He kissed me the way little girls dream about being kissed at their weddings, the way teenagers like to see in movies. The way most grown women have given up on wishing for.
I lost myself to the kiss, to King’s strong hold on me, and when I emerged on the other side, I was once again the Cressida I’d been trying so hard to be.
King watched me with his moonshine eyes. “Good?”
I pressed my lips softly to his then spoke against them, “Thank you.”
“Told you, I got you, babe.”
“Now, I know it, King,” I replied, running one hand down his arm so we could link fingers.
“Ready for school?”
“You’ll be there, right?”
He grinned and squeezed my hand. “Until June 18th, babe.”
I laughed a little and it felt really good. “Then, yeah, babe, I’m ready.
Classes were going well. Everyone was deeply rattled by what had happened to Benny but very few students or faculty knew the full story, mostly because Carson Gentry’s family owned half the town and I was sure he had a part in keeping his son out of the narrative.
My IB English and History classes were especially subdued by the news but I put on movies in both classes so they could zone out and relax. Everything was going well until the end of the day when an announcement went out that there would be a town hall meeting at six that night, and that it was mandatory for both students and faculty to attend.
“Is that normal?” I asked Tayline and Rainbow as we had a cup of tea after school in the teacher’s lounge.
Before EBA, I never would have thought I’d enjoy hanging out in a teacher’s lounge but the Academy was superbly funded so the teachers enjoyed a mahogany-paneled, multi-room space on the ground floor of the Main Building that included a beautifully appointed kitchen, a full bathroom and an enormous lounge decorated with plush leather chairs and couches, plaid pillows in the school colors of navy blue, green and yellow, and a media center on the other side of the room from where we sat.
Our trio liked the window banquette tucked away at the narrow end of the communal area because it afforded us a grand view of the room (perfect for gossip target practice) but also the privacy we needed to properly talk (gossip).
“It’s happened twice before,” Rainbow answered after sharing a concerned look with Tay. “Once, after a kid went missing and the town pitched in to find him. That was probably, oh, twenty years ago? And then again when two girls at EBA got pregnant in the same year, this was probably 2010, and the pastor and his son, the mayor, joined forces to warn about the perils of sex before marriage.”
“Wow.”
Tayline nodded. “I’m telling you right now, it’s not going to go well for The Fallen.”
“It shouldn’t go well for them,” Warren cut in, appearing by our table with a suddenness that disturbed me. I wondered where he had been lurking to overhear our conversation. “They’ve been causing problems in Entrance for years.”
“Oh please,” Tay said while rolling her huge, chocolate brown eyes. “The Fallen have protected us from tons of crime. We have one of the lowest rates of drug abuse, drug-related crime and murder in small town Canada. It’s their protection that buys us that statistic.”
Warren was a handsome man, clean-cut and brunet with blue eyes in a way that most women liked, but when he looked at Tayline as he did then, eyes narrowed and mouth pursed over the sour lemon of thought perched on his tongue, I thought he was hideous.
“They’re thugs and they’ve been given free reign for too long this town. I’m a personal friend of Mayor Lafayette’s and I think you’ll find he has some very… persuasive things to say about your darling MC tonight.”
Rainbow snorted. “Come on, Warren. You grew up here same as me and Tay did. You know they aren’t bad guys.”
“Sure, that’s why Benito Bonanno is in the hospital after a drug overdose,” he quipped.
The blood drained from my face both at the reminder of last night’s horrors and at the reality of what Warren was saying. They were going to pin the accident on the MC.
I didn’t know what that meant for King or Zeus, but it couldn’t be good.
As it turned out, it wasn’t.
“We need to reaffirm governmental and legal authority in this town,” Mayor Lafayette preached later that night from his chestnut podium in Town Hall.
I’d never been to the massive ivy-covered brick building in the center of town. I wished I were there under more auspicious circumstances because everything about it was old and beautiful. Instead, I sat in one of the packed rows of the main auditorium listening to a tall, middle-aged man with great hair talk about the evils of the MC and the laziness of Entrance citizens in giving them free sovereignty over society.