23 Cassius #2
Zae rolls up again and hops off her board when she sees me turn. Her eyes move to Derek and her whole expression hardens in a way that would be almost funny if I didn’t know exactly why.
“Oh,” she says flatly. “It’s you.”
Derek laughs. “Good to see you too, Zara.”
She doesn’t correct him, which is how I know she dislikes him as much as she always did. She only lets people get away with the wrong name when she’s decided they aren’t worth the effort.
“You remember Derek.” I gesture to him with my thumb, because introducing them would be stupid.
“Unfortunately,” she replies.
That gets a grin out of him, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. He looks between us, putting things together in whatever ugly little way his brain works.
“Well, that tracks,” he says, nodding toward her board, then at me. “You always did have a thing for girls who thought they could fix people.”
Zae’s shoulders go still and my jaw tightens. But Derek? He just keeps smiling like he’s only making conversation.
“He was better sophomore year,” he adds, turning to her now as if I’m not even there. “Every week somebody was catching hands for breathing too loud. It was fun while it lasted.”
Fun.
That word slides under my skin wrong. Zae’s hand finds my wrist with light pressure, more grounding than anything.
“I was there,” she says evenly. “I remember.”
Derek snorts. “Yeah, and you started getting in his head about halfway through it.”
“I started telling you to shut the hell up,” she corrects.
That makes something in my chest pull tighter.
She did.
After the arrest, after the overnight hold, after the whole town knew. She found Derek outside of school one afternoon and told him to fuck off so hard he actually stepped back. Told him if he cared about me at all he’d stop feeding my anger every chance he got. He didn’t stop, but I did.
Or I tried to.
Around junior year, when I realized he liked seeing me angry more than he liked me as a person, I cut him off.
By then he was mostly bored anyway because I wasn’t giving him anything fun to watch anymore.
I still punched lockers, walls, anything that wasn’t living.
But I stopped giving him the version of me he wanted.
Now he’s here looking at me like he found a toy he thought he’d lost.
“Man,” he says, shaking his head like he’s nostalgic, “things were great till this one came in.” He points at Zae, tone playful in a way that lands worse than open disrespect.
Zae’s fingers tighten around my wrist. My vision narrows a fraction, blurring the lights at the edges of the park slightly, and dropping the music a step back. Derek notes my reaction. He always was good at spotting the exact second before a fuse caught.
“There he is,” he murmurs.
My hands flex once at my sides. The panic comes first, which is the part nobody ever sees unless they know what they’re looking at.
It feels ugly and hot and immediate, because one part of my brain is already ten steps ahead, already replaying every bad outcome, already deciding somebody’s about to get hurt and I have to do something before it happens. Then the panic turns.
It always turns, because rage is just fear that found a target.
Zae steps forward before I do, breaking the direct line between us. “Okay. We’re not doing this tonight.”
Derek lifts his hands. “Relax. I’m just talking.”
“Then maybe get better at it,” she snaps back dryly.
My shoulders twitch an inch. But I feel it, and that’s enough to make my stomach turn. Because my body already knows what it wants to do. That’s the part I hate. How close I get before I stop myself.
“I’m getting a drink,” I mutter, an obvious lie.
I don’t wait for either of them to answer.
I grab my board and walk. The farther edge of the park is darker, away from the string lights and the music and the idiots in costumes pretending they’re brave enough to skate rails they’ve never landed sober.
I stop by the fence and grip the board too hard for a second before forcing my hands to loosen.
I didn’t touch him. Didn’t step into his space. Didn’t lose it. That should count for something. Right?
It doesn’t.
Because I felt the drop, the narrowing. I felt how little it took to get me there. Just Derek, a sentence, and a reminder that the version of me he used to cheer on didn’t die. It just got quieter.
“Eat shit, Derek,” I hear Zae tell him off behind me, and then her footsteps are heading my way.
If I wasn’t so upset, I’d love her more for it. She stops beside me, not crowding or touching me right away. She’s been managing me for so long she probably doesn’t even realize the way her body reacts anymore.
“You good?” she asks.
I nod once.
Lie.
She lets it sit there for a second, then leans her shoulder lightly into my arm.
“Derek still sucks,” she says after a beat. “That part’s nice and consistent.”
A breath almost turns into a laugh.
“He does,” I admit.
“He always did.” She glances up at me. “Remember sophomore year when he tried to get you to fight Nate Peterson over a stolen pencil?”
I look down at her. “That’s not how that happened.”
“That is exactly how that happened.”
“He was talking shit.”
“He asked to borrow your pencil, Cass.”
I shake my head once, because arguing the details of ancient high school rage is ridiculous, but some of the tightness in my chest eases for half a second anyway.
“You didn’t do anything,” she tries more quietly now. “You walked away.”
I look past the fence instead of at her. “That’s a low bar.”
“It still counts.”
Does it?
I don’t know anymore.
The problem isn’t what I did. It’s what almost happened before I decided to walk away. She reaches for my hand then, lacing our fingers together without asking, as if she’s reminding both of us where we are.
Here, with each other. Warm, steady, and real. I hold on harder than I mean to, then force myself to loosen before I hurt her. She doesn’t comment on it.
“Cass,” she says after a moment, voice softer now. “He doesn’t know you.”
I look down at her finally. That almost gets me, because she says it with such certainty, such easy faith. Like it's fact instead of hope.
“He knows enough,” I answer.
“No,” she says, and there’s more steel in it now. “He knows who you were when you were at your worst, and he liked that version of you because it entertained him. That’s not the same thing.”
When I don’t answer, she shifts fully in front of me, forcing me to either look at her or be obvious about avoiding it.
“He was never your friend,” she adds, and her tone is dry in that way she uses when she’s trying not to show me how serious she is. “He was your emotional arsonist.”
That pulls a real breath of laughter out of me, short and rough and gone too fast.
Her face softens when she hears it. “There you are.”
And that right there is the problem. The way she can reach in and pull me back before I even fully realize how far I drifted. That shouldn’t have to be her job.
She’s still talking, filling the silence because she can feel I’m slipping and she’s trying to ease it before it turns into something heavier.
“We can leave if you want. Or stay. Or steal candy from your mother’s emergency bowl and go home and make fun of bad zombie makeup on TV. I’m flexible.”
I stare at her while she lays out options, while she hands me space to choose, while she does the thing she always does where she makes herself soft enough to absorb whatever’s coming off me.
She trusts me. She trusts me the way you trust a door to lock, a seatbelt to catch, a person to come when you call, easily and automatically.
And all I can think about is how little it took to feel that edge again.
How I stood there with my hands flexing and my vision tunneling and Derek grinning because he saw it too.
Not a full loss of control. A reminder. I tighten my grip on her hand before I mean to. She squeezes back immediately, without hesitation. That unquestioning kind of trust again. And it twists something ugly in my chest, because she thinks I’m safe.
God, I want to be.
But wanting doesn’t fix the fact that I’m still standing here counting how close I got to not being so. Again.