“Well, I hope you’re a better cleaner than you are a student. Because if you make a mess, you’re the one who’s going to clean it up.”
“I —”
My words evaporate when my back thumps the wall and I have nowhere else to go as he descends on me like the devil he is.
I fully expect him to put his hands on the wall and cage me. I expect him to get even closer to me, lean over me so he can box me in, trap me like he’s always done.
But he doesn’t.
He does none of those things.
He comes to a stop a couple of feet away from me and stands tall and broad. He even thrusts his hands down into his pockets.
And it’s worse.
Because I’m still caged.
My feet are still glued to the spot and my spine is still stuck to the wall. I’m still all trapped and pinned and he didn’t even have to move a muscle.
My chest heaving, I whisper, “I’m not… I’m not that.”
A whore.
His jaw moves back and forth as if he heard the word. “And if I wanted you to be that, I would’ve found a way to make you one.”
“I —”
“I’m the one with all the power here, aren’t I?”
My nails dig into the wall behind me as I jerk out a nod. The only answer I’ll give him.
“I can do whatever the fuck I want with you,” he says, his eyes heated. “And by your own admission, you’d do it, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Because you hate me so much.”
“I do.”
His eyes shimmer with something before he rasps, “So if I wanted the clumsy fumbling of a wild child bad child, who’s barely eighteen and spends her days in a school uniform and raising hell in a classroom, I would’ve taken it. And trust me, by the time I was done with you, you’d be hating yourself more for loving it than me for doing it to you. Not to mention, you’d be cleaning a different kind of mess from a lot of different places in addition to my Italian loafers. As it is, my tastes run to sophisticated, much more experienced women. So your teenage virtue is safe tonight.”
I know I should be relieved.
I should breathe easier. But my breaths are even messier now.
My skin is thrumming at his words.
My thighs are clenching involuntarily and my wide eyes become even wider behind my glasses. I inch them up jerkily and say, pushing everything aside, “So then… What do you want?”
He watches my features for a few seconds while his own become all serious, hard. “What I want is for you to tell me something.”
“Tell you what?”
“The truth.”
“The truth?”
“Is it him?”
“What?”
He grits his jaw. And he does it so hard and intensely that it lasts for a couple of seconds before he explains, or rather drops the bomb on me. “Your fucking boyfriend.”
“My b-boyfriend?”
His eyes have violence in them as he rasps, “Yeah. All this begging and working for extra fucking credit. He doesn’t happen to be involved in this, does he? Your piece of shit stoner boyfriend.”
For a few seconds, I can’t say anything.
I can’t even breathe. I can’t make thoughts let alone words.
My heart doesn’t beat.
But I guess that’s an exaggeration because I’m alive, aren’t I?
And I’m not sleeping either, no. So this can’t be a dream.
Or a nightmare really.
That the man who broke my heart three years ago, is somehow asking me about the boy I love.
That the man who tore me apart from the love of my life has somehow figured out that that’s why I’m doing all this.
“He’s not a piece of shit,” I blurt out the first thing that comes to mind.
Which was the wrong thing to say, because his eyes narrow suspiciously. “Yeah, he is.”
Even though I know this is a dangerous road to take, I still say, “No, he’s not. And he’s not a stoner either.”
Well, he kinda is but still.
“Yeah, he is,” he repeats.
“Okay, so yes, he’s a stoner,” I say. “So what? Like you’re so perfect. In fact, he’s better than you even though he smokes pot.”
And does other illegal substances.
But so what?
I love him and he waited for me. That’s all that matters.
A muscle jumps on his cheek. It jumps and pulses.
And somehow my heart that felt like it had stopped before beats to the rhythm of it.
“He smokes more than pot and you know it,” he clips. “And I’m not looking to compete with a high school dropout whose IQ is probably less than my shoe size.”
“I —”
“And it is because of him,” he cuts me off and concludes, “because nothing has changed, has it? You sneaked out to see him before you were sent to St. Mary’s and given what I found out tonight, I’m assuming you’ve been doing the same since you got here.”