Present day.
Parking the car, I get out and walk over to Blake, and tell him not to mention anything about Cain, he nods then looks behind me at Olivia.
“The car is all fixed, and your breaks are fixed too.” Blake throws the key at me. “Your face doesn't look too good.” He jokes.
“You left before you could see the guy you fucked up. Took him about forty minutes before he could stand up,” Travis laughs, and I give him and Logan a nod.
“Blake was joking he wants to fight Mason, one crazy fucker fighting another.” Logan looks over at Olivia then back to me.
“Really, you want to fight that psycho, you forgot who trained him. I’m sure you would give him a good fight, but you’ve seen him down there.” Now Blake is crazy out of the three, but Mason is a man full of rage and only needs a reason to let it all out, and he doesn’t care either.
There's a reason Cain taught him to be the one who gets information from people when we need it. We don’t even know why he is so full of rage. My parents took him to the doctors, and they just say he’s being a boy and wants to get his way. In the end they know Mason would never hurt anyone, so they’ve left him be. Then Cain came along, and made him into what he is today, a fighter who prefers a bat with barbed wire around it.
“As long as he doesn’t kill me, I’d be open to it,” Blake jokes, and I look behind me at Olivia and throw the car key to her, and she catches it.
“If you want your face fucked up, let me know and I’ll talk to him. I need to get a present.” I say bye to them all, and nothing to Olivia as I walk back to the car.
Closing the door, I look at Olivia as she walks over to her car. Why the hell can I not stop thinking about her? The way her lips felt on mine, how her body would feel under mine. As much as I hate her, all I want to do is touch and kiss her.
Do people fuck those they hate?
Twenty
Olivia
I don’t sayanything as Hayden walks away. I just stand there for a moment, the weight of the car keys in my hand are heavier than they should be. I glance down at them, then up at Hayden’s back as he disappears into his car like I mean nothing. Like what happened in my dorm last night didn’t happen. Like I’m just another chore on his list, and he checked it off.
I force myself to turn around and thank Blake for fixing my car even though my throat feels like it’s closing up. “Thank you,” I say, managing the words with a tight smile.
“No problem,” his voice as cold as Hayden is to me. I have a feeling everyone in Hayden’s life is cold.
The way they were talking about fighting, and Mason fighting with a baseball bat, is this who he is now? A fighter? During the time I’ve been away, I don’t think there's any part of the Hayden I knew left in him.
I knew he was in a fight last night when I saw the bruises on him. I just didn’t think he went somewhere to fight.
I give Blake a nod and slide into the driver’s seat. The engine hums to life, smooth now, responsive. My car might be fixed, butI’m so far away from being fixed I can feel myself breaking more and more, the more I see him.
I grip the steering wheel and breathe, trying to calm the unease churning in my chest. It doesn’t help, the more I see Hayden the harder it’s becoming to breathe. The whole way back to campus, my head is a fog of questions.
Will he ever forgive me?
Can we ever be friends again?
What could have happened between us?
I hate myself for even daring to hope we can become something. But a small corner in my heart, the tiny corner, lives in hope. The hope of Hayden and me together, the hope of Hayden touching me in ways I’ve dreamt of for years. The hope that one day he looks at me and sees past the betrayal, past the silence, past the pain. Ands sees the girl who used to sit beside him in the treehouse, laughing at nothing, dreaming about college, about us, about forever.
I pull into the lot by the dorms, the sun is beginning to dip behind the rooftops, bleeding warm orange into a blue-grey sky. It’s beautiful, and even the beauty of the day isn’t making me feel any better.
I drag myself out of the car and make my way up the stairs and down the hall. My key fumbles in the door, my fingers trembling like I’d been out in the cold, but it’s not. My body is betraying me, itching for Hayden.
I drop my keys on the desk and sit on the edge of my bed.
This is supposed to be different. My college days were meant to be different. It was meant to be with Hayden, doing everything together. A place to build memories, with the boy I fell in love with, before I even knew what love was. Making memories with the boy who made me believe in everything I read in my books, I wanted him to touch me the way the male character would touch his love interest. I wanted Hayden to bethe one to make me scream his name, but now I cry with the dream of it.
The tears come and I try to wipe them away, but they keep coming. Sobbing into my hands, I curl up in my bed, my knees pulled to my chest so I can make myself small, and invisible.
“I want him back in my life,” I whisper to myself, but I ruined it, and no matter how many times I say sorry, no matter how much I hurt for what I did, sorry will never be enough. Never.
