. You tend to glance at where you’re aiming before you strike. It’s how I’ve always been able to stop your embarrassing attempts to hurt me.”
I take note of the critique even as I glare at him. “I’d judge you less if you had an actual reason for fighting. A reason why so much of your life is drenched in violence.”
“Drenched in violence? Jesus, am I in a Shakespeare play all of a sudden? So melodramatic.”
“You are one of the richest kids at Ravenlake and don’t need the money you win at the fights, so why would you do any of it?”
Caleb rolls his eyes and stalks away from me. “All of this from a girl who dated an abusive asshole named Bumper. You say my life is drenched in violence? At least I’m in control of it. You’re just a helpless little sheep.”
His words hit me harder than I expect, and my throat tightens. Angry tears burn the backs of my eyes. “You don’t understand anything.”
Suddenly, Caleb is pacing back towards me, closing the distance between us quickly. “No, you don’t understand anything. You made shitty life choices that have left you vulnerable and scared. You chose to get involved with the Hell Princes. You chose to date a twenty-something reject named after the back of a car. And you chose to start out at your new school by blackmailing the most dangerous guy in town. So don’t lecture me on what I do and don’t understand, Cochran. I’m not the one in the shitty position here.”
Caleb is directly in front of me, his brown eyes wild. His anger is radiating like nuclear waste and I can’t help but shrink back a little bit. He seems taller, broader, more veiny and muscular.
He frightens me. There’s no denying that.
But for the billionth time since our worlds came crashing back together, I have to admit the truth: part of me secretly loves it.
Caleb says I don’t keep things close to the vest. That he can read my emotions. I thought I’d done a good job hiding the effect he has on me.
But his next words make it clear that I was dead wrong about that. He was right—he understands everything.
“You came to me. You asked for this. For someone who claims to be scared, you sure love messing with the bull. Maybe it’s because you actually like getting the horns.”
His eyes are locked on mine. Furious. Blazing.
Without looking away, I drive my hips forward, lean back slightly, and kick up. My lower shin makes firm and fierce contact with Caleb’s undercarriage, and the anger in his face shifts immediately to pain.
Caleb drops to his knees and crumples forward, hands grasping his wounded member.
I stumble away from him, shocked at what I’ve done. In the moment, it felt like the right thing to do. But seeing the flash of fury in his face, mixed with pain, makes me second-guess that instinct.
“Shit, shit. I’m sorry.” My hands are shaking with the adrenaline coursing through my veins. “I didn’t mean to—well, I did. But only because you were mean. And … shit.”
Caleb presses his forehead into the carpet for a second and then sits back on his haunches to look at me. His jaw is still clenched, a fire still burning behind his eyes, but he gives me a slow, deliberate nod.
“Good move.”
I press my back against the opposite wall, having put as much distance between us as possible. “Excuse me? Are you congratulating me?”
He shrugs and props himself up on his knuckles. “I can acknowledge a well-placed strike, even if that strike will make jerking off without pain impossible for the next few days.”
My face warms at both the compliment and his vulgar confession. “You deserved it.”
Caleb lowers his chin, looking at me from beneath thick lashes. “If you’re waiting for an apology, you’ll be waiting a long time.”
I relax and move back towards the counter to grab my water bottle. That sounds more like the Caleb I’ve come to know over the last couple days.
But as it turns out, relaxing is exactly the wrong thing to do. Before I can process what’s happening, Caleb lashes out like a cobra and seizes my ankle in a vise grip.
All it takes is one sharp tug for him to send me crashing to the ground on my ass. The impact knocks the air out of my lungs in a whoosh.
But I don’t have time to process that either, because Caleb is suddenly on top of me. His legs twine between mine and force them apart, his hands wind underneath my arms and clench behind my head.
I’m stuck, my back to his front, no longer in control of any of my limbs.
Utterly and completely exposed.
My face is flushed and my thighs are tingling. But the weirdest thing of all… is that it’s not such a bad feeling.
Caleb’s body heat surges through me, his heartbeat matching mine. And despite how hard I did or did not kick him in the family jewels, there doesn’t seem to be any permanent damage, because I sense his stiffness growing against my thigh.
The knowledge that he’s on top of me and hard is enough to make me swallow past a suddenly massive knot in my throat.
And then, just as quickly as it started, it’s over. Caleb releases me and bounds upright in a weirdly graceful move.
I’m left in a crumpled, sweaty heap on the floor, breathing hard in fear and wondering what the hell just happened.
“That’s your next lesson,” he growls. “Never let your guard down. And never, ever turn your back on the enemy.”
It’s all I can do to nod.
After that, the idea of training anymore seems like a decidedly bad idea.
So, we make plans to meet up every evening at seven, and I rush to the door to put on my shoes before Caleb changes his mind and decides to take that clinch one step farther.
When I reach the door, Caleb is standing a few feet behind me, leaning against the wall with his shoulder. “Are you sure knowing how to defend yourself is worth all of this? Maybe we
should just call it, forget this deal ever happened, and go our separate ways.”
I weigh the offer.
When I originally threatened Caleb, I didn’t quite understand what I was getting involved in. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision, and now he is in control of my reputation at my new school.
Even worse, if I fuck things up too much, he could ruin things for my dad at work. He could destroy what little respect my parents might still have for me.
Unknowingly, I gave Caleb complete power over my future. Calling things off now before anyone really gets hurt could be smart.
But then I remember the note I found on my car this morning.
I haven’t forgotten. You owe me, bitch.
Whether I end things with Caleb or not, I’m still going to be in danger. John is coming for me, and until I can find the money to pay him back, I have to at least be able to protect myself.
When the shit hits the fan and John comes calling, I don’t want to freeze up or run away.
I want to fight.
And I can’t do that without Caleb.
I pull the door open and wave. “I’ll see you tomorrow at seven.”
17
Caleb
Haley doesn’t make any fucking sense to me.
She is like a rabbit, nervous and scared of everything.
And yet I seem to be the one person in her life she stands up to. She is afraid of Bumper Whitley, the biggest pussy in South Texas, but she doesn’t mind giving me a swift kick to the nuts.
I flinch at the memory and readjust in my chair. It was a solid kick. They’re still tender.
“You got home late today.”
Mom walks into the dining room as she fastens a black apron around her waist. It has her name, Ophelia, stitched into the center pocket just below “Long John Bar & Brew.”
She has been working the bar there for six months to help cover expenses. I fucking hate that she has to do to that. She deserves better.
“I showered at Finn’s.”
I twirl my pencil between my fingers, noticing all of the nicks and scars across my knuckles from years of fighting.