Breaking the Bully

“Break?” I whisper. “Like those thunderheads?”

He looks back down at me, wrestling with something. Maybe a desire to come closer. But he does it anyway, his jaw flexing like it might snap. He lifts up a hand, brushing the very tip of his fingers down my cheekbone. “Yeah,” he rasps, rain wetting his lips. “Just…boom.”

Thunder punctuates his statement—and I can’t breathe.

I’ve always wanted to be drawn up into the storm. This is it. It’s happening. I’m caught in the electricity, its unruly nature. Moore’s black hair whips around his head, his golden brown eyes penetrating, snapping with something I’m only on the cusp of understanding. Is it…lust?

“Yeah…” His fingers move down my jaw, traveling slowly over the hollow of my throat to tease the collar of my nightgown. “You scare me, all right. But I can’t seem to stop…wanting, either. Wanting you to look at me. Wanting you…period. It’s why I sit behind you in all your classes, Allie. You don’t know that?”

My knees start to tremble.

I’ve always wondered how we end up in the same classes every single semester. He’s arranged for it to happen? He…likes me? That much?

Don’t act like it doesn’t go both ways.

Don’t act like…

As if I haven’t lain in this very field after school, when no one is at home, and touched myself in private places while thinking of Moore Dunnegan, my heels making trenches in the soft earth, my cries scattering the crows.

I must be doing a terrible job of keeping that secret to myself because Moore’s breath begins to grow shallow. “Allie. Baby.” He drops his forehead to mine, his fingers flicking open the top two buttons of my nightgown. “Please,” he groans. “Let me.”

My head is spinning. “Let you what?”

“Have you. Finally.” Another two buttons slip free, his hand sliding inside to knead my bare breast, making me gasp. “Goddammit. It’s not safe out here or I’d lay you down right here in this field. But I need you safe.” His thumb strums my nipple, setting off an ache low in my belly. “I need to be on top of you, Allie. I need in.”

Sex.

Of course he’s talking about sex.

People our age are having it. The pressure to join them is real and constant.

But I don’t feel pressure right now. I only feel urgency.

Want so deep that it churns like the heavens overhead. It has existed between us all along, hasn’t it? Not one-sided. A yearning pull between two people, orbiting each other in the earthly, incongruous setting of school.

“I can’t bring you inside,” I whisper. “I can’t.”

If you think this field isn’t safe, I want to tell him, you have no idea what lurks inside the four walls of my big, expensive, perfect-seeming home.

Moore opens his mouth to say something, but my name is shouted in the distance. From inside the house. With glittering eyes, Moore takes his hand out of my nightgown, covers my chest and steps back from me slightly, though it obviously pains him to do so. And a second later, the back door of my house opens, revealing my father, his wiry frame backlit by the interior.

“Allie!”

I start to tremble, the deep, invisible kind of trembling that grinds my back teeth together and unleashes nausea into my stomach. I try to speak, but I can’t.

“Allie,” my father says again—and he’s closer this time. “What are you doing out here in this storm?” There’s a tight smile in his voice. Of course there is. We have company. He never reveals his monstrous nature in front of other people. “Did you come out here to retrieve the handyman?”

I do a double take, noticing the strain forming around the corners of Moore’s mouth. “Handyman?”

“Yes.” My father chuckles, coming forward to clap a hand down on Moore’s tense shoulder. “He’s here to repair a leak in the attic. Came highly recommended.”

Moore can’t look at me now, his gaze cast over my shoulder. Hollow.

A minute ago, we were equals. But my father’s words have called into focus one very important thing. With Moore’s hands on me, I’d forgotten that I’m very rich and he’s very poor. It just didn’t matter. To me, it still doesn’t. But the economic divide between us is broadening by the second. I’ve experienced this my whole life. People whispering when they pass me on the sidewalk in town. She lives in the big house on Perry Hill. They have no idea it’s a prison.

“Why don’t you get to it?” My father suggests to Moore, his tone brittle. “Allie has to study. She’s going places, unlike some of us.”

I throw my gaze down to the ground, humiliation burning up my spine. My father is an expert at belittling people and he’s just done it to Moore. Suggesting that, unlike me, he isn’t going places. That he’ll live on the poor side of town forever while I go off to a university. I want to say something to make it better, to defend Moore, but I know I’ll only be making it worse on myself later. I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to offer Moore an apology. At school. I’ll talk to him then.