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Now I watched him struggle with the roll of duct tape he was using to tie a pair of sticks together. Cassian wasn’t like other boys our age. He seemed… more. More determined. More grown up. More everything.
Even now, there was a look on his face like he was taking the idea of building our silly little fort in the woods as seriously as if our lives depended on it.
He was seven. In a few more weeks, I would be, too. For the longest time, he had just been the boy who lived next door. I’d see him at school, and he’d get on the bus right after me for school, but that was all. His dad was a firefighter, and we’d met when I saw the truck stopped outside their house one day. I wandered over and asked if I could see inside. Cassian offered to show me, and ever since, we’d been friends.
I guess it happened like that, sometimes. All it took was a little spark.
Lately, he wasn’t just the boy next door to me. I’d started noticing things about him. Like the way his eyes looked like a cloudy sky, even when the sun was in them. Or how he had nice hair with little waves in it that tickled my face when we’d sit down close beside each other to catch our breath after a game. Most of all, I’d noticed how I felt weird around him. Like I couldn’t act normal, even if I tried. I’d say silly things or be quiet when I had a million things to say. And I’d lay in my bed after a day of playing and run through everything we’d done, puzzling over whether I’d looked stupid to him or if he thought I was cool.
“You going to help, Charli?” He had the roll of tape dangling from his teeth as he tried to arrange a set of sticks into a square shape.
“Sorry.” I got off the grass and went over to him, helping steady the sticks while he wrapped the corner in tape.
Cassian stopped what he was doing, dropping the sticks he’d been working so hard to get perfect as he grabbed my wrist. He stared down at the scrapes on my palms. “What’s this?”
“Nothing.” I tried to pull my hands back, but he didn’t let go.
“Tell me, Charli.”
There it was again. Cassian could be really quiet and thoughtful most of the time, always wondering how things worked and if there were better ways to tackle problems. But the one problem he always seemed to worry most about was me.
I hesitated to tell him the truth, because I worried what he might do.
“Charli. What happened?”
“Jonah. Him and his friends were playing this stupid game yesterday. They hid off the road and tried to throw sticks into the spokes of people’s bikes. They got mine and I fell, but I’m fine. It’s just a couple scratches.”
Cassian didn’t say anything for a while. He picked up the sticks again, wrapping the tape around the edges with jerky, quick motions. “Which friends?”
“Bill and Zane.”
He nodded.
“What are you going to do?”
The look on Cassian’s face when he met my eyes was my little heart’s first experience with what it felt like to swoon. Maybe that was why I felt so strange around him. He wasn’t just my friend. He was more than that, wasn’t he? He was my protector.
My dark guardian.
He gave the tape a savage tug, then tested to make sure the sticks weren’t going to separate. “I’m going to make sure they never mess with you again.”I knelt down in the grass behind the house and put three fingers on the ground the way Zoe had shown me. I let my butt lift up and found the sweet spot between tense and relaxed. I kept my eyes on the ground, counting in my head.
One…
Two…
I burst forward, pumping my arms as hard as I could. Every muscle in my body was screaming for a rest, but I pushed through it, even when it felt like I was going to puke. Once I reached the forty-yard marker, I tried to ease up from my sprint, but I ended up falling to the ground. I rolled to my back, feeling the sweat rolling off me despite the cold.
I stared up at the sky, remembering how many times Cassian and I had laid silently on hilltops or in the woods and just watched the clouds together.
How was that the same person as the cruel god who tormented me at school?
I blew out a breath and wiped the sweat from my eyes. After a while, I hobbled my sore ass inside and filled the bathtub with water and ice.
I’d joined the track team at Parker nearly three weeks ago now. We practiced four days a week, and I came home after practice every day to spend another hour or two working by myself in the backyard.
