Reckless At Raleigh High (Raleigh Rebels Book 3)

by Callie Hart

  I watch him hobbling off toward the parking lot, amazed that those few hits I got in didn’t miraculously make me feel better. During the long nights and the endless days when I’ve imagined laying into my old man, I was so fucking sure that they would.

  I haven’t brought a bag with me. No notebooks. No textbooks. No pens. I basically came to Raleigh to observe Silver from a distance, but after what just happened with Jack, my plans have changed dramatically. Jack dropped out of school the moment he could legally get away with it. He took shitty construction jobs, never rising above the lowest paid shit-kicker position, because he was never willing to put the hard yards in. He gave up on everything before he even got started, and that went for my mother, too.

  If I bail on school just because Ben’s not here anymore, and I walk away from Silver because things have gotten hard, then how am I really any different than him? Ben would be disappointed in me if I quit on everything now, when I was the one who was always encouraging him to do better, be stronger, to put his head down and focus on his education and the life he was going to build for himself.

  When I enter the classroom on the first floor of the English block, Ms. Swift squints at me over the top of her iPad, frowning. She’s a mousy, quirky looking woman, and her bangs are permanently in her eyes. “Mr. Moretti, I don’t believe you’re in this class?”

  At the mention of my name, Silver’s head snaps up, her brightly shining eyes searching me out. It kills me that her go-to reaction is immediate worry; I can read it on her face from a mile away. Her cheeks are still flushed from the cold outside, the end of her nose adorably pink. She’s so damn beautiful, it makes me breathless to even look at her. I smile in an attempt to quash the look of panic she’s wearing, hoping that her mind will stop racing quite so much. “I requested a class change, Ms. Swift. I don’t feel adequately challenged in my current English class.”

  “Uhhh…” Ms. Swift looks down at her iPad, flitting through a couple of screens. “I don’t see a transfer notification from the office here, Alex. You can’t just show up to an AP class because you feel like it. Making it into an AP class is…well, it’s kind of a big deal. So…”

  The students on the front row avoid eye contact with me, staring down at their open textbooks like they’re afraid I’m about to hulk out and trash the place. A couple of the kids on the second row brave a glance or two at me while also watching Ms. Swift, waiting to see what she’ll do.

  I’m not really paying attention to any of them, though. I’m too focused on Silver, trying to communicate a stumbling apology to her with my eyes. “I won’t bring your class average down,” I inform Ms. Swift tightly. “I’m here to learn.”

  “You’re sure? Because it looks like you came to make eyes at Silver Parisi rather than open your mind to the brilliance of the English language.”

  I turn my full attention to her now, my gaze drilling into her face. “I swear. I won’t cause any trouble. I’ll sit by the window. I won’t even be near Silver.”

  She doesn’t look too convinced. Doesn’t sound it either. “All right. By the window it is. Waste our time and we’ll boot you outta the room quicker than you can say ‘Geoffrey Chaucer who?’ And I will be checking with Karen after lunch to make sure you put that request in. Sit your butt down, Mr. Moretti.”

  I go and claim the only available seat left in the room—third row, directly under the AC vent, which is churning out cold air despite the fact that there are icicles dangling from the top of the casement on the other side of the window. “Uh, great. Umm, I actually need to borrow a pen. And some paper. And a textbook.”

  Ms. Swift eyes me balefully. “Ah. You clearly did come here to learn, didn’t you?” Her frosty smile doesn’t affect me. I’m chilled to the bone and only getting colder with the AC continually blasting me, and I’ve just seriously screwed myself over by electing to bump myself up a class—the workload’s bound to be way harder than my regular class—but that’s all background noise. I’m breathing the same air that Silver’s breathing. I feel the proximity of her, and the wild, frenetic beast inside of me that’s been bucking and pulling on its chains finally calms, finally breathes a massive sigh of relief. This is where I’m supposed to be. And if joining yet another AP class and burning my brain cells to a crisp means that I get to be near her, then so fucking be it.

  14

  ALEX

  I tell her about Zander’s confession concerning my father. I tell her about my run-in with Monty. I tell her I won’t be working at the Rock anymore. Once I’ve reassured her that I won’t be struggling to pay rent for a long while yet, she seems to take everything in stride. Predictably, she’s not too happy that I vanished on her, though.

  “You get to be sad, Alex. You get to be lost, and hurt, and turned around. What you don’t get to do is ghost me. I’m not okay with that. We don’t do that to each oth—”

  She deserves to chew me out for the shit I’ve been pulling over the past couple of days. I owe her better than I’ve been giving her, and she has every right to tear me a new one for vanishing on her so spectacularly, but in this moment, the air shivering with snow out of the Camaro’s window and everything so peaceful and quiet, all I want to do is kiss her.

  I hold her by the nape of her neck, quickly pulling her to me, and I bring my mouth down on hers before she can finish her sentence. She tastes of cinnamon, and mint, and the ginger tea she likes to drink sometimes; I consume all of it, all of her, plunging my tongue into her mouth with a wild abandon that halts her breath in her lungs.

  I guess she wasn’t banking on being kissed like she’s about to get fucked. It takes her a second to respond. When she does, it’s with a shuddering sigh that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up straight.

  Her fingers wind into my hair, tracing down the sides of my face, running over my collar bones until she’s driving her nails into the tops of my shoulders, panting out sharp blasts of air down her nose. She’s so fucking bitable. I suck her lower lip into my mouth, tugging on it with my front teeth, and Silver lets out a little whimper that has another part of me altogether standing to attention.

  Reluctantly, I break off the kiss before we go too far. Sure, I want her real bad. Goes without saying that I want my dick inside her, with her shivering out an orgasm on top of me, but this is more important than sex. I need to make things right with her. If we apologize and make up, communicating only through sex, we’ll forget how to actually talk about our shit, and I’m no genius when it comes to emotions but I’m pretty sure that’ll end in disaster.

  I cradle her face in my hands, committing the dazed, heated look on her face to memory. Then I gently stroke the tip of my index finger down the length of her nose, rubbing away the wet sheen of her mouth so I can’t be distracted by how hot she is, all pouty and swollen like this.

  “I let you down,” I whisper. “I’m fucking sorry.”

  Her eyes still unfocused, she shakes her head, swallowing. “You didn’t let anyone down. That’s the whole point. No one expects you to just get up, dust yourself off and move on like nothing happened. You lost him, you lost Ben, and—”

  The words, sharp as knives, flay me to the bone. I’ve been trying to outrun them ever since I found out Ben was dead, but this time I settle into my seat and I face them, I feel them, and I try not to flee from the truth.

  Ben’s dead.

  My brother is gone, and he isn’t coming back.

  I’m never going to sit across from him at the diner and dip French fries into a milkshake with him. We’re never going to watch scary movies together. The sound of his incredibly rare laughter is never going to fill the spare room of the apartment I got just so he could come and live with me.

  These are hard realities to face. I don’t want to accept any of it, but that’s the thing about death. It can’t be ignored. You just have to find a way to live with the hand it deals you, and that sucks more than I can bear.

  Silver clears her throat, plucking at the col
lar of my t-shirt, worrying at the stitching. “I’m not mad at you for disappearing. Not really. I don’t know how you’re supposed to handle any of this, okay? There are no guidelines for coping with grief.”

  “There are actually. There are millions of them online, and every single one of them is horseshit. I’m gonna be okay. I just need to figure out how to put one foot in front of the other, and…”

  She rests her chin on my shoulder, curling my hair around her finger. “And?”

  “And…I’m supposed to go to college, then get a good job, right? Pay off my loans over the next twenty fucking years and get a mortgage. Become a responsible human being who regrets covering himself in tattoos. That’s what comes next.”

  Leaning back, Silver’s disturbingly quiet for a very long time. After a while she rests the back of her head against the frosted window behind her and lets out a long breath. “What would your Mom say about that? What did she want for you when you grew up?”

  Well, shit. I could really do without unleashing my mother on the inside of this car. To remember her is to give her life, and she’s just too big and overwhelming to deal with right now. Silver asked the question, though, and she looks like she’s expecting an answer. “She…she wanted me to make music. She wanted me to be an artist like Giacomo. She wanted me to be an arctic explorer. A deep-sea diver. She wanted me to be happy.”

  Silver smiles softly, brushing the pad of her thumb along the line of my jaw, making my stubble rasp in the silent car. “She wanted you to be free…” she says in a hushed tone. “None of the things she envisioned for you involved office jobs, mortgages or regrets. You’re not made for that world, Alessandro. You were made for colorful ink and the rumble of an engine, and an open highway, full of possibilities and uncertainty. That’s what your life looks like after high school.”

  The oxygen rushes out of my lungs in a winded, long exhale. “I’m not interested in a future that doesn’t feature you in it, Argento.”

  “Who said anything about that? I’ve told you once already, I’m not going anywhere. We’ll weather whatever storms come our way together, I promise. We have so far, haven’t we?”

  Man, when did I turn into such a little bitch? When did I start feeling this swollen ache in my chest any time Silver talks about the future? It feels like I’m holding something fragile in my hands, delicate beyond measure, and the slightest twitch will cause it to shatter. My whole life, I’ve had to be forceful and brash in order to make it from one day to the next. This entire thing with Silver requires finesse, though. It requires a gentle touch that I sure as shit wasn’t born with. As the bell rings inside the school, across the other side of the parking lot, I find myself praying that I can figure it all out before I end up permanently breaking something.

  15

  SILVER

  Three Weeks Later

  “I heard she got busted sucking Jake’s dick and the new kid lost his temper. What kind of psycho carries a gun around anyway? I’ve been saying there’s something off with that Moretti guy ever since he walked through the front door.”

  “God, you are such a dipshit. If that was true, how did she end up in the hospital with broken ribs and a rope burn around her neck?”

  “What the fuck, dude. How the hell am I supposed to have all the answers? What am I, a bad daytime TV detective? All I know is, Jake’s s’posed to come into some of his inheritance after his eighteenth birthday. Watch this space. That bitch is gonna be knocking on his door, holding out her unmanicured hand, looking for a payout. Seriously, have you seen her hands? They are gross. Her fingers are actually calloused like an old man’s.”

  “Oh my god, Leah, you’re such a bitch!”

  An eruption of laughter bounces off the tiled walls of the changing room—a pack of hyenas cackling over a fresh kill. I roll my eyes, marveling at how stupid the girls sound, tittering to one another on the other side of the lockers. The past three weeks have been fine. With both Kacey and Jake gone, no one’s bothered openly attacking me. What would be the point? There’s no one left to impress with their random acts of cruelty, and so I’m mostly ignored. Every once in a while, this kind of bullshit takes place, though. Tall tales and sharp words crafted to entertain at my expense. The girls know I’m here, which means their little gossip session’s being conducted with the specific purpose of fucking with me. Sucks for them that I’ve heard way worse. Nothing they or anyone else says can hurt me now. I’m literally fucking untouchable. Bored by the whole affair, I finish tying my chucks, straighten out my Raleigh sweatpants, and sit myself down on the bench next to me.

  “Olives,” I say loudly. The girls on the other side of the locker fall auspiciously quiet. “In the forties, after the war, my gram married my grandpa. They were young and in love, and they wanted to move away from their parents, so they bought a patch of old farming land in Toscana and decided to start growing olives.”

  A head pops around the side of the locker: blonde hair blown out to perfection; black cat-eye liner and heavy mascara; ridiculously overdrawn lips that look kind of clownish. It’s Leah Prescott, in the spray-tanned flesh. She was always a low-ranked member of the Sirens, but with Kacey gone all sorts of powerplays have been set in motion as a number of the girls jostle for the position of Queen Bee.

  “The fuck are you talking about? Olives?” She lets out a disgusted sigh. “You’re that desperate for attention now that you just start rambling about fucking olives?”

  I give her a saccharine-sweet smile. “They’re one of Italy’s biggest exports. Gram and Pops built up themselves an olive empire. When they moved to America in the seventies, they outsourced the management of the business and lived off the profit. Gram sold the business in the mid-nineties when my Pops died. I won’t go into specifics, but let’s just say the Parisi family did damn well for themselves. We’re what some people might call obscenely well off. I’m set for life. I sure as fuck don’t need Jacob Weaving’s inheritance money. But even if I were planning on extorting cash out of that piece of shit, I’d have a tough time. He’s a psychotic rapist. He’s gonna spend the next thirty years rotting in a jail cell with all of his assets frozen. Now. Do you want to head into the gym and actually practice, or are you gonna hang around out here, pulling your kick shorts out of your ass crack and popping pineapple Hubba Bubba like the basic bitch that you are?”

  Leah’s jaw drops. Low and behold, there, wedged into the side of her cheek, is a wad of bright yellow gum. “Eww,” she grouses. “Have you been staring at my ass? Gross. Don’t even think about it, okay.”

  God, seriously. Yawn. I make mention of her ass and suddenly I’m hitting on her? “If I were into girls, Leah, you would not be on my radar. I’m only interested in creatures with a soul, and you’re a fucking vampire.”

  “Rude! Wait, what kind of vampire? Like, a Bella Swan kind of vampire? Or the dusty old hag kind out of one of those old black and white movies?”

  “GIRLS!” Coach Foley’s voice roars into the changing room, causing one of the girls still loitering on the other side of the lockers to scream out loud in surprise. “I can hear your bickering from my office on the other side of the damn hall. What in God’s green earth is wrong with you?” Coach Foley used to work at Raleigh, but she retired a couple of years ago. Darhower enticed her away from her gardening and her cross-country mountain biking to cover for Coach Quentin while he takes a leave of absence.

  I’m glad it’s Foley who’ll be coaching the Sirens during my first term back on the team. She always kept Kacey in check whenever my ex-best friend used to haze the new girls who joined the team. I wasn’t strong or brave enough to shut Kace down myself, no one was, to do such a thing would have been social suicide, but Coach Foley didn’t give a shit about Kacey’s ice queen routine. She was immune to every single one of Kacey’s powerplays, and she’ll be immune to Leah’s brand of bullshit now, too. “Get your asses into the gym right now. And if I hear any of you say fuck one more time, you’re all gonna wind up in deten
tion. Get moving! Silver, hang back a sec. I need to go over some game dates with you.”

  “Bitch,” Leah mutters under her breath. “You’ve been off the team a long time, Parisi. Don’t think you’re just gonna waltz back in and claim your old place at the top of the Siren food chain. It won’t be that easy.”

  I smile tightly, pressing my lips into a thin line. “Siren politics don’t interest me in the slightest, Leah. I’m only here for the college application credits. Believe me. The floor’s all yours.”

  Her mouth opens and closes like a fish out of water, gasping for air. If I stand still long enough, I’m sure she’ll come up with a cutting come back about how she doesn’t need my permission to jostle for role of Siren’s head bitch, but I’m already walking past her, heading for Coach Foley’s office. Leah’s friends chitter and mumble quietly behind me; I can’t tell if they’re gossiping about me or their beloved leader. Can’t bring myself to care, either. They’re so high school, clinging on to the unimportant, unnecessary stuff. They still think that surviving at Raleigh is tough, but they’re so fucking wrong. Surviving here is easy as hell once you’ve been raped and nearly strangled to death.

  “I know I’ve been gone a while, but I read the papers. I still have friends on the faculty here, and I have to say, I’m surprised you haven’t transferred out to Bellingham, Silver. What you’ve had to deal with…” Coach Foley puffs out her cheeks, eyes wide as she shakes her head. “It’s unconscionable that the situation wasn’t dealt with properly before it could come to a head like that. Principal Darhower should have investigated the matter and taken the appropriate steps to make sure you were safe. I’m sorry that didn’t happen. Truly, I am.”