Chapter 181
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-ONE
NICOLE
Me: Wanna meet up tonight?
I leaned against my locker the next day, impatiently tapped my foot, and stared down at the message I’d sent Joe Santos three hours ago. Should I text him again? Why wasn’t he returning my messages? Men like him usually did within minutes.
After tearing off some skin on my inner cheek with my teeth, I double-texted.
Which I had never done to someone like him.
But, damn, I was desperate as fuck not to use Akio for my father’s dirty work. I didn’t want to get him involved at all and would much rather suck it up and let the mob’s grimy hit men use me so I could get information.
Me: Maybe a quickie after I get out of school. xx
Still nothing.
But the Delivered message turned to Read.
I tightened my hands into fists and then I shoved the phone into my purse because he obviously wasn’t interested, and if I couldn’t get any information from anyone, then maybe Dad was right.
My body just wasn’t cutting it anymore.
The bell rang through the hallway, and I strolled down the corridor to Akio’s locker. When I turned the corner, I spotted Akio dressed in an oversize black anime shirt, pulling books out of the metal compartment, his hair all over the place, as if he’d had a long night.
“Akio!” Jo?o shouted down the hallway, storming toward him.
Eyes widening, Akio slammed his locker closed and hurried in the opposite direction of Jo?o while juggling a stack of textbooks that he hadn’t gotten to put away. Jo?o stormed after him, seething.
“You’d better have it tonight,” Jo?o growled, catching up to him. “Don’t be late for work.”
“I can’t keep giving you drugs!” he whisper-yelled at him.
Jo?o seized him by the collar and slammed him up against the lockers. “You’d better—”
With my heels clacking against the tiled floor, I ran across the hallway, grabbed Jo?o by his shoulder, and pulled him away from Akio, whose glasses now sat crooked on his nose. “Leave him alone.”
“This is none of your bratty bitch business,” Jo?o growled.
“Leave. Him. Alone.”
After looking between us, he snickered. “What, are you guys fucking now?”
I expected Akio to say no, but when neither of us said a word, Jo?o smirked and ripped himself away from me. “For the first time in my life, I actually have some respect for you, Akio.” He headed down the hall. “But you’d still better have the shit tonight.”
Once he disappeared, I turned to Akio, who readjusted his glasses.
“So,” I said with a small giggle, “you’re a drug dealer.”
“Don’t listen to Jo?o. I don’t—”
I gently pushed him. “It’s just a joke.”
But what had Jo?o said about Akio having the drugs for him tonight after school?
Maybe he actually was working for his mother, selling drugs to the drug dealers themselves.
But then why would they have the confidence to bully Akio?
It should’ve been the other way around if Akio really was the dealer’s dealer.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’m fine. I have to get to class.”
“Wait.” I grabbed his wrist. “I want to talk to you.”
The second bell rang through the hallways, signaling that we were already late for our next class, which was, as luck would have it, science. Some of the good girls hurried to class, and the troublesome kids lingered in the hallways, waiting for restorative officers to discipline them.
Akio glanced over his shoulder at the troublemakers, who threw glances our way. “What’re you doing, talking to me here? We can talk about the project in science. You don’t have to go out of your way to—”
“This isn’t about the project.”
“Then, what is it about?”
I paused, my stomach twisting at the thought of what had happened last night. What he had seen. How I’d reacted. And what I’d said to the poor, innocent kid who seemed to have had a crush on me for a long, long time now.
“I wanted to apologize”—I tugged him to a quieter section of the hallway—“for yesterday.”
“What about it?” he asked, fiddling with the bottom of his One Piece graphic tee.
“About what I said in the car,” I whispered.
Akio paused for a long time, then swallowed and looked away. “Which part?”
How could I say the you’re not my type part without saying the you’re not my type part?
He shouldn’t have come to my house, but all the other things that I’d said, I hadn’t really meant them. I had been trying to protect him from my father and from what any of those guys would do to him if they caught him.
I shrugged and tilted my face away so he couldn’t see my blush. “About all of it.”
After a long and tense pause, he gazed down at the tiled floor and shuffled his shoes, again pulling his already-oversized shirt away from his abdomen—the way Mom used to do after Dad would bully her for the belly fat she could never lose from childbirth.
But Akio didn’t have an ounce of belly fat.
“You don’t have to try to make me feel better,” he said, turning toward our science class.
“I’m not trying to make you feel better.”
“That’s what it seems like.”
“Why can’t I apologize to you because I’m remorseful?”
“Because.”
After shaking my head because I still didn’t understand, I said, “Because why?”
Grasping the handle of the classroom door, he paused. “Because I don’t blame you.”
“What does that mean?”
Again, another pause. “You don’t have to worry about it, Nicole.”
“Worry about what?”
He slipped through the door. “Any of it.”