Chapter 3
CHAPTER
THREE
STORM
The memory of the scent clings to me. It’s there, in my nose, but I feel it under my skin too. Even here, in the white and teal hallways of West River High, bleach in my lungs from the cleaning they must have done over the weekend, I can’t get away from the smell.
The nausea lurches in my gut and I close my eyes a second. I’m already late; the commotion of early morning is sealed off behind closed classroom doors.
I want to leave.
Get back in the WRX and drive far away from here.
Mom will know, though. She has a tracker on the Subaru and I haven’t been able to find it yet. It’s not that I’ll get in “trouble.” It’s…everything else.
There is no one in the world like my mother.
The guilt around my throat…it chokes me more than the scent. Of everything they’ve done to me, this is the worst crime. And what is there to do with it? Only my father is guilty, but if I tell, it’ll break a heart that isn’t mine.
I bring my fingers to my temple, eyes still closed, no one around to see me in the quiet.
I could still bail. Mom will be disappointed; it always shows in her big blue eyes, the ways me and Dad let her down.
Dad won’t say anything. He’ll glance at me over the rim of his glasses and go back to his paperwork and this business and the secret the two of us keep between us.
I want to throw up.
I consider crashing my knuckles against the locker at my side, the one I took Paradise Lost from, but I know that’s immature and ridiculous and if I want to get into a real fight, I could find Cortland.
I’ve already punched him once, when we first met, and now he knows me enough to know when I need the violence.
If I leave early, he’ll be pissed I missed football practice. But he should also know me enough to know I don’t give a fuck about sports. It’s something to do, and it can hurt, too. More so, it’s a distraction. It keeps me away from hearing whispers in my house.
The sound of heels clacking against the marble reaches my ears a second before I snap open my eyes and see Sloane Stevens standing in front of me, her chin lifted and her gaze searching mine.
I squeeze the paperback book between my fingers of one hand and drop the other from my head, clenching it into a fist at my side.
Sloane is dressed in jeans and a purple polo, both buttons undone, a butterfly necklace around her throat. It looks like solid gold, and her eyes, staring right at mine, are turquoise and jade gemstones. When I inhale, I catch the scent of strawberries.
For the first time all morning, it drives the memory of the rest of it away.
She doesn’t say anything and neither do I, her pink lips parted, long, light hair pulled back by a thin white headband. Her shoes are plain black heels and she wears them all the time; it seems kind of ridiculous, given we’re in school, but Sloane is like that. Extra.
She’s a cheerleader and we don’t talk much but it’s not because she’s shy. She has too many friends. I don’t understand it, why she’d want them.
We don’t talk because I’m nothing like her and the bubbles floating around her perfect world.
I don’t know why the fuck she’s staring at me right now.
She glances at Milton in my hand. “Did you read it? For Mrs. Thurston’s class?” Her voice is different than it usually is. Low, kind of raspy, and when I search her eyes, they seem a little red. Like she’s been crying. Maybe she broke a nail.
“No.”
She nods once and crosses her arms over her chest. “Unsurprised.”
Fuck off. I don’t say it though. I don’t want to go to class, and I don’t want to be left alone. Not that I would ever confess it out loud, and certainly not to Sloane fucking Stevens.
Aside from being a perfect princess, there’s not much I know about her.
A few random facts here and there. She has a lot of siblings; three, maybe, which to me, an only child, is three too many.
One is a genius, I’ve been told. Caspian Stevens.
He’s in college but I’ve heard a lot of girls giggle about him and how hot he is.
If he looks anything like Sloane, I’m sure he’s exquisite.
“All is not lost. There’s still revenge,” Sloane says under her breath, but she’s staring up at me.
I frown, drawn in despite myself.
“Paraphrasing,” she says, then she sniffs, and I know she’s definitely been crying. What could she possibly fucking have to cry about? I have this wild urge to grab her by her slender arms and shake her, to pour into her brain what I saw this weekend. Make her understand the gravity of tears.
But for once, I am strangely calm.
“For when Mrs. Thurston asks why Satan was still so chill about being cast out of heaven. He had reasons to go on,” she explains.
We’re not in the same class, but there’s only one English teacher for our grade.
She shrugs, her lips pursed. “You’re welcome.” Then she flicks her eyes up and down me before they settle on the gold chain around my throat. “I like your necklace,” she says, nodding toward it. “Is it real gold?”
“Are you made of real bones?”
She rolls her eyes. “You are completely unsurprising, Storm Leary.” Then she marches past me and shoulder checks me as she does.
And despite myself, a smile curves my lips as I turn to stare at her hips sway while she heads to the bathroom.
Unknown
You might be in trouble, Wolf.
I stare at my screen as I walk through the woods in my backyard.
Well, not technically my yard anymore, considering how far I’ve wandered.
I’m sure I’m past that oh-so-important invisible property line.
But Cortland is at home with Remi and the baby, and while Lyle is sleeping and my best friend and his fiancée aren’t loud or annoying and we have an entire house to ourselves, sometimes I need to get out.
Otherwise I start acting twitchy and everyone thinks I’m on coke again and maybe a few months ago I would have been but…
Not now.
And when I get texts like these, it doesn’t fucking help things.
My first instinct is to call my dad.
Not for help.
For answers.
But he could help, too. After all, he fucking owes me.
A memory flashes in my mind and I stop walking.
It’s the smell. It never leaves my brain cells.
I bow my head, my fingers tight around my phone, the birds and creatures of the night so alive in the woods, but it’s my pulse in my own ears I hear the most.
Absentmindedly, I bring my hand up with the phone in it and scrub my knuckles over my throat.
I feel the scar there, the raised lump, and tension coils through me.
Another memory. This one is more recent. But it’s the same sense that haunts me.
I’m there again, in the maroon, pristine hotel suite, and Dad is calm and the other man watches me and I’m on my knees sobbing and the smell… It’s stuck in my mind like some sort of olfactory imprint.
Olfactory. I almost laugh out loud, thinking of the look Cortland would give me if I said that word around him.
We’ve known each other since high school, and I’ve been there with him through hell and back, but I know deep down, no matter how much he loves me, he thinks I’m just a dealer.
He’s never been the academic between us, but I imagine he believes me to have a few dozen brain cells left and with as much as I used to smoke weed, he might be right.
Then there was the coke, but that was before the hotel room with Dad, and fucking a girl so hard I nearly broke her and…
No.
I’m not going down that road.
I force my eyes open as I stand beneath too many trees, crickets humming in the dark, nothing around me I can see but woods, and beyond the thick canopies overhead, stars.
The night is brisk, and the cold chill slithers down my neck beneath the black T-shirt I’m wearing that cost me way too much money but I like how expensive things feel.
You might be in trouble, Wolf.
I don’t know the number but the number knows me. They wouldn’t use the nickname if they didn’t. Not even Cortland knows it, and he’s my closest friend. It wouldn’t be hard to guess but it’s not a text people would casually send.
It’s a local area code and not the person I want to be texting me.
I wish it was Sloane Stevens splashed across my screen instead.
I would never admit those thoughts to anyone though.
It’s something I need to let go of, this schoolboy crush.
She’s too smart, so she’s graduating a year early which means come spring, she’ll be gone from Ely U and Ellicottville, too.
Remi’s best friend, I see her often enough when she’s visiting her “nephew,” as she refers to Lyle, but we’re nothing more than friends.
It’s all we should ever be. She wants to move to the coast to be near her sister and start her own business when she graduates with her marketing degree.
And maybe more importantly, Sloane is sweet.
But she’s also hot, and a fucking tease, and while I’ve only fucked two girls in the past two years, she acts more chaste than I actually am.
But only when she’s around me. I hear things from Remi. I know Sloane gets fucked more than I care to think about, ever since things didn’t work out with her and the last guy she was seriously into.
It doesn’t matter anyway.
This isn’t Sloane.
I tap my tattooed fingers along the side of the phone for a second, knowing I should ask who it is, but if I am in some kind of trouble, I need to be smart.
I copy the number, open up an app my dad told me about that one of his developer friends made, one nearly no one else on the planet knows about right now, and paste the number into it.
In the dark, my brows furrow.
It doesn’t bring up a name, no doubt because whoever it is lives in the same world I flirt with, but it’s got a commonly associated IP address and the app tells me where it originates from.
The Hollows.
Out of reach from Ellicottville and Aben, the neighboring town, which is where I grew up after we moved.