That earns me the kind of smile that feels like a jab. It’s brief. She looks like she wants to say more like she wants to peel off the surface of this strange, stuttering thing between us and find the truth, but instead she says, “Well, you are. And shouldn’t you be with Leslie?”
I follow her gesture toward the quad, toward the cluster of girls. It’s like watching a play I both want and don’t want to be in. My throat tightens.
She folds her arms. She’s jealous? Mad? Furious with me. Then I catch the sight of marks along the hollow of her throat, puckered bruises that bloom dark against pale skin, the faint, desperate circles at the base of her neck. Hickeys. Not the candy kisses of teenagers, but the kind you get when someone is trying to prove ownership or need. I’d seen those marks on Bella and a few others during the week—light, indiscreet. Jamie loves them. He hands them out like confetti when he’s celebrating or when he wants to mark a night as his.
“You fucked him,” I say before I can stop myself. The words are blunt and the taste of them is bitter.
Her reaction is immediate. Eyes wide, alarm flaring—then a temper flare that makes me grin like an idiot because I know I hit something that matters.
“What?” Her voice is too loud for the lot, but she doesn’t care. She looks like someone about to set a fire to prove a point.
“I knew you wanted to be a cheerleader like Bella,” I say, stepping to her. “Never took you for a puck bunny too.”
“Fuck you, Miles,” she spits. The words are sharp, raw.
“I know you want me too, but I guess you’ll have to ask Jamie permission first, huh.”
I don’t expect the pain. The slap lands across my cheek with a clean, hot sting that lights up even the bruises my uncle left me with. For a sliver of a second I forget all the rules—forget Victor, forget the warehouse, forget the way the world breaks and keeps breaking under my feet. I feel nothing but a rush of red hot anger. The old hunger rises in me like a tide.
“Stay away from me,” she says, voice shaking, and then she turns and walks away like she’s punishing me just by moving.
I watch her go. I should be smart. I should walk back to my car, chew on the guilt, maybe throw out the falafels I grabbed for herin a stupid attempt at being thoughtful. I should, but I don’t. I’m so mad I can’t see straight. Every rational bone in my body snaps and I fantasize—dangerous, repetitive fantasies—about dragging her back and spanking her so hard her whole life recalibrates around me.
Instead, what comes is a cold laugh and a deeper, more terrifying certainty. I’m so fucked.
Jamie is going to be furious, and for a sliver of a moment, the idea of being in front of him, of having to explain this mess, makes my stomach drop.
I open the car door because I need something to do with my hands, and I grab the falafels. I fling them into the trash can by the dumpster. Fuck it. Fuck it all.
What did I expect? That she’d be okay after I was a dick after our kiss in the rain? That she’d stand there and tell me she liked me, that she’d been confused, that everything could be easy again? Life doesn’t hand out easy. It hands out choices that fucking suck.
I slide into the driver’s seat, chest heaving. My face throbs where she hit me, but it’s the bubbling heat behind my ribs that’s worse. I turn the key and the engine answers like a beast dragged awake. Anger tastes metallic in my mouth. Regret tastes like stale beer. I want to steamroll everything in my path until Jamie’s grin is wiped off his face for good. I want to carve a place in the world where she can’t look at me like I’m a bad joke.
Instead, I drive away. The lot recedes, and her silhouette grows smaller in my rearview mirror. I should be smarter. I should be better. But I’ve always been a little ruined, a little too raw around the edges. This proves it. This shows me how quickly I can tear a thing to pieces when I don’t know how to keep my hands to myself.
Screw her.
On the highway, I toss out the panties I should have never taken in the first place and kept all this time. Fuck it. Whatever this was is fucking over with.
14
Chloe
Afterclass,Ican’tfocus on anything but the echo of Miles’s voice, that smug tilt when he called me a puck bunny. I can’t believe I slapped him. It should make me feel triumphant. It doesn’t. It sits heavy instead—this dull, sinking guilt under my ribs that won’t move no matter how many times I tell myself he deserved it.
I should be heading to the library, maybe look for Jamie, maybe try to make sense of what’s happening between us—whateverthisis—but before I can even pull my phone out, I hear the unmistakable sound of Bella before I see her.
“Chloe, babe!”
She’s in oversized sunglasses that eat half her face, a messy bun barely holding itself together, and red lipstick so bright it could double as a warning sign. Her voice is slightly raspy, which onlyconfirms what her outfit and the dark circles under her eyes already say: hangover.
“Oh my God, I’m dying,” she groans, looping her arm through mine. “Do not ever let me drink that much again. I swear I could feel the tequila in myeyeballsthis morning.”
I laugh despite myself, the sound small but real. “Rough night?”
“The roughest,” she says dramatically. “After the streaking, I came back and couldn’t find you anywhere. I thought maybe you got kidnapped or something.”
I try not to flinch at her choice of words.
