Chapter 19
Quietly, Painfully
(Mason)
It’s a good thing we only live half a mile from the school, because after Olivia took off without either of us, I dreaded the idea of asking for a ride. After Olivia’s blow up, I have no doubt her mom has a pretty good idea about what happened. Olivia’s dad is not going to be happy when he gets home tonight.
As Evie stalks along behind me, it’s hard not to be pissed at her. I know it wasn’t her fault. I should have locked the door, for one, but I can’t help tossing away my anger when I think of how excited she was at the idea of Olivia and I being together. It was the reaction I wanted from Olivia, but now I’m afraid it’s been jeopardized.
Evie and I part ways without a word when we reach the school grounds. She heads for Aaron while I go in search of Olivia. Her obsessive nature leads me to her locker. My palms immediately turn sweaty as I spot her. She pushes the locker closed and leans her head against it.
My body responds immediately, carrying me toward her. I only get within five feet before she senses my presence and looks up. The deer-in-the-headlights look she sports stops me cold. I don’t know what to do when she turns and bolts for her first class.
I want to run after her, talk to her, something! Falling back against the locker, I force myself to take a deep breath and think.
Of course Olivia is freaking out! Before Dad brought up living arrangements after high school, Olivia had never looked at me as more than her brother. Romance, kissing, sex, those had never before crossed her mind. It kills me to admit it, but kissing her may not have been the best plan. What was I thinking?
Banging my head against the locker, the sound draws a few strange looks, but I ignore them. I need someone to tell me what to do. Should I back off, let her process the fact that I’m in love with her? Will she freak out again if I hold her hand or try to get close? I don’t know what to do!
A scuffle in the middle of the hall draws my attention, even more so when Robin pops back up to her feet after probably tripping on something. Her bright red glasses draw my gaze and I freeze. She’s the only other one who can see and hear me, but how do I talk to her about this? I’m not as blind as Olivia. Robin clearly has feelings for me. I have no idea what to do about that either. I like her, a lot, but I’m in love with Olivia.
I am on the verge of ditching school entirely and taking a mental health day, but Robin catches sight of me first and ping pongs off the other students milling in the hallway to reach me. This is the first time her grin doesn’t rub off on me.
“I kissed Olivia!” I blurt out, independent of thought.
Robin blinks. Her eyes widen. The delicate arch of her eyebrows flies up. Her lips part as she stares at me. “Uh, what?”
“I kissed her.” My breathing takes a vacation, leaving me staring at Robin like a fish.
Robin closes her mouth and fiddles with her glasses. “Okay.” She breathes out slowly. “How did Olivia react?”
“Uh, great, at first.” I drag my hands down my face wanting to shake myself violently. “Until Evie walked in on us and figured out what was going on. That’s when Olivia freaked out, took off without us, and now she practically ran away from me.”
Covering her mouth with her hand as she thinks, Robin looks like she trying not to laugh. “So, it could have gone better, then?”
The final bell blares through the hall saving me from having to say anything in response. This was a mistake. I turn toward the outer doors. Robin snatches at my hand and refuses to let me go.
“Uh-uh,” she says. “You’re coming to class with me.”
I could break free if I wanted to, but I let Robin drag me down the hall to her first class. As soon as she drops into her seat and releases my hand, I slide down the wall to the floor and hang my head. I want to stay here for the rest of the day. Robin nudges me with her shoe. I ignore her. So, she kicks me, hard enough to make me yelp.
Glaring up at her, she glares right back and points to one of the two notebooks on her desk. I groan. Talking about this was a really, really stupid plan. Still, Robin won’t give up. She gets me in the shin with the next kick and I pull myself up off the ground so I can see whatever she wrote.
Look, I know you’re in love with Olivia. That was pretty obvious the second we met, but it’s also been pretty obvious that she thinks of you as her brother. What were you thinking kissing her?
“It wasn’t like that,” I argue. “She’s been different the last few weeks. I knew the way she thought about me was starting to change. Then last night, we got in this fight after she found out I went with you to your grandma’s. She was mad at me for lying, but I thought she was more jealous than anything.”
Was she?
“That was definitely part of it, but she was pretty mad about the lying, too.” I sit on the top of an empty desk in front of Robin feeling exhausted. “Anyway, we worked it out and we ended up falling asleep on my bed.”
Robin peers up at me with a quizzical expression. I roll my eyes at her. “Nothing happened. If it had, I probably would have blurted out that I had sex with Olivia rather than that I kissed her if it had.”
Nodding, Robin looks back down at her notebook and writes, Okay, no sex, but something obviously happened.
“I had another nightmare. Olivia was kidnapped. It was pretty bad and Olivia had to wake me up. I thought she’d leave after that, but …”
She didn’t?
I shake my head. She didn’t even want to. She wanted to stay with me.
You spent the night together? Robin asks.
Nodding, I continue. “When I woke up, though, she was gone. I took a shower, but when I went to leave, Olivia walked in on me and it just happened.” I scrub my hands through my hair and look at the ceiling.
For a long time, Robin doesn’t write anything else. I look down, thinking perhaps she is taking real notes, but her pencil sits between her fingers unmoving. When my eyes travel up to her face, her expression makes me want to kick myself. The quiver in her chin is faint, but it’s only accentuated by the way her bottom lip is being held between her teeth. She blinks her eyes rapidly. I am such a jerk.
“Robin,” I say, reaching down and covering her hand with mine. The touch seems to startle her and she looks up with a tortured expression. What was I thinking?
Standing, I let my hand slide away from hers. “Robin, I’m so sorry. I know you don’t want to hear any of this.”
I turn to leave but Robin sticks her leg out in front of me. I could just step over her, but I look back. Her notebook is tilted up so I can see it.
SIT! DOWN!
My face screws up in confusion. She taps the same message and glares at the seat in front of her. Not sure what I’m doing, I sit back down on the edge of the desk. Her pencil starts flying over the paper.
I can’t do this through notes. I have a free period next. Do. Not. Go. Anywhere!
For some reason, I listen to her. The last thing I want to do is hurt Robin. It was an idiot thing to do going to her with this problem in the first place. I can’t figure out why she’s so intent on making me stick close by, but her intensity pushes me to do as she says. I slink down in the empty seat and try to focus on the lecture, on anything other than Robin and Olivia.
The ring of the bell startles me nearly right out of my chair half an hour later. I stumble to my feet. Before I can take a step, I feel Robin’s grip latch onto my hand. She’s not letting me get away. Once again, I am drug through the halls to the parking lot. Robin yanks me over to an empty bench and unloads her stuff on ground.
“Sit,” she demands.
I sit.
She looks over at me with an expression I can’t puzzle out. Guilt spreads through me like a sickness. “Robin, I’m so sorry for coming to you with this. I wasn’t going to. It just kind of slipped out. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“Why?” Robin asks. “We’re friends. You
can talk to me about anything.”
“Yeah, but …”
I seem to have developed a talent for getting myself into stupid situations. She’s acting like this has nothing to do with her, but it does, doesn’t it? I can’t have possibly misread the way she acts when we’re alone. Feeling incredibly lost, I figure I can’t make this any worse by telling the truth.
“Robin, I shouldn’t have said anything, because I know you like me.” I look over at her with a pained expression. “Don’t you?”
Robin’s infectious grin returns. “Of course I do. As you well know, you usually don’t kiss people if you hate them, and I’ve kissed you twice.”
“But …?”
My head shakes back and forth. Did I lose part of my brain at some point during the night? What is going on?
“Mason,” Robin says, sliding her hand into mine, “I like you a lot, but like I said, I know you’re in love with Olivia.”
“Then why did you kiss me? Twice?”
She grins again. “I knew how Olivia saw you, and I just thought that if you ever got tired of waiting around for her, you’d know I was here.”
I can only stare, still feeling rather off center. Robin smiles sadly and leans her head against my shoulder. “You kissing Olivia, yeah, that threw me for a minute, but I knew my chances from the start. I’m still your friend first and this was obviously tearing you up.”
“You looked pretty upset in class,” I say quietly, afraid she’s just being nice now.
Robin’s body goes unnaturally still. When she speaks, her voice is strained. “Yeah, but not about what you think.”
Her words send a chill down my spine. Gently, I push her up to look at me. “Robin, what’s wrong?”
“It’s not about Olivia,” she says, her chin beginning to quiver again. “It’s about you.”
“What do you mean?”
The tears I thought she was trying to hold back in class spring to her eyes in a glassy sheet. “After I dropped you off, I went home and asked my mom about the Escort thing.”
I suck in a breath as fear stabs straight into my chest.
Robin hurriedly tries to reassure me. “I didn’t say anything about you. I told her Grandma had been rambling on about Escorts and I wasn’t sure what they were.”
Scaling back my panic is a slow process. “Did she know?” I ask shakily.
“Some,” Robin admits. “She didn’t know how Escorts are able to take Aerlings home. She said it’s not something Escorts really talk about. She did know when it’s supposed to happen, though.”
Robin’s voice catches on that last point and I know whatever she says next is not going to be good. Her fingers cinch around mine more tightly. I don’t want her to say it, but I need to know. “When?”
“Your… on your eighteenth birthday. I tried to ask her if there was any way to avoid it, stay here, but she said there wasn’t. Aerlings have to go home when they turn eighteen.” She tucks her lip between her teeth, biting down almost to the point of drawing blood as she attempts to stop trembling. “I’m so sorry. You only have a few more weeks here before you’ll have to go back, Mason.”
“Three,” I whisper mournfully.
Robin looks up at me. “What?”
“Three weeks. My birthday is October sixteenth. That’s only three weeks away.”
A tear slips down Robin’s cheek. “I’m so sorry, Mason.”
Leaning back against the bench, I breathe out slowly. “This changes everything.”
“I know.”
I shake my head back and forth in frustration. Anger sets in so strongly, I can’t contain it. My fist slams down against the bench, leaving a sizable dent. Robin jumps next to me, but isn’t scared away. Her hand tightens around mine. Both our knuckles are pale from the strength of our grips.
In three weeks, the only life I’ve ever known will be over. Somehow I’ll be sent back to a world that is completely alien to me. Olivia’s parents, Evie, Olivia, I’ll never see them again. No more playing catch in the backyard. No more cooking next to Mom, listening to her laugh as ingredients and utensils float through the kitchen. Evie will never laugh at my antics again. And Olivia… my heart convulses in on itself.
I never could have imagined a time when kissing Olivia would be something I considered a mistake, but now that is the only thought running through my head. I would never have been so cruel had I known.
“I can’t be with Olivia,” I say in amazement.
“You still have a few weeks,” Robin says.
Shaking my head, I know where that would lead. Three weeks to be together, love each other, only to be torn apart. It could never be casual between us. I felt the passion behind her kiss this morning. She’s scared right now because this is new an unexpected, but I know Olivia.
Giving someone her love isn’t something she would take lightly. Olivia’s love is fierce. It’s what has kept me safe all these years. Loving me as a brother kept her focused, made me her first concern. Giving herself to me with a deeper love isn’t something that could ever be broken. When I am forced to leave… that isn’t something I could ever put her through.
“Robin,” I say quietly, painfully, “I need you to do something for me.”
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