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I almost groaned, which would have definitely set her off. I hated these little discussions, but I had yet to find any way to avoid them while I was living in their house. Maybe that was why Ryan stayed out half the night… but it was easy enough for him, he could drive. I doubted Mum was as interested in having heart-to-hearts with her male child anyway.
“Everything seems normal to me,” I told her. I reached for one of my dolls.
Mum shrugged. “Maybe it’s me… I just wonder if this is what I really want any more. If I shouldn’t just end it before we’re sixty and stuck with one another for good.”
When I was fifteen, I’d worried when she said things like that. I pictured having to move with her into a smaller place where I would have even less privacy, maybe somewhere like where Callie lived, where Mum would be shaking scared all the time and I’d be scared too, but have to hide it. Now, I knew when she said those things about Mike it was all bullshit. She was never going to leave him, she probably didn’t love him all that much but she didn’t have any reason to hate him either. She just liked the sound of her own angst I guess.
I had to wonder if this was just how all the better adult relationships went. You thought everything was amazing to start with, and then once it settled down you realised you weren’t that keen on it after all and you’d thrown a lot of energy into something that was going to be a slight drain on you for the rest of your life. It was a discouraging thought.
Well, all I could do for my mum was listen. Honestly I wished she would just end it with Mike if she was going to go on about him like that all the time. It didn’t seem fair. But I doubted she would, because objectively Mike was not a bad guy. I’d never bonded with him, Ryan and I had been too old when they’d gotten together, but he was never any drama or anything. He just let us live, so we let him live.
“I’m sorry,” I told Mum, stifling a yawn. She was probably going to want to talk for a couple hours now, so I would
have to keep my brain from getting the idea it could switch off any time soon. “It always seems to me like you two get along great, but I guess these things are much more complicated with couples…”
I didn’t bother hiding my yawn as I made my way to my locker to collect my lunch. I wished I could avoid this situation entirely, but eating in the library wasn’t going to fly, so I figured I’d just scarf as much of my food as I felt like and then run off back there. At least at school, nobody seemed to notice too much if I nodded off, even if I was being noticed far too much aside from that at the moment.
Mum had talked bloody half the night, and this morning I had no better idea what exactly her issue was than I’d had at the start of that conversation. That was fairly normal with her, though. At least my exhaustion kept me from paying too much attention to everything going on around me, the whispering and snickering. Nobody was coming straight out confronting me like Tyrell had at least, which probably had something to do with Steven, but it still sucked compared to the relative peace I’d had before Callie started messing with a crowd we didn’t belong anywhere near. Even though I’d patched things up with Aileen I didn’t even want to go eat lunch with her. I didn’t want her to see how things were turning out for me, or drag her into the firing line. And I felt like she already understood that, because after she texted to let me know where she would be eating lunch, she hadn’t followed up asking where I was or anything.
I felt like I’d become radioactive, like it wasn’t safe for anyone to be around me any more, and whatever Steven had done to keep people from directly addressing it with me was just making it worse. I realised he hadn’t intended for me to know that he was doing anything… but I’d seen him, and that was that.
I walked around the block my locker was part of to reach my favourite alcove for hiding in—and there was a broad chest in my way.
By the time I realised it was Steven, he’d already grabbed me and pulled me in, turning so I was pressed into the space, the bulk of his body blocking me from any escape.
My lunch sack fell to the ground between our feet. The scent of Steven in such close quarters was making me dizzy.
“What are you—”
“Keep your voice down, Tamara,” he ordered, and his low tone made my empty stomach flutter so much I obeyed by default, unable to continue speaking. “I wanted to talk to you. To ask you a question. There’s something going on between us, isn’t it? You could hardly look at me yesterday.”
And I definitely couldn’t look at him now, as close as he was… as helpless as I was to fight him off.
He wasn’t doing anything I needed to fight off, though. He was just blocking my escape route, looking at me. “You want me, don’t you?”
I couldn’t explain to him that I was actually scared he would find out what I’d learned about him… but then being trapped there, him in my face, was making me feel things that had nothing to do with fear.
“I don’t like you,” I told him.
He didn’t even shrug. “This isn’t about liking me.”
That really hit me, because I couldn’t imagine someone like Lucas reacting the same way. He’d have to do something to make me change my mind. And Steven had been so angry when I claimed he and Lucas were the same. Maybe I wasn’t seeing Steven as clearly as I thought.
No… in a lot of ways, he was worse than Lucas. I couldn’t imagine Lucas physically threatening anybody. He was too slick to need to.
Steven leaned over so his forehead bumped against mine, more softly than I would have expected him to be able to make contact. “If you want me, you can have me. As much as you’d like.”
My legs started to shake, and he put his hands on me. Holding me up, but it just made me even shakier. I couldn’t process what he was offering here.
A smile crossed his face briefly, possibly the first I’d ever seen from him. “I get the idea you’re not an experienced woman, so you get to run the show a bit. You can decide how you’d like things to go, and nobody needs to know. I’ll even make sure all these shits who are bothering you at the moment back off, and you won’t know anything’s going on.”
“You’re not doing such a great job of that so far,” I informed him. “I saw what you did with Tyrell yesterday.”
He winced like it actually bothered him I’d caught him out. “Guess I’ll have to do better, then.”
“That’s not what you need to do better on. I thought you agreed to leave me alone.”
“Ah, we were both lying our fucking faces off the other day,” said Steven. “I thought we deserved a chance to clear the air without that fucking bitch interfering. But I’m not going to force you to do anything you really don’t want to do, so if you don’t want it…”
