He had a talent, that was for sure. He so easily irritated me in one breath and confused me in the very next.
Me:
No.
Unknown:
Hmm. I don’t believe you.
Me:
Believe or don’t believe whatever you want.
Unknown:
That sounds like a slippery slope. Speaking of slippery, how’s your leg? Doin okay?
For a moment, I thought he was talking about the scars on my inner thighs, and the most horrible dread started spreading through me. Then I realized he meant the leg that had gotten caught in the wire, and I sighed at my own paranoia.
Me:
It’s fine
Unknown:
Good. Be more careful where you step, darling.
Me:
Please don’t call me that.
A hot, itching flush burned across my cheeks, and this time I did turn the screen off, then set my phone facedown and buried my face in my hands.
Where the hell did he get off, calling me that?
The phone vibrated against the table, so I grabbed it and shoved it into my backpack.
I didn’t want to play games with him today.
Each interaction with him only left me feeling even more flustered and confused, and I wished I could get a handle on him. That I could put him in a clearly marked box and tape it shut. I just wanted to be able to label him a self-involved asshole so I could move on, but he was frustratingly hard to pin down.
And to ignore.
I’d gone all day without seeing him, but this irritating curiosity had its teeth in me, and I couldn’t get rid of it no matter what I did. A deluge of questions flooded my mind; I was drowning in my own desire to know more about him.
I wanted to know why his dad thought he needed to be watched. I wanted to know why he was closed-off one moment, and then intensely open the next. Silly and serious, self-centered and self-sacrificing. Opposite ends of a spectrum housed in one confusing body.
I wanted to know what made him tick so I could put this all to rest. Maybe if I understood him just a little better, he wouldn’t be able to get under my skin so easily.
After my morning class, it started to rain, so I ran across campus to the library and found a nice corner to hole up in on the second floor. I had another hour before I needed to get to my next class, so I rifled through my backpack for my phone, ignored the new text messages, and opened the browser so I could scour the internet for everything I could find on the Voss family.
And I found a whole hell of a lot.
Dakota had two siblings—an older brother named Everett and a younger brother named Valentine, the guy I’d met in our room the other day.
Everett looked like the exact type of person that had bullied me in grade school. He was smiling in every picture, but it was the kind of smile that dripped with arrogance and cruelty. TheI’m better than you and I know it and I’ll prove itglint in his eyes was infuriating, even through the screen of my phone.
He also bore a striking resemblance to Dakota, though he didn’t have any freckles and his hair was a lighter shade of brown.
