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“They didn’t ask for you,” I point out. “And they said to bring my stuff. I’m obviously getting checked out.”
“Why would your mom check you out?” she asks. “You have a car.”
“I don’t know, Dixie,” I say, summoning my patience. “I’ll see you tomorrow, ‘kay?”
I take a slow breath while bending down to zip my bag, so no one will see me collecting myself. Dixie is watching like a hawk. I can’t afford to let myself slip in front of the school’s gossip blogger. I’m the subject of at least half her posts already. Because I’m popular, she thinks I’m going to tell her everything so she can put it on her blog and somehow become popular herself. I hate to tell her, but it doesn’t work that way. I’m on top because I paid my dues and continue to pay them every goddamn day. She hasn’t sacrificed anything, except maybe her dignity.
The chick needs to get grip and stand on her own two feet instead of clinging to everyone like a leach. I’m not her ticket out of here any more than Colt is.
I guess thinking about my arch nemesis is enough to summon my torment in the flesh because I’m halfway down the hall when he emerges from the restroom, and I promptly forget how to breathe.
God, why did he have to come back this year? I’m barely holding it together as it is.
I force my chin up, clench my jaw, and march toward him, letting my gaze move beyond him like I don’t even see him. There’s no one else in this hallway, but I can’t be too careful. Someone could walk out of the classrooms at any moment, see us talking, and report back to the Dolces. Then it would all be over for both of us.
I’m about to pass him when he stops walking. I force myself not to close my eyes and inhale as I walk by, to take in the smoky, woodsy scent of him and use it like oxygen, let it revive the tiniest tendril of some dead thing inside me, make it live for one precious heartbeat before it turns black again.
“Hey,” he says, tipping his chin at me.
I should ignore him and keep walking.
I should.
But I don’t.
I can’t. Not even for him. I know he’s the one taking the bigger risk, that all I’ll lose is the throne I built from the ground up, when I was crawling in the dirt with broken nails and bloody thighs, stacking one sin on another like bricks while acid rain fell from my eyes as if it could cleanse them of the unholy things I’ve seen.
He could lose his life for talking to me.
“Since when do we say hi in the hall?” I ask, giving him a scathing look to warn him off.
“You have a tattoo?” he asks.
I could deny it, but there’s no point. Everyone in Faulkner has seen it. Even if I wore long sleeves all year long, my cheer uniform exposes it every week.
“Yeah, so?”
“Can I see it?”
Butterflies explode in my belly as I glance around. What if someone leaves a class to go to the bathroom or the nurse or the office? What would they think if they saw their queen talking to the untouchable, so close he could touch me?
“No, you freak,” I say, glowering at him.
He steps even closer, and my heart stops beating. “Let me see it.”
His voice is low, a honeyed drawl that’s more intoxicating than whiskey, more hypnotic than a snake in an opium den. I can’t help but obey, even as I hate him for making me, hate myself for doing it. I swallow hard, lifting my arm and letting my loose sleeve drop below the stretch of skin that Maverick made beautiful. Mom freaked out when she saw it, but for once I had chosen something of my own, something she couldn’t take away.
Colt grips my wrist gently, pulling it toward him and examining the ink. My heart is pounding so loud I’m sure he must hear it, that the traitorous beat is echoing down the hall and through the walls, the tell-tale heart Edgar Allan Poe didn’t live to write about. At any second, everyone will rush from the rooms to see what’s causing the commotion that quakes the building, that rends the ground like an earthquake of immeasurable magnitude.
“Colt?” I whisper.
He runs his thumb slowly over my skin, over the pulse in my wrist that’s fluttering like a thousand butterfly wings. They’ve taken me over—my stomach, my throat, and down low, in the ache below my belly. I lift my gaze to his, and I’m sure he knows. That he sees me, all the way inside, where the stench of the rotten girl who died there has been contained for so long.
That’s why he’s so terrifying.
Colt sees me, who I truly am, in a way the Dolces never tried to do, in a way Rylan isn’t able to. He’s always seen me, since that day in the basement when he saw what I endured and what I did with it afterwards. We took opposite paths, though, and the one thing he’s never been able to see is why I chose mine instead of his.
“Let me go,” I breathe, not moving to pull away.
