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I was tempted to sneak up on him and take it, like he’d taken a few things from me, but I was too lazy to get up fully yet.
I wasn’t too surprised he was there, but why sleep on the floor? I nudged him with a foot.
He smacked his lips, rolled over, and looked at me with half-opened eyes. “Mmmm.”
I made room for him, scooting to the far edge of the cot against the wall.
A smile broke out on his lips. He got up on his hands and knees slowly. He eased himself into the sleeping bag beside me. The metal of the cot creaked a little as he settled in.
“Morning,” he whispered, his dark eyes blinking rapidly.
“Good morning,” I said softly. My throat was dry, so my voice was raspy. “You didn’t have to sleep on the floor.”
“I didn’t want to wake you. North said you had a hard time falling asleep.”
“I couldn’t stop thinking about what to do.” I did feel a little better after sleeping. Before, I was waiting for explosions. Now I was just ready to get out of the house and figure out ways to stay away from it for as long as possible. Having some sort of plan in place would ease my dour thoughts...at least, so I hoped.
He smiled and slowly stroked my forearm with his palm, warming the skin. His voice was a little croaky at first and then got better. “This will be easier than you think. Just get on Carol’s good side and stay there. She knows a bit about us, but she seems sympathetic to you. That’s good, right? Do what she says for a bit. Make it seem like you’d be a good choice for a private school. We’ve got the rest. We’ll feed her brochures for fake private schools.”
He made it sound so simple. Like all I had to do was pretend and I’d be out. “Will she want me to go?”
“She won’t pass up free tuition. If she’s concerned at all about money, in her mind, you’ll have room and board completely paid for two years until you graduate and go to college. Victor was thinking about doing the same thing.”
I sat up on my elbows to check in with him. “What? Why?”
His brown eyes focused on me, unwavering. “Victor wants to get out from under his dad. Getting into a private school full-time is probably the way to go. He’d be able to stay away for weeks. It’s the same as you, getting them to sign off on a school. You’ll be out of here before you know it.”
The news was surprising. Victor’s situation I understood. I knew his father. He was pretty harsh. What about his mother? What would she think?
Here I was complaining about being inconvenienced, disappointed about having to wait in an uncomfortable situation. How did Victor feel when he had to be home, or at a concert, something he might not want to be at? He did it for a reason. In the future, there was a promise he’d be how he wanted. He was patient enough to wait for it.
I’d felt like I was the only one, but I was with the people who understood what I was going through better than anyone.
I still wanted out. I wanted what some of them wanted for themselves. Still, if they were going to be patient, I needed to be, too. Besides, where would we go? We couldn’t all just live with Nathan in his house forever.
Perhaps I was too hopeful to get out of here so soon. It was only half the problem. I sighed heavily, staring at Luke’s chest rather than looking at him.
Luke continued to rub my arm. “Don’t be scared.”
“I’m not.”
“You are,” he said. He reached for my jawline and eased my face up until I was looking at him. “Tell me.”
His dark eyes warmed, silently urging me to tell him the truth. I breathed in, still smelling the musk of North lingering in the air, and then Luke was there, asking me to tell him things. His scent, vanilla and sugar, mixed with the others in the room. It brought comfort to me.
“There’s a lot to do,” I whispered. I swallowed, sighed and rolled onto my back. “And it isn’t just Carol. What happens even if I get out of here? I heard the fight you guys had. Back at Victor’s yesterday.”
“I was wondering if you did. Some of them were yelling loud enough.” He let go of me, creating a minuscule amount of space between us. He propped his head up with his arm and gazed at me. “Don’t let them worry you, though.”
“Kota’s really upset,” I said.
“After you fainted, you scared the crap out of him. We were all pretty on edge after that. Don’t take it seriously. We’d fight over gum.”
I cracked a small grin at his attempt at a joke but quickly lost it just thinking of what they’d been yelling about again. “I mean about everything else. The plan. The mess...”
“You’re not a mess, Sang.” He shifted his head closer, his nose near mine. “Kota was always going to be the one to convince. You get him to believe in this, then we’ll all follow. We knew this.”
I couldn’t stop hearing Kota’s voice, sounding so doubtful about what North and the others had wanted to try: us together in a relationship, whatever that meant. Kota’s lack of faith in it left me wondering again if this was at all something I could dare to ask any of them. “It was all wrong. He found out because...I was kissing Gabriel. He saw us.”
His lips twitched at the corners. “I know.”
“It didn’t happen right. He shouldn’t have been surprised like that. I should have told him.”
He reached out to cup my cheek into his palm. His thumb traced my lower lip. “It was bad timing, but would there ever have been good timing?”
“It could have gone better.”
“It is what it is now.” He smiled and then leaned in and kissed my nose, slowly, and remained close by so his warm breath fell on my face. “You can’t change what happened, so let’s look at this now. He’s learned about it. He’s still here. That’s good. If he didn’t want this at all, he’d have said so.”
The conversation echoed in my head. The stress...he couldn’t stop seeing me kissing the others. It hurt him. I thought for sure he’d never be able to look at me again.
Only when we were in the car, and the concern he carried then, staring right at me at times.
Then there was the look he gave me when I was about to go inside the house, when it looked like he was coming after me, and he was so worried that it made me pause.
The things he said to me on the phone... I didn’t know what it all meant. He was hurt, but every time he talked to me or was around me, I remembered seeing that desperation.
The same desperate feelings I had, that I needed to know he still cared about me.
I groaned. “I feel like I really let him down and hurt him, and I keep seeing his face and how disappointed he was.”
Luke leaned in close enough he could have nuzzled my nose. He sighed heavily, his warm breath falling against my lips. He then drew his head back so he could look at my eyes. “Sang, I know him. I’m sure he was upset. However, he’s...not said no. We just surprised him. That’s all.”
“He didn’t seem to want to.”
“That’s not what I heard,” he said. “I heard him trying to want to and not being able to wrap his head around it. We all did that.”
I pressed my lips together firmly, as if doing so would eliminate the growing knots in my stomach and heart. “I can’t imagine why he would try. I feel like I treated him badly for not saying anything.”
“We’re all at fault for it, but he’ll know why once he’s had a chance to think it over. There was no easy way to tell any one of us. We only found out because we went to see Lily and her team, remember? Before then, what did you think was going to happen?”
I shook my head, my lips moving for a moment as I thought of everything I’d feared, remembering something I had forgotten. “I...was afraid to disappoint you all. I was afraid to hurt everyone by telling someone how I really felt... I just assumed I couldn’t choose among you because it hurt too much to choose just one.”
He moved a hand over to his chest, pressing. “Before I found out, I would have been upset if I saw you kissing Gabriel. But it was only because I’d have worried you did
n’t like me.”
“I like you,” I said quickly and then my voice cracked at the end as it wasn’t the full truth of what I felt. It was just my immediate reaction to what he was saying.
He chuckled and then leaned in, touching his forehead to mine. “Kota got a shock, but I bet it was because of the same thing. The reason the rest of us weren’t really forward about a relationship with you was because we all assumed Kota had first dibs.” He coughed out another giggle and then quieted. “Sorry, that sounded weird.”
“But what does it mean?”
“He saw you first, and the rest of us weren’t going to make a move when it was clear he liked you and we all thought you just liked him. Or at least I could tell. But then you seemed to like me, too. So I was confused for a while. I didn’t want to hurt Kota by getting you to date me. That, and when we told each other not to pressure you when you were going through a bunch of stuff.”
For months, we’d all tiptoed around each other, not saying what we were thinking. I had known I was doing it, but I didn’t realize they were, too. “Kota seemed to sometimes want to...and then would back off sometimes.”
“We all did, for so many reasons. But Kota’s going to come around. He was the heart of our group for the longest time. He was the one that pulled us all together.” He paused and then his eyes narrowed. “It’ll change, soon, I think.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’re all in this for you now. It used to be him, but now it’s you.”
I backed my head up a bit. We were still close, nose to nose, and it almost hurt to look at his face. “I don’t understand. The heart?”
“We weren’t always close,” he said, a soft smile on his face. “North and I used to fight all the time. The doc and Mr. Blackbourne... Victor and Gabriel...we all kind of butt heads every now and again. Kota sets us straight. If we’re too mad at the others to keep it together, we focus on him. He just has this way of drawing us back in and making everything right.”
I pictured when Gabriel was upset with Victor for buying me too many things. I thought of North and Luke sometimes fighting, or North and Silas... there were other instances, too. I’d often wondered how they managed to stick together when they were so different. Was Kota responsible for all of it? “I didn’t know.”
He smiled softly and then leaned in, kissing me lightly on the lips. “You’re the heart now, Sang. You talked to Victor and Gabriel that last time, and they calmed down. You calm North down when he yells at me. You’re just like Kota. Give him time to sort it out for himself. He’ll see. Once he’s on your side, once he believes in all this, it’ll be different. And I think he will. He’s just like you.”
