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“What. Did. You. Call. Her?” He fisted Eric’s collar under his chin while pushing him harder against the locker until the metal began to dent. With Eric being seventeen and him nineteen, and Eric’s parents being the fierce protectors of their entitled son, he knew he could get in trouble, but he didn’t care.
“Nothing. I didn’t call her anything,” Eric mumbled, his bright blond hair falling onto his flushed forehead.
“That’s better. I thought so. I knew you wouldn’t call her something other than Jane, right? Am I right?” He was in Eric’s face, ignoring the spectators who had stilled around them.
“You’re right. You’re right,” Eric hurried to say breathlessly.
“Good. I love being right. So, don’t get me wrong, Hays.”
“Okay.”
He loosened his grip and let go of him.
Eric remained leaning against the locker to catch his breath and rearrange the rumpled collar of his T-shirt.
When he walked away, looking for Jane’s face in the crowd, she wasn’t there. The kids he passed by just moved aside, letting him through, and since Eric was a general douchebag, many of them smiled and a few patted his shoulder.
“I heard you went all Mr. T on Eric Hays,” Jane commented when he walked into the study room and sat next to her a few hours later.
“Mr. What?”
“Mr. T. You know, from the A-Team?”
“Oh. If anyone ever—”
“Nah,” she cut in and said over a breathy, embarrassed chuckle. “You didn’t have to. I don’t need saving.” Her cheeks flushed, and she cast her eyes downward.
“I know. You’re too busy saving my ass with this,” he replied, tapping on the thick textbook that he had taken out of his backpack.
“But I appreciate the thought,” she said, bringing her eyes up to meet his.
Those dark chestnut eyes and the genuine smile that spread on her lips plunged themselves right into the crux of his heart.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A car beeped behind him. There were at least twenty yards between him and the car in front. Finn stepped on the accelerator.
On the car stereo, Eddie Vedder sang about his memories, washed in black, knowing that his love would one day be a star in someone else’s sky. “But why, why can’t it be in mine,” Pearl Jam’s lead sang, his voice splintering to pieces, like his heart, and Finn knew exactly how deep and painful those wreckages cut.
Jane.
He hadn’t known back then that, one day, he would hurt her more than Eric ever had. He also hadn’t known when she had first approached him at the library that she would become the love of his life and that he would have to live without her.
