Forever We Fall (Pieces of Us #2)

1. Hotaru

“What are you looking at, pretty boy?”

The guy who asked the inane question sits a table over in the great hall. He said pretty boy as though it is a curse. Maybe it is. At least my face doesn’t look like the back end of Headmaster Bridgeport’s bulldog.

Instead of telling him so, I avert my gaze.

I hadn’t been looking at him, per se. I’d been assessing my new, and ironically old-as-dirt, home. The place looks like the cover of one of my mom’s Regency romance novels. She always snuck away to read them when my dad was out on business, but I found her collection. Reading them gave me plenty of juice for the spank bank. Even better than my dad’s stash of porn mags. I found those too. The books, at least, require a bit of imagination.

The difference between the Regency novel I’m suddenly living in and my mom’s? This one doesn’t have a woman in sight. Not even the teachers are women. No luscious boobs to be perused. No skirts to hike. No cherries to pop.

The only pair of tits in the school is the headmaster’s secretary, Miss Booth. She made enrollment bearable, at least.

“I said, what are you looking at?” The guy has pushed up from the table. He towers over his group of friends, who all turn and look at me.

Where my new nemesis looks like a dog’s behind, his friends look like they could grace the pages of an Abercrombie & Fitch quarterly. Very white. Very hot. Very exclusive.

“I heard what you said.” It’s the first time a student has spoken to me since I moved in last week.

“Then answer me, you?—”

He’s about to call me an Asian slur because he’s as creative as the headmaster’s dog too. The double doors opening cut him off. I’ve heard them mumble a variety of insults under their breath from the day I arrived. Hell, I’ve heard them from the first day we moved to London. I was six at the time. Nine years have passed. Nothing has changed, except I’m no longer in London or with my parents.

British mum. Japanese dad.

The attendance clerk rushes through the center of the hall as though his pants are on fire. His frail arms pump, shuttling his thin frame forward with more oomph than I expect from the old guy.

No matter his mission, he doesn’t miss an opportunity to sneer at the nearly two hundred students in the room for first lunch.

“Sit down, Phillip,” Bud Randal hisses, projecting his severe case of halitosis. The guy’s breath smells worse than his pitted teeth look. When my father and I were in his office for enrollment, I spent it dodging the stench.

I hope my stupid tormentor gets a nose full. Phillip. Dusty-ass name pairs nicely with the guy’s dusty-ass face and attitude.

The clerk waits until the kid complies, then rushes up to the head table where our professors enjoy the last few moments of their break.

How they can live here in this relic of a time gone by in a place with no women for their entire adult lives is beyond me. Talk about hell on earth. Perhaps they’ve committed some egregious crimes, and this is their punishment.

Mr. Randal whispers in the headmaster’s ear for several beats. I know the head guy is holding his damn breath. I would be. Then the clerk retreats as quickly as he came.

The murmurs start immediately. I don’t make sense of them until we’re up in single file, like prisoners, headed to our afternoon classes.

There’s a new student.

Another one.

It doesn’t take much to get this place riled. Of course, some of these guys have been at this boarding school since year one.

I can’t imagine being raised in this awful place, away from your family or anyone who ever cared about you. It’s bad enough that I had to leave my friends and my stupid home at fourteen. If I was five fucking years old, I’d know for certain that my family didn’t give a shit about me. It explains a lot about the tight-knit friend groups and lack of social norms here.

Right now, this place is just a punishment. I can earn my way out—not home but back to Japan with my grandparents.

Or so I’ve been told. I’ll believe it when it happens.

“We haven’t had a new student who wasn’t a blasted first year in like five years, and now we have two in as many weeks,” someone chirps behind me as we shuffle along.

“Yeah, well, no one wants to come to this backwoods boys’ school, and I can’t blame them,” his friend says.

Me neither.

We disseminate into the various halls and make our way into ancient classrooms that probably saw kids huddled under the desks during World War II.

I recline in my seat and try to listen as the professor steps up to the front of the small theater-style room. The longer he drones about exponent properties, the further my mind wanders.

Within minutes, I’m back on our terrace overlooking Regent's Park, but only seeing Kendra down on her knees and my little prick between her sweet lips. It’s a bittersweet memory. For a moment, the pleasure overwhelms the pain—the reason I’m in this godforsaken place to begin with.

I can still hear her saying she’s never done anything like this before. Stupidly, I was inclined to believe her. Even though Kendra’s friends had said the same thing when they knelt for me over the past year.

That belief lasted less than a minute. About the length of time it took her to unfasten my pants and pull out my swollen length. The second it was in her mouth, she blew me like it was her life’s passion and her daily practice. She moaned and slurped and gagged. At that point, I was glad she was two years older than me. I didn’t care if she did it every day in the boys’ bathroom to earn cash for the shops.

Take my money.

I was too far gone to care. My balls were drawn up tight and ready to blow. I didn’t much care when my mum opened the door and screamed behind me. Except Kendra stopped blowing me. She even had the decency to look contrite.

Me?

Nope.

I’m an asshole.

I wrapped my hands around my wet length, jerked twice, and shot my load. When my eyes finally opened and my brain began to function, I noticed where it landed. Her cheek, open bottom lip, and the tops of her not-so-demurely covered breasts were coated.

My mom had the good sense to vanish. Kendra looked like she wanted to.

That should have been the thing that got me here. It wasn’t.

“Mr. Kido?”

The professor mispronounces my surname as kiddo. One look at my face without the present scowl should tell him how off the mark he is. I don’t correct him. I don’t tell him that it is pronounced like key and dough like I do for all the other morons who can’t say my name. I don’t tell him that I’m descended from samurai. I don’t tell him I’ve practiced martial arts and swordplay since I could walk. I don’t tell him that I could slice his neck open with my pencil before he blinks.

No, it would draw more attention to me and the situation, me being the new outcast. It would add more fuel to the already humiliating fire.

This is my punishment, after all.

“You don’t know the answer because you weren’t paying attention. There’s no daydreaming in this class. Do you understand? Daydream and fail.” He snaps the cap on his dry-erase marker. His gaze flits from me and my narrowed glare as though he knows he’s pushing it. Pushing me.

My chest goes tight and hot. I’d like nothing more than to rip this quarter desktop from the floor it’s bolted to and chuck it at his head. My daydream continues with the hunk of metal careening down the levels of seats, taking out Phillip on its way, and then leveling the professor in front of everyone.

“Who can solve the equation?” The prof’s gaze moves around the room, but no one volunteers.

He writes all the questions on the board daily before we come in. He explains the concept, works through a few, calls on a few kids, and then we work in silence for the rest of the mind-numbing class to complete the problems and submit our work.

“Two hundred seventy-four,” I answer. His gaze shifts back to me with a hint of an eye roll. “Twenty-six. Five hundred sixty-one. Three hundred five. Nine hundred sixty-nine.”

His eyes go wide, finally figuring out that I’m answering all the equations on the board, out loud, for the entire class. Several students are several steps ahead of him. They jot down the numbers as I rattle them off. Phillip, the dog-ass-faced kid, sits several rows below me. He laughs at the number sixty-nine like the idiot he is.

“Thirty-nine. Five hundred forty-three. Seventy-eight.”

“Mr. Kido,” the professor snaps, mispronouncing my name once more.

“It’s Kido!” I bark. “I don’t need to pay attention. You do.”

The man’s mouth gapes. Lots of oohs and uh-ohs reverberate around the room. The sallow color in his cheeks goes ruddy. His upper lip quivers and slowly gathers into a snarl. “How dare you?—”

“What? Point out that your second example is incorrect?”

His head snaps toward the board. I’m fairly certain he reworks the problem in his head and then jerks back toward me.

We’re in a standoff even though I’m sitting.

It’s the point when he can send me to the office and make an enemy of me, or he can acknowledge he’s wrong, and I’ll blow his grubby ass out of the water where math is concerned, as well as life in general.

“To the headmaster’s office.”

“Thank you.” I stand and reach for my bag.

“Thank you?” he scoffs. “Why on earth are you thanking me for that?”

One day, he’ll learn not to speak to me in front of the class. If he has any semblance of a brain, it’ll be today.

I sling my bag over my shoulder and head for the door. When I’m on his level and standing several inches taller than him, I grin.

“It will give us, Bridgeport and me, a chance to discuss your subpar teaching skills and your nightly visits to a certain student’s room.” The class gasps. “Plus, the headmaster’s office has to be more interesting than this class.”

Before he can formulate a response, I’m out the door and headed for the main office. The classroom erupts into chaos behind me.

I’m smiling for the first time since I arrived at this awful place.

Have I actually seen him visiting another student’s room? No. But he doesn’t know that. And I like to fuck with people. They’re pretty easy to manipulate. I don’t know why, but people always have been. Easy to read. Easy to influence. Puppets, most of them.

No one is in the hallways. All the tenth through thirteenth years are in class. They separate us from the first through fifth, sixth through ninth, and then the rest of us. I haven’t seen the whole school come together, but I heard they do for the beginning and end of the year celebrations.

Can’t wait.

I exit our building, head across campus, and shove through the main office entrance. The place is bustling. A lady behind the desk is on the phone. Or should I say the lady, as in the only one? I sit in the waiting area, put my backpack on the chair beside me, and drink her in.

Blond hair pulled back at the nape. Glasses sit on the bridge of her nose. A cardigan hugs her shoulders and meets with little buttons at the center of her chest. Her breasts aren’t large, but they’re the biggest in these parts. They’re big enough to fill my mouth and tempt my tongue.

She clocks me and automatically gives me the hold-on-a-minute finger. Then her gaze meets mine.

Her pink lips part. Her throat works on a big swallow. She turns in her seat and faces the wall. A blush creeps up the side of her neck, and she fidgets with her hair.

Yeah, she remembers me. I chatted her up real good while my father signed my life away. She made things bearable. She can make things better than bearable. Just the warm, wet spot I need to forget about this horrid place for a bit.

My smile is back.

It’s a good day.

The door opens, and Headmaster Bridgeport enters. He holds the door for a big man with wide shoulders and a civil smile on his lips. A smile that I don’t buy. Not for one pence and not for one second.

There’s evil behind his gaze.

Now I’m the one swallowing. Gulping really. The hairs on the back of my neck go up. My pulse thrums in my stomach.

“Sit there.” The man’s fat index finger points toward me. I fight the urge to squirm, and I don’t fucking squirm for anyone. “I’ll speak with the headmaster.”

Threat coats the man’s words. No one else seems to pick up on it, though. Not the secretary. Not the young office workers in the back. Not the dumb-as-dirt headmaster. His dog, that ugly motherfucker, diverts from his master’s office to cower behind Miss Booth’s desk. The only smart one of the lot. He can sense the bad coming from that guy and gets the hell out of Dodge.

While the two men continue to the headmaster’s office, a guy materializes from behind the nightmarish man.

His spine is ramrod straight, and his chin is high. He looks strong and regal and also scared out of his fucking mind. No one else could probably tell, but I’m sneaky and stupidly good at reading people. It’s a gift…and a curse.

His eyes are intent on the man, hyper-focused, even as he sits with perfect posture. He releases a small bag gently on the floor. It’s a ratty duffel the size of a carry-on. There’s a wince as his ass meets the chair two away from mine. He favors his right side as though sporting an injury on his left. His hands are fists, and his jaw is screwed so tight it looks like he’s about to crack a molar.

The door closes, and the evil man disappears.

It’s as if the guy next to me takes his first breath of the entire day. It practically shakes the damn room. He blinks as though just taking in the world around him. He clocks the secretary first but doesn’t really see her and all she has to offer. Maybe he doesn’t yet know that she’s the only slice for miles.

Looks like he’ll learn soon enough.

This is for sure the new kid everyone’s buzzing about. He’s wearing a bespoke suit that’s two sizes too big for him instead of the school uniform.

If I’d seen him before, I’d remember.

His isn’t a face I’ll forget.