36. Raf
CHAPTER 36
RAF
Although I’m slowly growing accustomed to having Ava in our apartment, sleep is still evading me. I’m wide awake at five a.m. with nothing better to do, so I hit the gym and beat the shit out of a punching bag for a while, then drag my ass back home to shower off the sweat I worked up and throw on a fresh hoodie and jeans. There are still no signs of life from my roommates when I head to the kitchen to fix myself a bowl of cereal, dropping into a chair at the table and digging in. It’s some whole grain, zero sugar bullshit that Wes chokes down regularly, but I’ve gotta admit, it’s not half bad. Compared to a lot of his other ‘healthy’ versions of normal food, this stuff is surprisingly edible.
I’m just starting in on my second bowl when the door to Ford’s bedroom cracks open and Ava slips out into the hall. She doesn’t see me at first, tiptoeing on bare feet and gently shutting the door behind her, careful not to make a sound. Her wild chestnut hair cascades down her back, round ass cheeks peeking out from the bottom of her tiny pajama shorts. I freeze with my spoon halfway to my mouth, fingers tightening around the metal.
Then she spins around, her spine going ramrod straight when her big brown eyes land on me. For a few tense seconds, neither of us moves. She stares at me and I glare back, daring her to be the first to break. Predictably, she does, abruptly turning tail and scampering off down the hall to her own room, the door slamming behind her like a fucking gunshot.
I resume eating, spoon clinking angrily against the ceramic. I’m crunching the shit out of each bite as if it personally wronged me, trying my best not to let the rage that’s been building all fucking morning boil over when Ford emerges from his room, stretching in the doorway with a lazy grin plastered across his face.
“Oh, hey,” he greets, rubbing a hand through his dark, sleep-tousled hair. “What’s up, man?”
What’s up ? I can’t tell if he’s being an asshole right now or if he’s genuinely clueless.
“You’re having her sleep in your bed like she’s your girlfriend,” I snarl.
He just shrugs a shoulder, the infuriatingly casual gesture making my blood boil even hotter. “So?”
I open my mouth, ready to unload on him, but then Wes strides into the kitchen and chimes right in on the conversation.
“She belongs to all of us, right?” he remarks, dropping into the chair across from me at the table and reaching for the cereal box.
“Sleepovers were never part of the fucking agreement,” I snap, struggling to keep my cool.
“What’s the big deal?” Ford scoffs, pushing off from the doorframe and sauntering over to join us in the kitchen. He leans an elbow against the counter, perfectly at ease. “Jealous ‘cause she doesn’t wanna sleep in your bed?” he taunts, arching a brow.
“I don’t give a shit what she wants,” I grit out, every syllable carrying the force of my barely restrained anger. “This isn’t about her fucking wants and needs. It’s about controlling her. Punishing her. Fucking ruining her.”
“I get next sleepover,” Wes announces, shoving a hand into the cereal box and pulling out a fistful to eat dry.
“No,” I snarl, rage unfurling by the second. “ No. Fucking. Sleepovers .”
Ford and Wes both look at me like I’ve lost my mind, and maybe I have. The shadows are dangerously close lately, my control over them slipping the longer I’m forced to cohabitate with the spawn of my father’s whore.
“Why not?” Ford questions, clearly missing the fucking point. “She’s our Doll, isn’t she? Why not enjoy the perks?”
“Because it’s not fucking real!” I seethe, slapping a palm down on the tabletop, my cereal bowl rattling against the lacquered surface.
“What do you mean it isn’t real?” Ava asks meekly, peering into the kitchen from the hall.
Fuck .
This is a prime example of why she shouldn’t be here– because we can’t even have a fucking private conversation without her busting in on it and asking questions.
Questions that she definitely isn’t getting the real answers to.
Ford and Wes both dart glances my way, and I think fast on my feet. “You’re still on probation,” I grumble, spooning another bite of cereal from my bowl. “None of this is official until you’ve proven your loyalty and are properly initiated.”
“Okay,” she replies slowly, drawing out the word as she takes a timid step into the kitchen. “So, when do I get initiated then? What does that entail?”
“Loyalty first,” I grumble, shoving the spoon in my mouth and effectively ending the conversation.
“Can’t let you in on the inner workings of the society until you’re worthy,” Wes adds with a wink. His eyes wander down her body unabashedly, the corner of his mouth twitching up in a little smirk. “Grab your backpack and let’s get going, we’ve got a Stats exam to crush.”
Ava huffs a frustrated sigh, spinning on a heel and stomping off down the hall back to her room.
Wes swings his gaze on me, arching a brow, and I glare back, daring him to say something else.
He wisely doesn’t.
“Guess that means we’ve all gotta get ready to go then, huh?” Ford sighs, pushing off from the counter.
I drop my spoon into the bowl with a loud clatter, shoving to my feet. “Sure, let’s go keep up fucking appearances, shall we?” I scoff bitterly. “God forbid the sheep miss out on their daily show.”
The bullshit over breakfast puts me in a foul mood for the rest of the day. By the time afternoon rolls around, I consider skipping my English Lit class and hitting the weight room instead, yet somehow wind up wandering into the lecture hall anyway. I’m all by myself up in the back corner now that Chelsea’s been relegated to sitting on the opposite side of the room, but I don’t mind it one bit. I prefer the solitude to her trivial, incessant chatter.
Ava sits up front like the fucking teacher’s pet, and I stare at the back of her head for the entire lecture while Professor Turner drones on about symbolism and some other pretentious bullshit. Ava never turns around, but I know she feels the weight of my glare. It’s obvious from the tense set of her posture and every uncomfortable shift in her chair that she’s painfully aware of the predator in her midst.
When Turner finally dismisses the class, she summons everyone to the front of the room to collect our graded assignments on the way out– some bullshit paper that Ford had Ava write for me. Normally, I shove off my homework assignments to eager nerds who want to get in the Kings’ good graces, but the opportunity to torture Ava was just too ripe to pass up. Let’s hope she earned me an A, or there’ll be hell to pay.
Ava’s the first to Turner’s desk– because of fucking course she is– and she takes her paper from our professor with a brittle smile, spinning around and quickly darting up the aisle to leave. I catch her by the elbow before she can blow past me, those doe eyes widening in fear as I yank her to a stop.
“Wait for me outside,” I direct, drinking in her fear like an addict before releasing my grip and allowing her to scramble away.
A satisfied smile spreads across my lips. While I could easily jump to the front of the line at any point, I think I’ll stay right where I am, let Ava stew for a while as she waits.
Slowly, I work my way to the front of the room, taking my sweet ass time while my classmates collect their assignments and leave. When I do finally get up to the front and approach Turner, however, rather than handing me my paper, she hesitates.
“Hey Raf, can you actually stick around for a minute?” she asks sweetly, batting her lashes and glancing past me to the few students that remain.
I narrow my eyes in suspicion, but curiosity gets the best of me. Professor Turner’s hot, and I’ve heard Ford bragging about her blowjobs being top tier. “Sure,” I mumble, sidestepping and leaning a hip against the edge of her desk.
She’s quick to hand off the last few papers, and when only the two of us remain, she approaches me with my assignment.
“I had no idea you had such deep feelings,” she coos, her voice soft like she’s talking to a damn child. “But I’m glad you’re working through them.”
I blink back at her in confusion, and she seems to take my silence as some kind of invitation.
“If you need to talk about it, or let it out, I’ve got office hours,” she offers, finally handing over the damn paper.
My fingers curl around the edges as I take it from her, eyes dropping the bright red ‘A’ circled near the top, then bouncing back up to meet hers.
The fuck is she talking about?
“The parallels you drew between Ethan Frome’s emotional and spiritual numbness and your own experience with your mother’s death brought me to tears,” Turner breathes, her big green eyes rounded in earnestness. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been so moved by a literary analysis paper, most students just half-ass these things. Really well done, Raf.”
I think I’ve stopped breathing, my heart ceasing to pump blood through my body. I’m stuck in some strange state of suspended animation, my mind tripping over itself in a struggle to process what the fuck is happening right now.
What does Ava even know about my mother, about how her death affected me? How much has the little bitch pieced together, and how fucking dare she expose me by writing about it?
The longer I stand here, the more I feel like I’m going to explode. I try to look down at the paper again, to make out the words on the page, but I can’t discern anything through the shadowy haze distorting my vision.
Professor Turner just keeps staring at me expectantly, and it makes me want to punch something.
Someone .
“I’m sure it wasn’t easy to open up like that,” she says, reaching out to set a sympathetic hand on my arm. “Like I said, I’m here if you want to continue exploring those feelings, try to process some of your emotions through other literary works that might resonate with what you’ve been through.”
The way she holds my gaze tells me she’s dead serious, but that only adds fuel to the fire. I don’t need some random fucking college professor pitying me. And here I thought she wanted me to stay after class so she could blow me since Ford couldn’t get it up yesterday.
“I’ll let you know” I grit out, shaking her hand off my arm and pivoting toward the door.
I immediately bolt, taking the stairs two at a time back up the aisle, blood boiling, fists clenched, on a mission to fucking destroy Ava Morrow.
She isn’t waiting in the hallway when I push through the door to exit the classroom, though, and she’s not loitering outside the building either. The fact that she bailed– that she disobeyed a direct order from a King– makes me even more murderous. I storm through campus in the direction of the dorms, past clusters of students who take one look at my face and step the hell out of the way. I’m halfway there when I abruptly stop to actually try to read the paper again, needing to see for myself exactly what Ava wrote, and every line sinks in like a blade. Different metaphors for grief, how it can leave a person feeling numb or directionless or full of rage. Tying it all back to my mother’s death and how I’m still living that experience every day.
The fury feels like it’s burning me up from the inside out. Ava’s words are all I can see, laid out neat and perfect on the page as if she knew exactly what she was doing. The worst part is, it’s like she pulled them straight from my own brain, like she fucking gets it . This is the second time today that it feels as if I’ve been punched in the gut by this girl, but this time, I’m not stopping myself from hitting back.
“Hey, Raf,” a random voice calls– someone I don’t know and don’t care to. I ignore it, ignore everything except the paper still clutched in my trembling grip. I want to ball it up, tear it to shreds, light it on fire… but all I can do is stare at the words, reading them over and over like a goddamn masochist until they all start to blur together.
Ava’s got no idea how deep this runs, no clue who she’s messing with. I never thought she had the balls to pull something like this, but now the fucking gloves are off.
The sky is low and gray, clouds pushing down as I resume my rampage toward Sutton Hall, adrenaline and fury taking the wheel. Everything narrows into a single, focused point. Find Ava. Make her hurt. Make her pay.
The anger feels like a living, breathing thing, wrapping its claws around my throat, choking the life out of me. She left after I told her to stay because she knew exactly what she did. She did it on purpose to fuck with me, knowing how deep this would cut. Knowing it’d make me bleed.
I pick up my pace, shoes hitting the pavement hard and relentless as I approach the back door of the building. Another student is coming out and he holds the door open, says something, but I’m already past him and pounding up the stairs on a mission.
I storm into our top floor apartment like a fucking hurricane, my rage leaving a trail of destruction as I slam my backpack against the wall and kick the door closed behind me. Wes and Ford are on the couch in the living room, glued to the TV screen with Playstation controllers in their hands. They don’t even glance back as I stomp up behind them, roaring, “Where is she?”
Ford slowly turns his head, raising an eyebrow. “In her room.”
I blow past them and down the hallway, still clutching the paper in my fist. The hinges almost give way when I kick her door in, Ava sitting up on her bed with a start as I rush toward her. She opens her mouth, but before she can get a word out, I’ve got hold of her wrist, hauling her off the bed and to her feet as her books clatter to the floor around us.
“Ow, Raf, you’re hurting me!” she whines, brown eyes wide with fear and confusion as I wrench her arm behind her back, shoving her chest up against the closest wall.
I can’t even hear her over the roar in my head as I crowd in behind her, pinning her to the brick with my weight. The shadows have me now, the darkness inside swallowing up any last trace of rationality. “What the fuck is this?” I demand, shoving the paper in her face, the words on it still burning in my brain like a brand.
She flinches, her terrified gaze zeroing in on what I’m holding. I’m close enough to see the full weight of her panic setting in, to feel her start to tremble beneath my grip.
“Your assignment,” she croaks, barely audible.
My grip on her wrist tightens and she whimpers, struggling against my hold.
“Who told you to write this?” I shout, my voice raw and ugly with accusation. It’s everything I’ve been holding in since I saw what she wrote in that paper, since I saw her leaving Ford’s room this morning, since I saw her in the weight room that first fucking day.
“Ford did!” she cries out.
It’s the wrong answer, or maybe the right one, and I don’t know which makes me more furious.
“No,” I growl, shaking the paper in her face, each movement punctuated by rage. “Who told you to write what’s in here ?”
“N-nobody!” she stammers. “I was just doing the assignment!”
Again, wrong fucking answer.
I toss the damn thing over my shoulder, suddenly realizing that Ford and Wes have joined the party. They’re standing a few feet away, the sheets of paper floating to the floor between us.
Ford stoops to pick up a page, sucking in a breath through his teeth as his eyes skim the text. “You fucked up, Ava baby,” he murmurs, whistling as he hands the paper over to Wes.
I shove the back of Ava’s skirt up, ripping her ugly cotton briefs off her body in a violent frenzy. I want to strip her bare like she stripped me, make her feel just as naked and exposed as I do right now.
“Raf, stop!” she shrieks, writhing against my iron grip.
I can’t stop. The shadows are all I see. Ava struggles and sobs as I tear at her clothes, but she doesn’t know what this is like, how it feels to be fucking drowning in your own head. I can’t even try breathing or telling myself I’m in control right now because I know I’m not.
Wes’ hand suddenly clamps down on my shoulder, his voice breaking through the chaos as he wrenches me back. “You need to fuckin’ cool it, bro. Walk it off or something.”
It’s just enough to pull me back from the edge, snapping me out of the haze I’m in. I let go of Ava’s wrist, blinking as I stumble backwards.
“The fuck, Raf?” Ford scowls.
As if he’s a fucking boy scout.
I stab my fingers through my hair, straightening my posture and attempting to gather myself. I’m still shaking with anger that I can’t contain, overwhelmed by the fury pulsing through my veins.
Then my eyes lock with Ava’s, and the look on her face as she stands there trembling, her torn clothes hanging from her slender frame, is the knockout punch.
I point a finger in her direction, my upper lip curling back from my teeth in a snarl. “This isn’t over, slut,” I spit. “When I come up with a suitable punishment for this, you’re gonna wish I’d just torn you open on my cock.”
She flinches, a tear rolling down the apple of her cheek as she stares back at me in horror.
I can’t even fucking look at her anymore.
Whipping around, I storm out of her room just as furiously as I entered, taking the shadows with me.