TWO
NEVE
Ihear their low murmurs from my spot pressed flat to the wall. The gray brick pricks at my hoodie and my hair, but I don’t dare move to find a more comfortable pose. My heart is still racing and Jackson’s angry words ring in my head.
My older brother, Nolan, told me Jackson was a waste of my time.“A piece of shit,”is actually what he said, but Nolan thinks I’m a saint and all the boys who want to sleep with me are sinners and he couldn’t have that more backward.
Still, I think I’m in over my head with Jackson.
He’s a little crazier than what I usually go for. When we got into the argument in his truck, he jerked the Ford over to the arena and started screaming at me for fucking around with his best friend, Will, which, fair, but when his eyes started going red and I could smell the liquor on his breath, it seemed like it was time for me to run.
I’ve never had to run from a man before and I don’t much fucking like it.
“Hey, man,” Jackson is saying, his words a little shaky. “I don’t mean any trouble. She’s a little tipsy if you know what I mean.”
I’m not. I’m, shockingly, completely sober.
“And I need to find her before she gets hurt.”
I roll my eyes in the dark and glance down at the dead, frostbitten grass beneath my black slip-on Uggs.
This isnotan outfit I’d wear to get attention, but I intended to break up with Jackson when he picked me up from my apartment to “talk,” so I didn’t want to look like his wet dream.
At twenty-nine, he should get off Drayton’s campus anyway. Look for a girl who won’t fuck him over just because she can.
I’m twenty-one, and I’m not going to stop being broken anytime soon.
My chest squeezes when I think of what Nolan would say, but it doesn’t matter. Nolan is in NYC and he only hears the filtered version of my life. Never the fucking mess of the facts. Although he does know about the slip-up with Will. Sometimes when I drunk text him, he pries and I confess.
It doesn’t stop him from trying to control me, his directives wrapped up with love.“Stay home, tonight, Neve. You’re better than all those boys.”
Not much different from how he was growing up.“You don’t need dessert tonight, Neve. You won’t feel well after you eat it.”
I roll my eyes in the dark and push those thoughts aside. No alcohol tonight, and only two meals, he’d be proud.
In my head I see the two men I ran past: One whom I collided with, my fingertips on his broad chest. Dark hair, dark eyes, a glare that said he might break my wrists if I didn’t fuck off. Then the other one, a few feet away; he watched me coolly, without a word.
I bite the inside of my cheek and hold my breath in the freezing night, only a sliver of the moon in the sky as I glance up, blinking at the stars. Drayton is forty minutes outside of Toronto proper, and forty minutes lets you see the Andromeda Galaxy. Well, maybe if I had my glasses.
But I left them in my apartment.
“No, I don’t think you need to find her,” one of the boys says. If I had to guess, it’s the blond. There’s a permanent smirk in his tone. “We’ll take care of it.”
I shake my head silently. No they won’t. They looked like athletes, bigger and taller than me, but I don’t know them. I guess I am at the Sky Arena, so maybe they play hockey? A little thrill jolts through me at the thought. I grew up watching hockey in North Carolina. Seeing the Canes play from the nosebleeds was some of the most fun I had with Nolan and Mom, even if Nolan always “accidentally” dumped half the popcorn when it was my turn to eat it.
But we don’t really speak to Mom much anymore.
She chose someone else over us.
I clench my teeth and push it all away.
My fingers are starting to go numb, even inside the sleeves of my hoodie, and it’s a twenty-minute walk to Darkmouth, the shadowy apartment above Midnight Blackwell’s Book Emporium that I share with Cynthia.
I should probably take this time to start running there before I freeze to death.
This is my last year at Drayton U and I do not want to die before I get my useless psychology degree.
I mean, I don’t think it’s useless.
