He rubbed his free hand over his face, brushing at it roughly. “I gotta go, Marlow.”
No.
How many cool-guy points would I lose if I refused to let go of him and instead forced him to sit back down and talk to me? 10? 20? 50?
Prying my fingers apart in order to let him go was a new type of agony I’d never experienced before. It felt like ripping my chest open and grabbing at my own beating heart to suffocate with my bare hands.
He stared at me for a long moment, his lips parting as if to say something but quickly clamping shut a second later. With one final headshake, he slipped away from me and headed out of the mess hall, leaving me to wallow once more.
The thing about self-pitying,at least for me, was that eventually, it turned into righteous anger.
All of this was unfamiliar territory. One I’d never waded through, let alone figured out how the fuck I was going to get out of this funk now that I was knee-deep in the shit storm of it all. With no one to blame by myself for fucking this up royally with my own emotions, I was beginning to see why Avery had been so fucking bent out of shape about Brandon.
Here were some simple truths I was starting to discover on this own journey of mine.
One: getting ditched was actually starting to grate on my nerves, to the point where I was close to throwing a tantrum the next time my time was cut short with the one person I’d been promised to be sharing it with.
Two: getting iced out by Blake was at the top of my list forworst things everand was steadily getting worse the longer I sat here staring at this damn bonfire while pretending to give a shitabout whatever the couple next to me was rambling on about in between sharing a single bottle of beer.
Three: no matter how many times I tried to talk about this to Silas, he wasn’t going to get it. No amount of explaining, re-explaining and then explaining myself again was going to get through that thick skull of his. I was convinced he was incapable of feeling most human emotions outside of pure petty spite, but that was me. Avery wasprettysure he felt love and deep affection, at least for us, so we had that going for us.
But other than that?
He was like a damn robot with the wrong default settings installed.
Four:I was fucking over my own self.
How I’d gone from coming here with the sole purpose of bettering my health to combat the very real fear I’d drop dead just like my pops and somehow turned that into a ‘why doesn’t he like me?’situation was never going to cease from blowing my mind. And pissing me off.
Mainly because I could no longer pretend Ididn’tcare.
I did.
A whole lot.
“What do you think, Marlow?” the man next to me asked. Mark, I think his name was?
“About what?”
His wife laughed. “About what we were just discussing. I think the ropes course was way tricker than the rock wall. There was nothing to grab onto and it was all core strength. Which one did you do already?”
Yeah, fuck this.
Pushing myself up from my stump, I nodded to their bottle, waving my own completely full one in the air. “Another round?”
They both glanced at each other. “Oh, uh?—”
Before they could tell me no, I stepped around them and headed for the small group of staff huddled at the edge of the fires. Their voices were quiet as they talked amongst themselves, a rumble of laughter rippling through them right as I approached.
“Hey…” I threw on my best endearing smile. “Was looking for the director’s office. Would any of you be kind enough to point me in that direction?”
As my eyes adjusted from staring at the fire, I noticed Talos was among the group. I had a hard time seeing his expression from the flickering of the flames behind us making the shadows on all of their faces dance and move in weird patterns. All of them were quiet for a moment, defaulting to Blake’s second almost instantly.
He was the first to speak. “What’s the matter?”
“Have to return something.”
“What’s the item?”
