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“I’ll kick their ass if they do. I don’t give a fuck if it’s one of Skylar’s friends or a teacher.”
I cut my eyes up to him. “Wow, that makes me feel so much better,” I said sarcastically.
“Anything for you, Sunshine.” Blaise chuckled.
When we stepped up onto the sidewalk, Blaise glanced down between us and paused. I looked down too, wondering what he was staring at. There wasn’t anything there, so I gazed back up at him.
“What’s wrong?”
“I didn’t think you wanted to …” He glanced down again and squeezed my hand in his.
“Oh,” I whispered, not even realizing that we were about to walk into Redwood Academy hand in hand, in front of all those judgmental students who had snickered behind my back the other day.
As if he knew and understood that I didn’t like the whole PDA thing yet, Blaise tugged his hand out of mine. My chest tightened at the loss of warmth, at the sudden emptiness inside me. And when he started toward the building, the loneliness festered.
While I might not want Redwood’s attention, Blaise was the only person who I trusted to get me through this town’s wrath. He had done so much more for me than anyone I had ever known.
So, I jogged to catch up with him and wrapped my hand around his.
“It’s okay,” he said, as if he was about to pull his hand away. “I don’t mind.”
“No.” I squeezed his hand tighter and glanced up at him. “Please, don’t let go again.”
After glancing back down at our hands, he smiled. Yes, smiled—and not one of those infamous smirks either. He squeezed my hand tighter and turned toward the building, tugging me toward it.
Blaise Harleen, Redwood’s bad boy, didn’t hold anyone’s hand in public.
Except mine now.
Butterflies erupted through my stomach, the nervousness of today disappearing almost completely. For the first time ever, especially after how he’d stood up for me the other day, I didn’t mind the PDA.
When we stepped into Redwood Academy, there were even more whispers than the other day. People were staring at flyers on their lockers and laughing with each other. And I could only fucking imagine what the pictures were of.
Maybe Blaise and me? More of my writing?
I hurried over to a group of lockers, shoving my way through the crowd to stare in horror at pictures of two stepsiblings from Redwood—Jace Harbor and Allie Hall—standing at CVS’s pharmacy, picking out Plan B with the wordswhore, incest,andslutwritten out everywhere.
Fuck.
What is it with people at this school?!
It was worse here than all those cheesy romance books.
Suddenly, the door Blaise and I had come through flew open. Allie Hall raced through the halls, plucking the flyers off the lockers as quickly as she could, her cheeks flushed as people stared and whispered in her direction until she reached her locker.
People were crowded around it, staring at something. She pushed her way through the crowd and collapsed suddenly. I swallowed hard, finding Maddie among the crowd, and grabbed her hand.
“What’s going on?” she asked Blaise and me.
“I don’t know.”
When we reached Allie’s locker too, I dropped both of their hands and clutched my stomach. There were pictures of Jace and Allie in the locker room, of him eating her out, of him fucking her, of his fingers in her mouth.
God, I wanted to puke.What is wrong with people?!
“Oh my God,” Allie whispered, body heaving on Redwood’s dirty hallway floor.
My chest tightened for her. I could only imagine how she was feeling—probably a thousand times worse than I had on Friday. Tears welled up in my eyes, and I snatched a couple of flyers off the lockers beside us, so nobody would see them.
