Chapter 5
5
GAVIN
I threw my phone across the room, only somewhat satisfied when it hit the corner of my dresser and shattered.
Why the fuck did he have to call me? Why the fuck did he have to give a shit?
But he didn’t, I knew he didn’t. Coach Troutman had put him up to that, for whatever fucking reason, and he was just following orders like a good little soldier. And now he could go back to forgetting me and living his perfect life.
I wanted to call him back and scream at him until I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to call him back and tell him how dare he , how dare he try and be nice when no one else gave a shit? Not even Coach Troutman wanted to talk to me, he doled out the task to Beck.
I wanted to call him back and listen to his voice, the deep baritone that he’d softened for me . I wanted to hear him laugh because I’d said something funny, I wanted to see that look in his eyes that he used to give me when it was just the two of us. It was a look that said The whole world could disappear and it wouldn’t even matter, because I know I’d still have you.
It was a look I’d never see again.
Because I was a fucking coward.
I grabbed my clock off the nightstand and threw it as hard as I could. There was an ugly, sharp crashing sound as it smashed through the glass window with so much force it also broke the screen off its track. Both the clock and screen disappeared into the darkness of the night, and I was left with the fragments of glass on the ground, sparkling like fallen stars.
Oh, fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck .
Every muscle in my body tensed, and I went still, listening.
Waiting.
I didn’t have to wait long.
Fear spiked through me when I heard my dad’s heavy boots on the stairs. I didn’t even try to clean up the mess. There wasn’t time.
The door swung open, and my fingers curled under the hem of my shirt, gripping the material hard as I stood frozen in the middle of the room.
His icy eyes took in the damage I’d done to his house, and when he looked at me, I stopped breathing.
“It was an accident,” I whispered in desperation. “I’m sorry, I’ll?—”
It only took two steps for him to reach me, and then his meaty palm smacked into the side of my head with so much force I crumpled to the ground.
Or I just had nothing left inside my body; no bones, no muscle, no strength, no fight to hold me up anymore.
I bit back the whimper clawing at my throat as he crouched near me, hovering over me. “I’m this close,” he said, holding his thumb and forefinger up, the distance between them half an inch. “This fucking close to kicking you out of my damn house. You’re lucky I let you stay after getting yourself booted from the wrestling team. Do you know how lucky you are?”
I knew he wanted an actual response, so I said in a strained voice, “Yes.”
“I don’t think you do,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t think you appreciate anything I’ve done for you. Everything I’ve sacrificed for you.” He made a sound of disgust, then said, “You have one more chance to get your shit together.”
He stood up and spat on the ground, and I watched it land two inches from my eyes.
“Clean that up. I’ll think of something you can do to pay me back.”
He slammed the door behind him.
I let out the whimper I’d been trying to hold in and curled into a ball, wrapping my hands over my head as my whole body shook.
I wanted to pick myself up off the floor, pack a bag, and leave this house.
I willed myself to get up, but I just lay there and cried quietly.
I thought maybe my dad had loved me at some point in my life. I thought maybe I clung to that a little harder than I should. This desperate, pathetic hope that he still loved me—even though he hadn’t said the actual words in years—festered in my soul, a burden I was too weak to slough off.
I didn’t know what to do. I’d never felt more lost and alone in my entire life. I’d never felt less…substantial. Like I’d disappear at any moment, and nothing in the whole entire world would change. Not a single person would notice.
Not even Beck.
I stalked out of the dean’s office and headed straight for the bathroom. I barely made it to the toilet before I threw up. Just water—again—because I hadn’t been able to even look at food for days. I waited until the nausea started to settle, until my body stopped trying to expel things it didn’t have, then fell back on my ass and leaned against the stall, not giving a single fuck about how disgusting the floor was.
I sucked in breath after breath, Dean Martinez’s words ringing in my ears.
In order to continue your academic career at Paxton University, you’ll have to attend a six-week course on drug abuse, as well as give forty hours of your time for university-specific community service. If you do not attend every single session and fail to complete at least fifteen hours of community service before graduation, you will be placed on academic suspension and will be able to graduate only upon completion of the course and the service hours. The use of steroids while on an athletic team here is unacceptable, but we want to help you, Gavin.
Fuck him. Fuck them all.
I didn’t even give a fuck about graduating. What was the point? And I stopped taking the steroids. There wasn’t any point in doing that anymore, either. My dad hadn’t brought it up at all, as if he’d forgotten about it entirely, and I think he’d forgotten about me entirely, too. I stayed in my room if I was home, and he never sought me out. I tried to never be home, but there weren’t very many places I could go. I didn’t want to be at school more than I had to be—I just attended my classes and left. I was glad I didn’t have any friends, that I’d never spoken to anyone in my classes. I was glad I had no one.
No one to notice that I was going through withdrawal. No one to care that I wasn’t okay. The awful nausea, the horrible feelings of hopelessness and rage, this itch under my skin that made me want to rip my hair out—they kept getting worse and worse.
And still, I was glad Beck caught me that day. The only thing I’d felt when he saw me pushing that drug into my body was relief—because someone knew. Someone finally knew and would do something about it.
And he had.
Of course he had.
But I couldn’t get that look in his eyes out of my head—the gut-wrenching sorrow in them. Like I’d betrayed him or something.
Fuck him. He could take that phony reaction and fuck right off.
I thought the withdrawal symptoms would only last a day or two, but once that threshold came and went with no relief, panic started to spread.
I thought I’d been losing my mind before, but that was fucking nothing compared to what was happening to me now.
Fucking nothing .
I thought that maybe I’d finally snapped. It was like my frail, brittle mind had fractured into jagged pieces that were slowly carving their way through my entire body.
I felt like I was living in a haze. Everything was slightly blurry, slightly out of focus. Every sound was a little muffled. A little dull. I wasn’t eating, was hardly sleeping. I felt completely untethered, like some kind of ghost that just floated around from place to place, having no idea what or who he was.
There was a month of school left, and I didn’t even want to go to my classes anymore. I didn’t want to see anyone. I didn’t want anyone to see me. I didn’t know what I was doing after I graduated, didn’t have a single fucking plan in place.
If I graduated.
Fuck that drug abuse course. Fuck the community service.
There was no. Fucking. Point.
I wanted to just sit here forever. Nobody would even notice. I could just sit here, on this sticky, nasty bathroom floor, and fade into nothing.
The door slammed open, making me jump, and someone laughed. It echoed in the small room, bouncing off the walls and hitting me like shrapnel.
The sound of someone else’s happiness was so loathsome it spurred me into action. I grabbed my backpack and shoved off the floor, knocked the stall door open, ignored the startled looks the two guys who’d walked in gave me, and ripped open the bathroom door.
The hall was filled with students. Laughing. Talking. Busy, busy, busy. So full of purpose. I kept my head down and shoved my way through the sea of students until I made it to the double doors leading outside.
The bright sunlight felt like laser beams burning through my skull, and I stared at the brick walkway, moving without aim. There was a buzzing beneath my skin, and I felt like punching a hole through all that brick, bloodying my hands, hearing the fragile bones crack beneath my skin.
If I was breaking apart, I wanted to do it so thoroughly no one could ever put me back together again.
I rounded the corner of the building and smashed right into someone, and I reflexively reached out to grab onto them.
It was a girl—half my size—and she made a small sound of distress when I wrapped my fingers around her arm to keep her from falling back on her ass.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, letting go of her.
“Oh—no, that’s—sorry, I wasn’t paying attention,” she said with a nervous laugh.
I looked at her face, at her flushed cheeks and long brown hair. Her big blue eyes and rosy lips, tilted up in a small, apologetic smile.
She was beautiful, but I felt absolutely nothing, and I despised myself for the lack of interest.
And then, as if my soul knew before any one of my senses, my eyes drifted higher to a point behind her.
To Beck.
He was standing at the end of the walkway, his immense form impossible to miss. My heart started to race as I watched him laugh, his shoulders shaking, and then he brought one massive hand up and ran his fingers through his tight blond curls. I finally noticed the smaller man standing in front of him—right in front of him, practically on the verge of pressing himself against Beck, and it wasn’t hard to understand what was going on.
Especially not when the guy did press himself against Beck, who just stood there and let it happen. I watched, frozen in place, as he trailed his fingers up Beck’s chest, curled them around the back of his neck, and pushed himself up on his tiptoes to press a kiss to Beck’s cheek.
The sound that choked its way out of my throat was mangled and broken, and the terrible sensation of being cleaved in half was all-consuming.
“—have Econ together, right? Whoa, hey, what’s wrong? Are you okay?”
I finally glanced at the girl who was still standing in front of me. She just looked like a blob now, a meaningless smudge of color. “Sorry,” I panted. I turned on my heel and walked away, my vision blurred, everything looking like it was vibrating, like the ground was trembling, the earth shaking, and I wished it would open up and swallow me down, wished it would bury me in its depths.
I shook my head against the roaring in my ears, but it was no use. Something inside me cracked open, like I really had been split in two, and the raw fury that exploded from that chasm brought a scorching wave of heat with it. The urge to hit something, to unleash this awful rage, was stronger than anything I’d ever felt before, and I had to get the fuck out of here, I needed to leave before I did something I couldn’t take back.
But my mind was a mess, images of Beck with that guy pounding into my brain, slamming into me over and over again, a relentless torrent of what I could never have.
What I could never be.
And Beck…
He was free to be everything he wanted to be.
He was free. He always had been.
He was free, and I let myself be chained like the pathetic dog I was.
I was almost to the courtyard when I paused, my eyes latching onto a familiar figure.
Small. Angelic. Perfect.
He was free, too. Isaac Carpenter could do whatever the fuck he wanted, when he wanted.
The malicious energy buzzing inside me grew and grew and grew until it was all I was, until my entire being was a thrumming hive of vicious hatred.
My fists clenched, my vision clouded, and I stalked toward him. Started running. Shoved him so hard he stumbled forward with a cry.
It wasn’t enough.
Before I could do something else, Brody Corelli was there, grabbing Isaac and hauling him around.
I hated him, too. “You fucking piece of shit, let me at that little?—”
Brody turned and shoved me so hard I almost tripped and fell. I wanted more. I wanted him to hurt me. To make me bleed.
I wanted him to kill me.
He stood between me and Isaac, chest heaving, eyes hard as he took me in.
I snarled like the animal I was and slammed my hands into his chest so hard he grunted, stumbling a little.
“Stop! Fucking stop it!” Isaac shouted from behind Brody.
But I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t.
My body wasn’t mine anymore, it belonged to all the hateful anger that had wrapped itself around my limbs, and when I threw a punch at Brody, it connected with his cheek.
“Brody!” Isaac flew out from behind Brody and shoved me as hard as he could. “Don’t fucking touch him, you asshole!” he screamed, his small hands shoving against my stomach.
“Isaac, no!”
I grabbed onto the front of his shirt, dragging him up, and snarled, “I lost everything because of you! It’s all your fucking?—”
The pain that exploded through my nose and cheek was like a balm, and I staggered back with the force of Brody’s punch. Blood began pouring from my nose, some of it going down the back of my throat, and all I could taste was iron. I wanted to stand there and let him beat me into nothing, but he grabbed Isaac and dragged him away from me.
And then—and then Beck was there, right in front of me. I blinked, some of the anger slithering away, the hazy fog starting to clear. I blinked again and finally noticed the crowd of students gathered around us, noticed all the phones out, all the eyes watching me.
“The cops are coming so you better back the fuck off,” Beck said, putting himself between me and Brody and Isaac. I couldn’t see them anymore. He was so close that nothing existed except him.
His voice was thick with disgust, his eyes blasting me with contempt, and resignation beat itself into my soul. With it came the first ripples of fear, and that only ramped up my need to fight.
I couldn’t stop now. I stepped toward Beck, started to raise my fists.
“Don’t make me knock you down, Forster.”
His use of my last name was like a slap in the face. He knew I never wanted anyone to call me that, he knew how much I hated it. He knew and he’d done it on purpose.
“Fuck you, Beck,” I spat, my mouth full of so much blood that my words were wet. But the vitriol was fading fast, the fear quickly overtaking all that rage, and nausea roiled in the pit of my stomach. All the blood dripping down the back of my throat wasn’t helping, and I gagged.
What was I doing? What had I done ? I ripped my eyes from Beck’s and looked around again, feeling like I was trapped in a nightmare. But I was the monster here, and there was no waking up, no escaping myself.
When two cops pushed their way through the crowd and Beck pointed at me and said something I couldn’t hear over the ringing in my ears, I knew then how utterly fucked I was. I knew just how deep Beck’s hatred for me ran, and most of all, I knew there was no coming back from any of this. I was fully burning in that pit of hell, and I’d be there for eternity.
I deserved nothing less.
And still, all I wanted was for Beck to hold me again. Just one more time.
I stared at Beck as I was handcuffed, and he stared back with a coldness that poured itself into every last inch of my being.
And when one of the cops jerked me around and began walking me away from the crowd, I was grateful that he felt anything toward me at all.
I clung to his contempt like it was the deepest kind of love, because in my life, to me, it might as well have been.
I didn’t truly register what I’d done or the consequences of my actions until a week after my arrest.
I couldn’t. My body was still ridding itself of the steroids, and my inability to eat, to function at all, had caused me to collapse on the floor of the holding cell. They ultimately took me to the hospital and hooked me up to an IV line and handcuffed me to the bed. They let me stay there for a day, then took me back to the police station and shoved me right back inside the holding cell.
My arraignment was the next morning, and I was given a court-appointed lawyer that might as well have not even been there. I was told that Brody Corelli had a pre-existing heart condition and my actions had caused him to go into heart failure, that he’d had to have emergency surgery but would be okay. I was told that I was very lucky he hadn’t died. I was told I wouldn’t be getting bail set, and my sentence would most likely include fines, covering the cost of Brody’s medical expenses that weren’t covered by insurance, and jail time.
They took me to jail and put me in a cell, and I wondered if my dad was worried. I wondered just how angry he was, if this was it, if this had been the final straw for him, if I’d used up my last chance.
The thought was crippling.
The day my mind began to clear of the perpetual fog that had stuck around for months was when true remorse began to sink into me. It was foreign, that feeling. I hadn’t experienced it in a long, long time, and I’d forgotten just how debilitating it could be.
I welcomed it in and let it weigh me down, and when I cried for all the pain I’d caused, my cellmate told me to shut the fuck up with that pansy shit.
I felt right at home.
They let me use the phone, and I called my dad. He was the only person I had. Except he cut that cord fast, and my deepest fear—the one thing I’d been trying to prevent for years and years and years—finally became my reality.
“You’ve made me look like a fucking clown for the last time. Don’t fucking call here again,” my dad said.
“But—but I’m your son,” I said, panic overtaking every part of me.
My dad had scoffed at that. “I don’t have a fucking son.”
I stood there for a long time after he hung up, just holding the phone to my ear and listening to the dial tone.
Was that…was that it? Did he mean that? But I knew he’d meant it. There was a finality in his voice I’d never heard before, a level of disgust he’d never shown.
It was over. I was alone now.
The reality of truly being alone in the world took a few days to sink in.
Part of me hoped he was just angry, that he would take me back after my time was up. He was just angry. He’d said things like that before, and this wasn’t really it, was it?
Part of me hoped that he truly was done with me, and I would never have to see him again.
But the soul-crushing panic that came with being abandoned was far worse than living with a monster. It was why I’d never left him in the first place.
I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t feel anything past the utter despair, the terror and the ever-present sensation that I was falling deeper and deeper into an endless void.
It had all been for nothing. It seemed no matter what I did, I was always meant to end up alone. It made me sick, thinking about what I’d become trying to avoid that. It made me sick, knowing it was all for nothing.
All for nothing.
All that was left was to sit in my own suffering. I deserved the pain, the feelings of despair, the hopelessness. I deserved to be alone, to never feel anything good ever again. I deserved these endless hours of wondering if I still existed, and if I did, wondering how to stop.
I deserved it all.
Every.
Last.
Moment.
I started to laugh, and my cellmate looked at me like I was insane.
I ignored him and laughed and laughed and laughed at absolutely nothing. And when the laughs turned into sobs, he called me a crazy sissy bitch.
But I didn’t care, because nothing mattered anymore.
I pictured Beck, the contempt in his eyes, and clung to that with all the strength I had left.