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“Yeah, I needed some space to clear my head.”
I nod. “I can understand that. Anyone in particular?”
“You,” she says, but then a whisper of a smirk twists onto her lips. “No, I’m pissed at my dad. He’s sent me a summons to go to Mexico a week before Spring Break to meet a potential suitor.”
I clench my fist. “A what?”
She raises a brow. “He intends to marry me off as soon as I finish here at the academy. Isn’t that what happens to practically every female student?”
She’s right. It is. But I never imagined that Adrianna would accept that fate. Even though she said she doesn’t want me to sit, I sit down on the rock next to her, which is terribly uncomfortable.
“Do you never listen?”
“Rarely,” I say, smiling at her. “So, who is this suitor?”
“No idea. You’d have to ask my father.”
I tilt my head. “I don’t think he’d tell me, do you?”
She grinds her teeth, which I notice she does when she’s stressed. “No,” she says simply, turning her attention back to the water.
“Do you come down here often?”
Adrianna shakes her head. “Only when I need to think, and that’s not too often when I’m here at the academy.”
“And when you’re home?” I realize that her home-life must not be the best, and as someone who also betrayed his family in a different way, I get a sense I may understand more about Adrianna than she would expect.
“I don’t see it as home, not really.”
I understand more than she can know, as I felt exactly the same about my home. “You feel like an imposter?”
Her eyes widen. “Yeah, how did you—”
“Let’s say I had a difficult family, too.”
She smiles, and it’s a smile that warms my heart. A worrying sensation, considering normally I feel nothing when I’m having an intimate relationship with a student, but Adrianna is different. Special.
“It’s why I betrayed my family, you know?”
“Why?” I ask.
She looks at me then and it feels like she sees past all the bullshit right to my soul. “Because I want to escape their clutches.”
“I could give you some tips.”
Her eyes narrow. “Are you saying you ran from your family, too?”
I clench my jaw as I rarely talk to anyone about my past. Oak knows the full story, but no one else does. “Yes, some shit went down, and I had to flee.”
“What kind of shit?”
I shake my head. “It’s not important.”
Her brow furrows. “Did you betray your family?”
I guess I betrayed them, but not in the way that Adrianna did. “Kind of.” I run a hand across the back of my neck. “I don’t like to talk about it.”
Adrianna doesn’t question me, turning her attention back to the running water. “I know what I’m doing is bad and it will hurt my family in the long run, but they don’t care about my future. My father wants to marry me to some thug with no regard as to the life I’ll live after marriage.”
