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We stayed like this, eyes closed, close. Waiting.
Hoping this wasn’t the wrong thing. That after all this turmoil, after all of this we’ve been through together, that someone outside of it would understand.
If Erica couldn’t accept whatever he’d say, then who else could? Did we have any chance at all?
I knew what Kota would say before he said it. I only hoped she’d understand. “Because... we’re both dating her.”
“You’re...what?”
“We both like her, so we decided between us that we’d...both date her. He wasn’t doing anything behind my back. I mean...I don’t mean to make it sound like Sang didn’t have a choice. She agreed to it. I’m probably making this sound worse than it is.”
Erica made a strange noise as she exhaled quickly. “I...don’t even know what to say. First, your school has you mixed up in a weird undercover operation, and now you’re saying you’re allowing...that Sang couldn’t decide between the two of you so you agreed to this?”
“We didn’t ask her to pick,” Kota said. “Nathan openly confessed to having feelings for her. He didn’t want it to cause problems. He was asking for solutions so he didn’t make a mistake like that. I talked to her about it. We were worried about it splitting up things or causing problems between us. Nathan wasn’t even interested in doing this. I suggested he give it a try, with Sang in agreement with it.”
Half-truths about how it happened.
I wondered why he wasn’t talking about the others, but I realized maybe that was a bit too far. If she couldn’t accept Nathan and Kota dating me at the same time, it’d be impossible for us to explain the whole real situation.
Baby steps. One thing at a time.
I couldn’t wait any more. There was no reason to let him sit through this alone any longer.
I kissed Luke on the nose quickly, releasing him.
He stared at me, his face paler than I’d seen it before. His usually happy face serious. Now determined.
I was, too. I straightened up, fixed what I could of my hair by getting it out of my face, and then opened the door.
Luke stepped away, hiding, and I closed the door for him.
They were sitting at the table. Kota turned around. Erica looked up, her eyes wide, her face strained with questions and concerns.
“Morning,” I said, hoping they assumed I’d just gotten up and hadn’t heard anything. Kota needed a break, and Erica needed time to think about what Kota was telling her.
Kota remained seated but stretched out an arm to me. I went to him, unsure what he wanted. He wrapped an arm around my waist and looked up at me. “Morning,” he said. “Are you hungry?”
“Are you?” I asked. “I can make some eggs and toast, perhaps?”
“Sure,” he said. And he looked over at his mom. “I was just telling her about what happened with Hendricks...and Nathan. About you, me and Nathan.”
“Oh,” I said. My face was still hot, the blush deepening, but she wasn’t outwardly protesting. Maybe he just wanted me to confirm what he was saying was true. “Yeah,” I said. “We didn’t mean to lie about it before.”
“We just weren’t sure you’d be okay with it,” Kota said. “Nathan made himself the bad guy until we were comfortable enough to talk about it.”
“He didn’t attack me,” I said. “I know what Jessica saw...that she probably didn’t understand the situation. We were talking about something else when I was saying things like no and whatever else. To Jessica, it probably sounded awful.”
Erica’s face had frozen. I thought she was looking at Kota, but her attention had altered to someplace distant, drifting into her own thoughts. “I want to be supportive of what you’re doing,” she said. “I think I’m having more problems trying to figure out how you came up with this, and why you thought to do it.”
“We sort of stumbled into the idea,” Kota said. “I know it’s weird, but for some reason, it works for us.”
She shook off her thoughts and refocused on us. “I think I need to hear this from him, from all three of you together. But let’s put it aside, for now. We need to figure out what to say to the police as well. He may need to be here. We’ll need to focus.” She looked at me. “Maybe you can go get Jessica and walk over and get him?”
“I’ll go see if she’s up,” I said, eager to do as she asked. She wasn’t yelling. She wasn’t demanding Kota get out of the Academy, that it was too dangerous. After all the lies, after all the craziness she’d experienced, I wondered how she was able to absorb it and deal with it. Did we not give her enough credit?
Part of me wondered if she hadn’t suspected the Academy to be more than what was on the surface. She’d told me before some suspicions she’d had about it, after the Academy changed Kota so drastically and helped them in their lives. Hopefully what she saw from that outweighed what happened last night. It wasn’t always dangerous like that.
I left them alone, trusting Kota to continue to talk with her about this, and headed to Jessica’s room.
Even though the truth was partially out, I wasn’t sure I felt totally comfortable.
But Nathan was no longer going to be an outcast. I wanted to be sure of this. No matter what happened now, I wouldn’t allow him to go through anything like that again.
Vulnerable
Nathan
The early morning broke over the trees, and Nathan was in his house, at the kitchen table with Diego Ramirez sitting across from him. They were both still wearing their clothes from the night before, Ramirez in jeans and a black shirt, and Nathan wearing a red hoodie and jeans. Nathan’s clothes were torn in places. He imagined his face was bruised. Parts of him were scraped and discolored where Hendricks had kicked or hit him.
His whole body ached, making sitting upright in the hardwood chair difficult.
Ramirez’s dark brows were high on his forehead as Nathan rattled off what happened. Nathan had been granted permission to talk about his dive into the lake, and onward.
Ramirez shook his head slowly as Nathan wrapped it up with the fight at the Lee house. He leaned forward, writing notes in a small notepad he’d pulled out for this. “I’ve got to tell you, I don’t know why you didn’t call in someone else sooner.”
Nathan shrugged. “Who is going to believe we’ve been chasing around a guy in a mask? And what we knew about Mr. Hendricks? We can’t submit the video we’ve got.”
“You can’t,” he said, and he stopped writing, putting his pen down. “I can. Someone can.”
“How do we explain the cameras?” Nathan asked. “We set them up, not the school. And Hendricks had never gone as far as he did last night. That was crazy.”
Ramirez smirked. “Okay. You’ve got me.” He pointed a knuckle out toward the street, beyond it to the Lee house across the way. “But I don’t want to see this shit happening again. You’re lucky David and I are on the same page when it comes to you-know-what. He’ll do his best to marginalize your exposure with the police, but we could have taken care of this well before if you’d let us in.”
“We can’t always do that,” Nathan said. “But outside of Volto, H
endricks and McCoy were the people we needed to put aside. And well, Morris. Only we didn’t know it before.”
He shook his head looking down at his notebook. “It’s likely more people were in on this and you don’t know it. Morris isn’t going to talk to me now. It’s going to take time to get information out of him or McCoy about who they were working with. Maybe once they start ratting on each other.”
“So they’ll be in jail?”
“Last I heard, they were awaiting lawyers and for bail. At so early in the morning, they’ll just wait for a judge. I doubt they’ll get bail. Not after attacking a minor in her home.”
“Not Sang...”
He shook his head. “Jessica Lee. And you. You’re willing to take this all the way to a trial, right?”
“Anything,” he said, and he felt sure he could do it. Sang needed to stay out but he didn’t have to. “We’ll get lucky if they don’t mention Sang at all.” He was sure they could manipulate the lawyers and get Academy lawyers involved.
It’d require far more favors. More than he had.
Diego tapped at the table. “You’re lucky I went out to check up on Morris. I didn’t know he’d lead me right back to you.”
“You got on this quick,” Nathan said.
“You got driven off the road and you all looked terrified. Sounded dangerous. I wanted to get a good grasp on the situation quickly before anyone else was hurt. I showed up a little late but I couldn’t really get an idea of what was going on until it all started happening.”
Nathan couldn’t disagree with that. And they were lucky he was willing to get out there so quickly. “You threw the lights?”
“Nope. That was Mrs. Lee, I think. That’s how I realized something horrible was going down. Smart of her to do it.” Ramirez stood up, taking up his notebook and stuffing it into a sling bag he’d brought in, throwing the pen inside as well. “I’ll probably be back. I want to find this Volto.”
“We’ll take care of him,” Nathan said.
Ramirez smirked and shook his head. “This is off the clock. I’m curious. I love a puzzle.”
