Bully (Angel & Demons Trilogy Book 1)

by Ashley Love

  "Damn straight you can't!" Charlie agrees. "The guy is a douche! He hit you."

  "I don't think it's so bad," Mason pipes in. "I mean you can't help who you like. I know we warned you about Zane before, but maybe things can change."

  Charlie snorts. "Ariel liking Zane is like borderline masochism! I mean look at her fucking face!"

  Mason eyes the bruises on my forehead and jaw, and he grimaces. "Maybe Zane will come around?"

  "Mason, it's Stockholm Syndrome!" she argues. "Ariel liking Zane is Stockholm Syndrome!"

  "Now that's just a little dramatic, don't you think?" Mason snorts.

  "No, she's right," I interject, and they both look at me. I swallow and fight the urge to look over at The Docks again. No matter how many times I look, Zane isn't going to magically appear today. "You guys need to help me. I can't like him. I need to know how to stop."

  Charlie and Mason exchange a glance. "You could try to go on a date with Joey?" Charlie suggests. "He's had his eye on you for a while."

  Mason laughs. "Ariel kind of screwed the pooch on that one today, didn't she? You were so awkward, you scared the kid off."

  I grimace. "Sorry," I mutter sheepishly.

  Charlie makes a little noise in the back of her throat, pondering what we could do. We all stand there for a good minute or two just staring off into space with pursed lips, thinking. I'm still reeling from what happened with Zane in the bathroom this morning, so I struggle to keep my mind on point. I keep getting distracted remembering the way Zane was looking at my lips. God, why does this have to be so hard? Why does it have to be like this?

  "Alright, you know what?" Mason says, interrupting my newest daydream. "We should draw up a plan. A strategy for how you can forget about Zane."

  Charlie ponders that for a moment, and then a smile spreads across her face. "Project Forgetting About Zane!"

  I chuckle a little. "Is that what we're calling it?"

  "Project FAZ for short," she nods.

  Mason sucks his lips into his mouth, thinking for a moment, and then he nods too. "I like that," he says. "Project FAZ. It sounds like a civil rights movement or something."

  I snort and shake my head. "Do you really think this will work?"

  "Oh it better work," Charlie says. "You can't have a crush on Zane Peterson. It's downright unhealthy."

  Mason looks like he wants to say something, but he bites his tongue. I'm tempted to go along with what he first said, that Zane may come around, that it's not such a bad thing that I have a crush on him. But I can't agree with that. Not after everything Zane's done in the past couple months. Not after everything his friends have done. Charlie is right. It's unhealthy.

  "Do you guys want to come over?" I ask them. I need a distraction for the evening. If I go home and sit there alone with Sophia, all I'm going to do is think about Zane and the way his fingers felt trailing over my forehead this morning. And I can't sit there and think about that if I'm expected to get over this stupid twisted crush.

  "Hell yeah!" Mason says, clapping me on the shoulder. "Did Bonnie make any more of those casseroles with the quail eggs? I need my fix."

  I chuckle a little. "I think I might have some leftover in the fridge."

  Mason grins in triumph, and the three of us start our saunter towards the woods. He slings his arm over my shoulders. "It'll be okay, buddy," he says. "We've all had crushes like this."

  I give him a half-hearted smile, and make it a point to very deliberately not look over at The Docks again. I know Zane isn't there, but if Project FAZ is going to work, I can't continuously look at place where he usually is. I suppose I'll have to sit with my back to the windows during lunch from now on so I'm not tempted to stare at Zane then too. And maybe I'll switch spots in math class to somewhere where I can't see him.

  This is going to be a lot harder than I thought.

  We chatter about anything and everything on our way through the woods to my house. I try to engage in the conversation as much as possible, even if I'm just blabbering about nothing, because if I stop talking, I'm going to think about Zane again.

  We stop by Bonnie's house to pick up Sophia, and Bonnie answers the door covered in flour. She ushers us inside, insisting that we stay for dinner since Sophia is helping her cook while Bonnie teaches her Latin.

  "How the hell do you know Latin?" Mason laughs, impressed.

  "Boy, I know all kinds of things," she replies, taking our backpacks from us and nodding her head at our shoes as a silent reminder to take them off.

  The three of us kick our shoes off and follow her into her tiny kitchen. Me and Charlie have to duck under the doorway, but it's the perfect height for Mason. He ducks anyway, pretending he's taller, and Charlie pokes fun at him while we accept cups of some sort of hot tea Bonnie brewed up out of her many herbs. I warm my hands on the mug and stick my tongue out at Sophia when she makes a face at me. She's covered in powder too.

  "What are you guys making?" Charlie asks, eyeing a plastic container of candied fruit chunks on the counter.

  "German stollen," Sophia replies, punching down a big ball of dough in a bowl and folding in a handful of walnuts.

  "For dinner?" Mason asks, stealing a candied fruit and popping it in his mouth while Bonnie's back is turned.

  "Dessert," she says. "Sophia, Ethan, and I made pastrami for dinner."

  Charlie makes a yummy sound, sipping her tea. She and Mason have met Bonnie a few times already, and they took a liking to her as quickly as me and Sophia did. There's just something about the woman that draws people in. She's unlike anyone I've ever met before.

  Ethan comes wandering into the kitchen then dragging a rubber chicken behind himself on the floor. Its head is hanging on by a thread. "Mama, Plastic got caught in the shower drain," he says, holding up the nearly-headless rubber chicken to show Bonnie.

  "You named your rubber chicken Plastic?" Mason asks. "I already like this kid."

  "Now how'd he get caught in the shower drain?" Bonnie asks, coming forward and taking the chicken, examining the tiny piece of rubber left holding its head in place.

  Ethan shrugs, putting on his best sad puppy face, trying to hide the fact that he was probably setting up another one of his pranks when the chicken's head fell off. Bonnie rolls her eyes and shakes her head. "I'll put his head back on for you tomorrow," she says. "As long as you come in here and help with the stollen."

  Ethan's sad puppy face turns into a smile, and he climbs up onto the counter next to Sophia, punching down the stollen with her.

  We eat dinner in the living room under the rabbit foot collection, chatting and laughing about everything random, and for a while I forget about Zane. Mason and Ethan find common ground in their mutual love for playing pranks on people, and Ethan ends up dragging him back to his room to show him his whole collection of itching powder and fake dog poop and costume blood.

  Charlie pulls out a notebook and we make a bullet point list of goals for Project FAZ, most of which involve me not under any circumstances being allowed to look at Zane at all. It's almost like I'm a drug addict and I have Mason and Charlie as sponsors. The whole thing is making me a little nervous. But what's making me more nervous is the fact that I have these feelings for Zane. Because that's very bad. I can't have feelings like this for a bully.

  By the time we work our way through the pastrami and German stollen, we're all stuffed, and Charlie and Mason both get phone calls from their mothers telling them it's time to get their asses home. I watch them talking with their mothers on the phone, Mason arguing and Charlie laughing, and I feel a stab of longing in my gut. Me and my own mom may not be terribly close, but I still miss her sometimes. And tonight, with Bonnie acting as motherly as she is, and Mason and Charlie both getting concerned phone calls from their own mothers, I miss my mom.

  Or maybe I just miss the idea of her. Either way.

  Me and Sophia wait until Mason and Charlie are picked up by their parents, a
nd then we say goodbye to Bonnie and Ethan and thank Bonnie for dinner before heading back to our own quiet house. The house is cold when we get inside. The heater has been working on and off lately, breaking for a few days, and then kicking on for the next few, only to break again. Sophia groans and hugs herself when we get inside, and she pulls her jacket tighter around her shoulders.

  "I miss Arizona," she grumbles, and saunters into the living room to watch another documentary. I look after her for a moment with a sigh, vowing to myself that I'm going to sit with her in a little while and make her teach me all the words she learned in Latin. I feel bad for Sophia sometimes. She's lonely.

  Rubbing my hands together and blowing into them to try and warm them up, I wander upstairs and into his room, shutting the door behind me. I fish my phone out of my pocket and go over to my nightstand, pulling out the folded piece of paper my mom left me last time we'd been together before she'd set off for Central America for her anthropological study. I don't remember exactly where she is, but I remember her telling me it's only an hour or two ahead there, and she'd given me this paper with the phone number she could be reached at.

  I stare at the phone number scrawled on the paper for a few minutes. I want to to call her, but I'm not really sure what we'll talk about. Me and my mom don't have much in common. I almost put the number and my phone away and go back downstairs, but then I think of Mason and Charlie talking with their mothers earlier, and that longing in my chest comes back.

  With a sigh, I dial the number and hesitate only briefly before pressing Call. It rings nearly a dozen times, but my mom had told me that it might take longer to connect with long distance calls like this, so I wait, sitting stiffly on my bed. When she finally answers, it's with a very professional, "Naomi Riley speaking."

  I don't say anything at first, because I think that it's her answering machine for a second, she sounds so mechanical. But when there's nothing but silence, I clear my throat a little. "Mom?"

  "Ariel? Why are you calling this late? Don't you have school tomorrow?" she asks, and I hear rustling around like she's climbing out of bed. I think I hear another voice in the background for a moment, but I must have imagined it. My mother is alone on her study.

  "Yeah, I do," I reply. "I just wanted to call. It's been a while."

  My mom hums a bit on the other end. "Yes it has," she agrees. "But you shouldn't be calling now. It's late, and I need to be up early."

  I swallow, the images of Charlie and Mason talking to their own mothers on the phone flickering and fading from my mind. I have no idea why I thought calling my mom would be anything like that.

  "Sorry," I apologize. "I should've waited. I just wanted to say hello."

  She sighs on the other end. "It's alright, it was good to talk to you, Ariel. I have to go now."

  There's a sudden voice in the background again, this time louder. A man's voice. I thought I'd imagined it before, but no, that's definitely a voice. "Who is that?" I ask.

  "No one, I'm alone," my mother replies tersely. "I have the TV on. I'll be home for Thanksgiving, Ariel. Goodbye now."

  Before I have a chance to say anything else, the line goes dead. I pull the phone away from my ear and stare at it.

  "Bye," I mutter, clicking it off and tossing it on my nightstand. Well, that was weird. I could have sworn I heard a voice.

  "Ariel!" Sophia calls from downstairs. "The TV stopped working!"

  I run my hands through my hair and sigh, standing and heading back downstairs. I try for a good twenty minutes to fix the TV, which is just a blue screen all of the sudden, but with no luck.

  I promise Sophia I'll call Kira to come look at it tomorrow, and she grumbles a little before heading up to bed early for the night. I tuck her in and give her an extra blanket from the closet since it's November and the East Coast nights are getting colder and colder.

  I take a long shower before laying down in my own bed, shivering from my wet hair. I pull out the Project FAZ list me and Charlie had made earlier and read over it a few times. If I don't distract myself with this, all I'll think about is the way Zane's hands felt on me this morning. And I can't think about that. I can't.

  18

  There are two packs' worth of cigarette butts littering the roof of his house by the time Zane climbs down that afternoon and goes inside. He'd come straight home from school after the incident in the bathroom with Ariel, and climbed up onto the roof to smoke his feelings away. His stomach is rolling with a bit of nausea from all the cigarettes, but at least it's a distraction from the ache in his chest he feels every time he thinks about Ariel.

  He's done nothing but sit there and think about her all afternoon again. And he has to admit it to himself—he can't deny it anymore.

  He has a crush on Ariel Riley.

  He has a crush on Ariel, and that's exactly the reason why he can't stop bullying her. Because he can't have a crush on her. It goes against everything he has established for himself this semester. He doesn't date losers, and frankly...Ariel is too good for him. And there's no way she would ever want someone like him. Especially not after everything he and his friends have done to her this year. And especially not after that absolute disaster of an encounter in the bathroom this morning.

  Zane groans to himself as he walks into his house, running a hand roughly over his face, his fingers scraping over the stubble that he really needs to shave soon. Liam is sitting in the kitchen again, working on homework, but so far Mike hasn't shown up yet, which is nice.

  "Hey," Liam greets. "I didn't know you were home."

  "Just got here," Zane lies, checking the fridge for a beer. There's nothing in there, and Zane frowns. He doesn't have any alcohol left in his stash.

  "Zane?" Liam asks.

  Zane sighs and closes the fridge, cringing at the rank smell of cigarettes clinging to his clothing. "Yeah?"

  Liam is staring at him, eyes wide, a signature puppy dog look that always makes Zane want to melt and roll his eyes all at the same time. "Can you not drink tonight?"

  Zane stares at his little brother. Damn it. Zane's been a horrible brother the past couple weeks. He knows it. Drinking and making an idiot of himself. All because of Ariel and her stupid big blue eyes. He needs to get over this shit fast.

  "Sure," he says, giving his brother a little smile. "I won't drink tonight."

  Liam returns his smile half-heartedly, and then goes back to working on whatever homework he's doing at the moment. Zane saunters over to the table and plops down next to him, peering over his shoulder briefly to see what he's working on. It's some sort of science lab about different types of cold medicine. Boring.

  Zane reaches over and steals a piece of paper out of Liam's notebook, plucking the little jagged edges off where the paper's connected to the spirals. He folds the paper in half, and then in half again, staring at it. How does Ariel always make those cool things out of origami? Zane can't even fold the paper straight. He sees her in the cafeteria all the time with her theater friends, folding this and that with colorful paper. He's seen her make cubes, and angels, and flowers, and even little bumblebees out of paper. It's effortless for her, but as Zane stares at the paper in his hands, he has no idea how she does it.

  He ends up just rolling and unrolling the corners of the paper, lost in thought.

  "Did you bring your biology book home?" Liam asks.

  Right. Zane almost forgot about Liam helping him with his biology homework.

  "Yeah," he replies. "It's in my room."

  "I'm almost done with this, and then I can help you work on that," Liam says, eyeing the paper in Zane's hands as it becomes more and more wrinkled.

  "Thanks," Zane says, sighing and tossing the piece of paper onto the table, scooting back his chair and standing. He walks down the hall to his room, digging in his backpack for his biology book. He sits down on his mattress and flips through the book for a bit. He already knows most of this stuff to be honest, but Liam is the brain
s of the family and he helps Zane with organizing his assignments. Zane is already weeks behind in his work, and it's only halfway through the semester. So much for graduating.

  As he sits there, he suddenly hears the front door slam open, so hard it hits the wall next to it. Zane looks up as he hears someone stumble into the house down the hall.

  "Liam Peterson, what the hell are you doin' here? Why aren't you at school?" he hears Mike snap from the kitchen.

  Crap. Mike's in one of those drunken moods tonight. This never ends well.

  "Dad, it's almost six," he hears Liam say in the kitchen. "I got off school hours ago."

  "Don't fuckin' lie to me, boy," Mike slurs low and dangerous.

  Zane jumps up from his mattress, dropping his biology book on the floor and leaving his room. When he gets to the kitchen, Mike is standing over the table, and Liam is staring resolutely down. Liam knows how this is going to end too; he's smart enough not to say anything.

  "Dad?" Zane says when he gets in there, and Mike looks up at him, a watery anger in his eyes. "Look at the clock. It's almost six. Liam's right."

  Mike glares at Zane, but he surprisingly obeys and turns, squinting at the clock on the oven. He grumbles under his breath and stumbles over to the oven to get a better look. Zane and Liam exchange a glance, and Zane nods his head towards the hallway, indicating for him to get out of there. Liam begins to gather up his books.

  "Leave them," Zane says, quietly enough for only Liam to hear, and Liam looks up at him once more before swallowing and standing, disappearing down the hall without his school stuff. Zane looks back at Mike as his father straightens up, apparently satisfied that the time is really almost six. He doesn't even look back at Zane before going to the fridge and yanking it open. He pulls it open so roughly a bottle of Tabasco sauce topples out of the door and clatters to the floor, breaking into several pieces.

  "Fuckin' piece a shit," Mike curses under his breath, stooping down to pick up the shards. He loses his balance in his drunken state and falls forward a little, hitting his head on the freezer. It would have been funny, watching this all happen, if Zane wasn't so used to this shit by now.