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Zoe grinned. “Normal, sane people are overrated.”A month passed and, much to my surprise, life went on. I’d occasionally see someone watching me with uncomfortable interest, but it could’ve been idle fascination to see the girl who had “tamed” one of the untamable Greeks. I’d been placed on a sort of pedestal along with Kennedy Stills. It meant girls watched me with mingling awe and disgust. Boys avoided me like the plague but looked at me like a kind of untouchable prize when they didn’t think I’d notice.
To be completely honest, none of that mattered to me. Before coming back to Silver Falls, I might’ve imagined it’d be the best feeling in the world. After all, I’d spent my life hopping from school to school, wishing beyond hope that I could finally fit in somewhere. Now I’d basically been thrust to the top of the popularity totem pole.
I sat with Cassian for lunch and hung out with him and the other Greeks after school. We went to the rock cliffs and swam in the aqua blue water there, so cold it took our breath away even when the sun was glaring down. We laughed in Logan’s rusted out truck as he barreled through sloppy, muddy backtrails in the woods and got us stuck at two in the morning. I went to all Cassian’s games and earned myself all sorts of winks, waves, and smirks from my very own football star.
It was like a dream, and I couldn’t help thinking how happy my mom would’ve been to see me now.
I was sitting at the kitchen table in the Stone’s house with four graduation tickets in my hands. The thought of my mom and the sight of the tickets for “friends and family” made me think of my dad. There was more baggage to unpack with him. So much more baggage.
He had screwed up in the parental department in almost every way imaginable. He blamed me for my mother’s death. He punished me for it with emotional warfare for ten years. He drank himself into a shell of his former self and made us have to live on pennies.
Worst of all, he made it so I lost both my parents that night, not just my mom. The old dad—the one who had never been perfect but had always been there for me—burned down with the house. Everything did.
I used to think part of me died there, too. Now I wonder if maybe it just clung to Cassian, because being with him made me feel whole again.
I rubbed my thumb over the tickets, considering. If I didn’t invite him to my graduation, it’d be a slap in his face. It didn’t matter if he wanted to come or cared about it. It’d be something I could never undo, and I couldn’t help wondering if that would set the tone for our relationship going forward.
Inviting him would be the harder decision. I still felt so much bitterness and anger toward him that I wanted nothing more than to make him hurt. God, I wanted to make him hurt a thousand times for every time he’d made me cry as a little girl. I wanted him to understand what he’d done. Really understand it.
And yet I knew I wasn’t going to do that.
Maybe I could thank Cassian for the strength, or maybe I only needed to look inward. But I’d learned how the horrible things that I lived through all made me stronger. They gave me the backbone to stand up to Cassian long enough to realize we needed each other. Now those experiences were going to give me the strength to extend the olive branch toward my dad.
Was it forgiveness? Hell no. I still wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to say I forgave him. But I was going to try.For no particular reason, I sat upright in my bed. It was dark out, and a quick check of my phone told me it was well past midnight. Cassian and I had not-so-sneakily started sleeping in the same bed several nights a week. If it was up to him, it would be every night, but I somehow felt like it was important to maintain at least a thread of boundaries. So even though he had snuck into my room before I went to sleep and I’d let him lick me until I was gasping for air, he dutifully left and went to his own room.
Just thinking of our encounter finalized the fact that sleep wasn’t in the cards for me tonight. I got up, threw on a long t-shirt to cover my bare breasts and panties, then headed downstairs. I wouldn’t have believed it before moving here, but I’d actually gotten used to the massive size of the house. It had the eerie but comforting feeling of occupying a hotel with no staff and only a handful of guests, like something built for giants that had moved on and left long ago.
