Chapter 5 #2
But when I heard she was spending most of her time at the school, the only place she felt safe in St. Carmen anymore, and assisting our new teacher, it was even better than expected.
The kid wasn’t good for much else—and it was unlikely she would ever marry, run her own house, or be able to hold down a real job—but her mother helped her find a place where she could dream away her days.
To think, when we were growing up, she possessed so much potential to gain her own power. She was smart and coy and knew exactly how to get what she wanted.
Now she only wants to escape. The doctors said it was age regression brought on by PTSD. She knows who she is but easily slips into another reality. One where she’s a child who doesn’t have to be in adult spaces. Unless she wants to, of course.
After years away, her medical team concluded that she wasn’t a danger to herself and just needed outpatient therapy and time.
Therapy hasn’t helped, but still, she goes.
“Your father is leaving for the summer?” Jerome asks.
I lift my eyes from my phone. “For a few weeks, at least.”
He left today with my stepmother, although I can’t imagine she’ll spend much time with him.
He’ll be in and out of our ski lodge, hunting, with probably a trip up to Alaska for bear and Montana for elk, because he just loves killing shit.
She’ll spend her days reading or redecorating something or going to the spa. I don’t care.
“I’ve got a friend.”
I raise my eyes again as Jerome risks glances at me in between looking out the window.
“You’d like him,” he says.
What the fuck? What is he…?
I narrow my eyes, glancing to make sure Milo and Vincent are gone as if I didn’t see them get out of the car myself.
What the hell does Jerome mean?
He just breathes a laugh. “You’re not the first heir in the history of the world pressured to keep up appearances, Callum,” he tells me.
Locking my jaw, I turn away, watching the canal pass by the windows as we enter St. Carmen.
“I was in school with him back in college,” he goes on. “He runs two hotels, bench-presses one-eighty, stands six-two, and likes his private life…private.”
My stomach starts to twist into a slow, massive knot, and I want to know what the fuck he’s heard. I don’t give a shit if my friends know what I like, but I don’t want my personal business out there. Did he hear it from someone?
Or is it obvious?
“Women look at him before they look at me,” he continues, “only he doesn’t like women.”
He was in college with him. Which means he’s around Jerome’s age. Thirty-five.
I don’t linger too long on the idea that dances at the periphery of my brain. Dallas is twenty-five. Would it fuck with him to see a man looking at me? One who’s older and a hell of a lot more successful?
We breeze past Liv’s film crew, who are trying to keep their equipment dry, and I look for her even though I hope I don’t see her.
She is actually the one thing in my past I regret.
“I could introduce you to him,” Jerome says.
I swallow, hating this conversation. But I can’t tell a man I need to shut his fucking mouth. I don’t want anyone. I haven’t wanted anyone for a long time.
But I need it. Badly.
And maybe it’ll feel good to flaunt my charmed life in front of Dallas.
“Well,” I sigh. “I guess I can’t stop you from bringing him by the Wolfe Room whenever you want.”
He smiles, and I won’t admit that I kind of appreciate having one person to talk to about this.
“Just not tonight,” I throw out.
I’ve got plans.
—
Summer classes at Marymount start tomorrow, and there’s anticipation in the air as I charge through the empty hallways.
Lightning flashes over the courtyard as rain pours down, the distant thunder rolling.
I pass brightly lit rooms and teachers getting ready, as well as janitors lining trash cans with fresh bags.
I never spent more time here than I had to as a student, but I know the school isn’t completely empty all summer.
Not only do teachers who aren’t teaching take the quiet opportunity to prepare in their classrooms before the fall, but the football team will be starting practice soon.
The boys who aren’t traveling will already be in the weight room, bulking up before everyone returns in about a month.
I didn’t much care for sweating my ass off in a hundred percent humidity out on the football field, and when I quit the team mid-season junior year, it was the first of many times I realized I took after my mother more than I did my father.
She didn’t want to suffer to please him, either.
There are far better men to do that for.
Climbing the stairs and approaching room 244, I slow, watching the classroom come into view.
At the doorway of Dallas’s classroom, where the lights are off and candles are lit, I stop and take in the scene of Dallas Jaeger and my stepsister, feeling like I’ve interrupted something.
Sophia kneels on the foot-wide windowsill of polished redwood, the bottom of her black knickerbocker pants buttoned just below the knee, a matching ribbon tied into a bow at the back of her head.
Her long brown hair is in tangles down her back, as if she was outside playing a short time ago. Dallas drifts slowly around the room, silently picking up desks and gently placing them into new arrangements without any sound as he watches her paint.
Candlelight flickers across the walls, the clouds letting in only minimal light as my sister colors in a massive scribble art piece on the windows.
I’ve seen her do these before. One black line drawn in curves and loops, hills and dips, making overlapping shapes, and then she fills in each section with a different color.
The piece covers one whole seven-foot-tall window, half-finished, as the reds, purples, and oranges come alive with the firelight and the streaks of rain cascading down the other side of the watercolors.
Sophia sits back on the heels of her sneakers, and I see that she’s wearing suspenders over her short-sleeve white T-shirt. From here, she looks eleven again. Which is how she wants to be seen.
I shift my gaze to Dallas, watching him move around the room, careful not to disturb her as she fills in each shape with paint. He’s still a couple of inches taller than me, and he still hasn’t noticed I’m here. Or maybe he has, and he’s letting me look. He’s fucking arrogant like that.
Trailing my eyes up the side of his neck, I linger where his soot-black hair touches the nape, and he still looks like he’s perpetually a month overdue for a haircut. It hangs over his forehead, too, a little wild but not unkempt, and his black tie hangs loose around his white collar.