“Nic!” Eric yells as he walks through the door, dropping his basket of freshly laundered clothes to go hug his best friend. “I thought you were in class, man.”
“I was supposed to be,” Dominic says, clapping Eric on the back with his eyes still on me. “My lab got canceled, so I came back here.”
“Lucky bastard, my labs never get canceled.”
Eric crosses the room and wraps his arms around my shoulders, hugging me to him and pressing a kiss to my forehead that makes Dominic’s eyes flare.God, what is this guy’s problem?
“Yeah.” Dominic lifts both of his eyebrows. His gaze darkens as I lean into Eric’s touch. “I’mthe lucky one. You’re the one spending the whole afternoon laid up with… Sorry, what was your name again?”
“Stop being an ass.” Eric laughs, flashing me a reassuring smile. “He knows who you are, babe. I guess spending too many nights alone in this room has made him forget his manners.”
“Right.”Or maybe he’s decided to hate my guts based on a five-second interaction.
Except that sounds kind of dramatic, so I push the thought down and force myself to smile back. It must be a little shaky though, because Eric spins us around, turning his back on his friend and facing me withconcern etched in his features.
“What’s the matter? Your mom didn’t call back again, did she?”
“No. I’m fine.”
I can’t stop myself from looking over Eric’s shoulder at Dominic to see what he thinks of this little exchange. I half expect him to be fighting back a laugh or on the verge of telling me I’m not good enough for his best friend, but he’s not paying any attention to us. His long legs are stretched across his bed, his feet kicked up, and there are headphones in his ears as he scrolls through his phone.
When I look back at Eric, he doesn’t look convinced but thankfully doesn’t press further.
“Alright, let’s go back to your room then.”
“Okay.”
It takes us all of five minutes to pack up our things, and Dominic ignores me the whole time. He makes small talk with Eric about the trip they’re planning to make to his mom’s house this weekend and doesn’t even blink in my direction until right before we’re about to walk out the door, when he pins me with a hard stare and says:
“Nice tomeetyou, Sloane.”
Chapter 7
Dominic
Now
Sloane:I know you said don’t mention it, but I have to say it again. Thank you.
I run my finger over the screen of my phone. Tracing the words of the message Sloane sent me on Saturday night. The ones I’ve read a thousand times since my phone pinged and my heart stopped when her name flashed on my lock screen.
I was at a red light less than five minutes away from her house when the message came through. My fingers were still aching from the memory of being in contact with her body, and that ache intensified as I held the phone in my hand and read her message. Shock slipped under my skin, quelling the fire that was still raging inside of me when I thought about what could have happened to her if I hadn’t been stalking her from across the room.
The light turned green, and I pushed the gas, throwing the phone in the passenger seat like it had burned me. She never texted me. Mama was the only reason I even had her number saved, and I knew that was true for Sloane too, because I was there when Mama made us promise to keep each other’s contact information up to date. It was one of those requests she made after Eric died that neither of us had the heart to deny, even though we both knew we had nothing to say to each other that required an exchange as personal as a text.Apparently, now she feels differently.
Or at least she did four days ago.
Now, it’s Tuesday, and her text sits unanswered in a fresh message thread that haunts me with possibilities I can never consider. Possibilities that paralyzed me after leaving her place, knowing there was a hole in her top the size of a grimy finger that belonged to an asshole I wanted to track down and kill.
And that was another problem.
The white-hot rage I’ve always known was inside of me but have never acted on out of fear of feeling too much like my father—a man who used his fists to hurt rather than protect, to break things down instead of building them up. And he’s the last person I want to be like. I could almost forgive myself for bearing his name and looks, for having his large hands and the same charming smile that made my mom forget the bruises around her throat when he brought flowers. I told myself none of it mattered, since I wasn’t like him in all the ways that mattered.
The fundamental difference being my ability to keep my fucking hands to myself. To use my words to handle issues and to walk away when things moved past the point of discussion.
But every bit of that went out the window when I saw the panic in Sloane’s eyes. Letting the rage take over was a conscious choice. Hitting the man not once, but twice, and then choking him—choking him—felt like the most natural thing in the world to do because it meant protectingher. But I didn’t know it also meant unleashing the darkest part of myself, the part I’ve spent my whole life trying to suppress.
Bitter.
