Page 51

I wanted to cry, but I’d learned to keep my feelings hidden from other teenagers a long time ago.

And, of course, just my luck, the worst was yet to come.

Jake cornered me at my locker before my last period, a wall of football players with him. They were crowding me, Jake in my personal space and glaring at me like I’d personally offended him, which I supposed I had by turning him down at the party and quite a few times before that. “Heard you’re a homeless prostitute now,” he said, and I didn’t even recognize him his face was so twisted up with loathing. I hadn’t thought he was the best guy before, but the way he was acting now was downright ugly.

His friends laughed and that was ugly too. It felt so hateful when I’d never done anything to any of them that I thought should warrant this level of spite.

“Will you let me pass?” I asked quietly, looking through him. I was trying my best to check out of the whole thing mentally, a skill I’d learned a long time ago.

“Not until you tell us how much you charge. What’s the going rate for a desperate teenage whore? And is there a group discount? I’m pretty sure we can all scrounge up enough change from our pockets to rent you out for the night.”

I tried to push past him, but he didn’t budge at first, breathing into my face. I shoved harder, and he chest bumped me. I was already off balance from shoving against his immoveable form, and it caught me wrong and sent me back hard, the back of my head hitting the bottom corner of an open top locker. I got a brief glimpse of Jake’s shocked face before I blacked out.

I woke up held against a hard chest I somehow recognized right away. Carter was carrying me.

“You shouldn’t have moved her,” a worried female voice was telling him. The school nurse. “But since you already did, set her down here.”

“The back of her head is bleeding, and she was out cold.”

His voice was awful, choked up and emotional, and as he laid me down gently on the nurse’s table I saw his expression. He looked like he was going to break down. I wanted to tell him to put on a better game face. This was not the place to be showing he was more than a teacher to me.

He saw my eyes were open. “Are you okay? What happened?”

The nurse shooed him away until he took a few steps back and started checking my head with soothing hands.

Eventually he asked again. “What happened? Someone said you were being harassed and got shoved, but no one would tell me who it was.” There was violence in his tone, and I knew right away that I could never tell him what had really happened. He would lose it and do something crazy, and the last thing I’d ever do is contribute to getting him in trouble.

“It was nothing that dramatic. Someone accidentally bumped me, I don’t know who, and I fell against a locker and I hit my head.”

If anything his expression got worse. He knew I was lying, and he wasn’t taking it well. Now he felt both angry and helpless.

The questions were mercifully put on hold as paramedics showed up, and I went quietly through another series of check-ups.

I begged them not to take me to a hospital, I was terrified of the bill, and they fussed over me a bit more but relented, giving me an ibuprofen, bandaging my head. They gave me wound care instructions and asked if I had a ride home.

“I’ll take her,” Carter said.

“You’re such a dear, Mr. North,” the nurse said, beaming at him.

Wasn’t he just?

The ride home was tense and awkward. I knew he was mad at me for covering for the person who’d shoved me, but he was also too worried about me to give me a hard time about it at the moment.

At home he babied me to an extreme extent, and I let him because I thought it might make him feel better and I liked the attention.

He arranged me on the living room couch like an invalid and brought everything he could think of to occupy me and make me feel better.

I asked for my school laptop.

“Are you sure? They told you to rest.”

“Rest but not sleep, right? And it’s hardly going to make me feel better to get even farther behind on my schoolwork.”

He relented, bringing both his laptop and my own to the sofa so we could work side by side.

“Do you need anything?” he asked me for the dozenth time, at least.

I looked at him, love swelling up inside me. No one had ever cared for me like this before. It felt like no one had ever cared for me in my whole life before Carter. “I could use a kiss,” I told him.