“Are you okay?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I say, nodding and taking her hand in my own. “I was just leaving you a little something for when you got back. I thought you were taking the whole day, though.”
“Oh, no. It was just a quick session. Dr. Saldon gave me a journaling assignment—yay, even now, I have homework,” she says, slowly pumping one hand in the air as if in celebration.
I chuckle. “Well, I have to get back to it. Message me later, okay?”
She nods, and as I leave, I hear a soft gasp from her cubicle and I grin, imagining her finding her flowers. While I can’t make up for the lost time, I decide right then and there she will have to get used to seeing my ugly mug for as long as she is willing. Whatever the cost, I plan to protect her.
Eleven
Avalee
I pick up the vase and press my nose against the soft petals of a pink carnation.
“Told ya so,” Cobi teases.
I turn to smile at him over my shoulder and find him hovering with one arm hanging over my cubicle wall. He doesn’t have the usual playful look in his eyes, and I pause, tensing up. My skin crawls, and I have to squeeze the cold vase to calm myself and recenter.
“Hey, Cobi. What’s up?”
He takes his arm off the cubicle wall and brushes his thumb under his nose. “Nothin’. Just checking on things and thinking about something.”
“Yeah, like what?” I ask, not really interested in his answer but also not enjoying this change in demeanor from someone I have relied on for their consistency for years. He was my knight in chining armor for so long, our bond deeper than that of brother and sister because he’d seen me in my worst moments, when terror and fear gripped my limbs and made even simple conversation a chore.
“Does he know it was me?”
My breath catches. “You what?”
“Who saved you.”
A ripple of anxiety and déjà vu claw away in my core. My head spins, and my legs nearly buckle. I lean against my desk to keep myself standing.
The door to the office swings open, and Liz and Asher pour through the opening with brown bags of food. Cobi shuffles off from my cubicle, leaving me shaken as the office fills with the salty scent of fries and burgers.
“Come on, Virtue. These burgers aren’t gonna eat themselves!” Liz calls. Her words and the smells of the food shake me from my fog. I make up an excuse about not feeling well and ask to have the rest of the day off. Liz agrees but looks ready to ask me a ton of questions that I cannot answer right now. I shoot a look at Cobi, who is watching me cautiously, like I might breakdown into tears at any moment. I suck in a breath and leave them as they pass out the meals to one another.
As I open my car door, I hesitate. If Ruin comes back to the office, he’ll find me gone and my flowers and note still sitting on the desk. I will just have to message him later, I decide, and make my way back to Dr. Saldon’s office. She doesn’t like for patients to drop in unannounced and without an appointment, but she also won’t turn me away. Cobi and Ruin and my life changing so rapidly has triggered me somehow, and I need to figure out why so it stops happening.
Twelve
Ruin
past
I watched Avalee,wondering if I should take her hand or not. We’d been flirting a lot since the school dance, but that didn’t necessarily mean she wanted to date me. Did it?
“My mother knows, you know,” she said.
“Huh?”
“About us,” she added. She looked up at me, those chocolatey brown eyes so trusting.
I chuckled. I guess my answer was right in front of me, then. I was a couple years older than her, but that didn’t seem to matter, never had. She’d always acted older than the girls in her grade.
“If your mother knows, does that mean your father does too?” I doubted it since he would more than likely flip, but I thought I’d ask anyway.
She shook her head. “No, and my mother hasn’t told him either, which is surprising. But I think she’s a little scared of how he might react.”
