James York slumped over, placing his hand on his knees, breathing deeply through the pain as I walked away guilt-free. My head spun a little as I walked along the hallway toward my next class. It made no sense to blackmail Maxwell Boleyn, whether it was the Yorks or Leslie, because he wouldn’t cave to their demands.
My feet froze on the linoleum just as I approached the stairs, and I turned back, stepping back inside the bathroom to find James York hovering over the basin, flicking water onto his bloody cock.
“Maxwell Boleyn committed suicide, did you know?” I pressed, and he grunted, “Huh? Nah,” like he didn’t care and had more important things to attend to.
“Right,” I murmured and left the bathroom again. If he didn’t care that Maxwell committed suicide, then I doubt he had any skin in the game. You’d think he’d be pleased that the man they were trying to screw over would be dead. Job done. Problem out of the way, although you can’t blackmail a dead man. So, the puppet master wasn’t the Yorks, and my hunch was Adina’s stepmother had something to do with it. But I had no proof. Did Adina even know the connection between her stepmom and the Yorks?
As I left the bathroom and headed toward the stairs, I had a strange loyalty toward Adina, a warming of feelings that Ez warned me about. It’s not in my nature to become attached to women, yet the more I hung out with her, the more I wanted to hang out with her. She was getting under my skin, and the thought of never seeing her again was like needles fired into my heart. I had to do something about it.
Yeah, sure, Ez was more concerned about Adina snitching on him over the dead man on the train, but my concern ran deeper, and when I saw Ez with her earlier, I wondered if he was catching feelings as well.
I arrived at class just on time and hissed at a group of girls who stared at me as I walked past. I know I look and behave weird, but I don’t give a shit. I sat alone as per usual; there was always a space around me where no student dared to invade, and that’s exactly how I liked it because I could stretch my legs out, spread my stuff out on the empty chairs and desks beside me.
But on that occasion, as my brain was in overdrive after questioning the Plath clone, I felt a weird sense of loneliness sitting there while students kept to the other side of the room. I wasn’t lonely for them; I was lonely for Adina, the girl whomI kissed in the library while the stranded bird fluttered by the window. The girl I betrayed and fucked over in the gardens was to punish her. It was cruel, but I enjoyed it and so did she, until we wouldn’t let her finish.
The Robotics lecturer enthusiastically rambled on, which was normally interesting, but I struggled to focus because I was thinking about her. If I don’t sort my shit out, I’ll fail. It was the Warwick family trust that paid for my schooling, and I didn’t want to let them down.
I pulled my attention to the front of the class, pushed her to the back of my mind, and for several moments, I was 100% concentrating on what the lecturer was saying. Then I caught a scent of perfume, and my mind immediately went back to thinking about Adina again.
Fuck, she was becoming my weakness, my addiction, and it wore like an ill-fitted glove.
