Page 58 of She's With Me (She's With Me 1)

“I know, Aiden,” I snap.

“And the driver’s side of the car was keyed,” he finishes.

It’s dead silent for a single heartbeat.

“She keyed my car! She fucking keyed my car. That son of a bitch slashed my tires while Ms. Manicure keyed my fucking car!”

I don’t know what to do with the anger filling me up. My fists are clenching as if they can’t decide if they want to punch someone or strangle them, maybe both.

Aiden hesitates. “It gets worse.”

“How can this get any worse!” I explode. “They fucking vandalized my car!”

I march around to the driver’s side to see what Aiden was talking about, and halt as I take in the damage to my car.

In big, crude but legible print, the words Man-Stealing Whore are scratched into the paint on the side of my car.

Man-stealing whore? How the hell am I a man-stealing whore? Who does she think she is calling me a man-stealing whore? I haven’t done anything! Who have I stolen from her? How can she justify calling me—

“Amelia?” My internal tirade is cut off by a concerned Aiden.

Aiden. Of course. This all comes back to him. All my problems since I started this stupid school are because of him. I wasn’t supposed to draw attention to myself. I was supposed to lay low and just finish senior year.

But no. Aiden had to be an emotionless, authoritative dick and start problems. He’s the one who brought all the attention onto me. He’s the one who couldn’t keep it in his pants and screwed psycho-stalker Barbie. He’s the one Kaitlyn warned me to stay away from or she’d start shit with me. He’s the one thing that Kaitlyn wanted, and because he was so intent on being an asshole to me, she figured that I was who he moved on to.

I don’t want any of this.

And now the ruthless, untouchable Queen Bee has it out for me, and she’s paired up with the one sleazebag who already has it out for Aiden, and clearly they have no problem breaking the law in order to hurt me.

I’m already facing one relentless psycho who disregards laws and is hell-bent on hurting me.

And. Now. I. Have. Three.

I can’t do it. I can’t handle this. I want to go home. I want to be Thea Kennedy with happy hazel eyes and curly brown hair, whose biggest worry is which nail polish color she should choose or if she’ll look good in her prom dress. Whose only boy trouble is whether Daniel Russell likes her back or not, or if Eli Woods would ever notice her. I want to live my life without pretending to be someone I’m not, without having to look over my shoulder for people determined to hurt me.

My head is dizzy with all these revelations. Or maybe it’s the fact that I’m hyperventilating.

“Amelia! Calm down! Breathe!” Aiden looks panicked, like he doesn’t know how to get me out of this panic attack.

“It’s okay,” he soothes, his fierce gray eyes boring into mine. “I’ll handle this. You’ll be okay. I’ll take care of everything, I promise.”

He wraps his powerful arms around me, but in my frantic state I shove him away from me.

“No, Aiden! You can’t take care of everything!”

“I will—”

“No! Don’t you think you’ve done enough damage?!”

“What ar—”

“This is all your fault! I was swept into this drama because of you! Kaitlyn hates me because of you. Ryan hates me because of you. I have enough shit to worry about without those two thinking of ways to torture me!”

His concerned expression reverts back to the expression he shows the rest of the world: impassive, emotionless, unreadable, hardened.

“I’m tired! I’m tired of all this bullshit! I’m tired of being swept into your drama with your enemies. And I’m especially tired of you pretending to care about me when you really just feel guilty about getting me into all this shit in the first place! You don’t care about me, Aiden! Your conscience is just telling you to fix your screwups.”

If Aiden is hurt by anything I’m saying, I would never know—his impassive, stoic expression never changes and his hard eyes never give anything away.

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