“What the fuck are you saying, that’s not true,” he spat, pulling a vape pen out of his tracksuit.
“Yeah it is.”
James frowned, staring at me skeptically.
“I didn’t know that. Younger than you?”
“No, older. He died of leukemia when he was sixteen. I was around Jasper’s age. Then my parents separated.”
I saw him take the vape pen out of his lips.
“Fuck, White.” A note of distressing sadness lingered in his raspy voice, and I found myself unable to swallow. I’d just told him something so personal, for no reason.
“It sucks,” was all I managed to say.
“Life definitely sucks, but maybe there’s no need to remind you of that. You learned that all on your own.”
“Thank you so much for your tact and diplomacy.” I groaned. “But people heal from pain.”
“Bullshit.”
I felt his eyes on me, but I couldn’t turn around.
“Did you really heal from it?”
My throat burned. I wasn’t really healed, but I definitely couldn’t tell him how I hid any negative emotion and substituted it with physical pain.
“Yeah, I mean, I don’t know.”
“Yeah.”
I limited myself to listening to him breathe as the night fell outside the window.
“What happened to you?” I breathed.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, have you always been like this?”
“So what, princess?”
His tone was spiteful. I’d known that our little truce would only last for the blink of an eye.
“So.”
Hotheaded, arrogant, full of himself, presumptuous, rude. The list of adjectives went on.
“I was born this way. Have you met Jordan? Being an asshole is in our DNA.”
His statement made me laugh, but when I turned around, James didn’t seem like he was joking. “I don’t believe you.”
“Oh, well, if you met my mom, you’d be convinced quickly, White.”
“James, your mom . . .”
One minute we were talking peacefully, the next minute, the unexpected happened. He roughly grabbed my elbow.
“Ow!”
