“Sometimes I think about her watching us,” he went on. “I think she’d like it, but she’d hate that she liked it.”
With Damon, he didn’t see the person. He was attracted to control. Making people do things they wouldn’t normally do. It was all about the turn of the screw. Like a fish hook, he burrowed his way into heads and stayed there, long after he’d gone.
And his friends were the most valuable thing to him. He’d die for us, but the scary part was, that might not be the worst that could happen.
“She’ll never be to you what we are,” he told me, “because she’s too scared, too proud, and too boring.” He stopped and finally turned to me. “She’d never love you like you deserve, because she doesn’t respect you. You’re too shallow to her.”
And I felt my insides fold in on themselves, over and over, creating this hole in my gut, because I knew he was right, and fuck him.
What would she see in me?
And why the hell did I care? I was William Grayson III. The grandson of a senator. The best shooter on our basketball team, and she’ll be coming to my company in ten years, begging for a grant to fund her stupid theory on the viability of rooftop farms with their own micro-climates or some such shit.
I didn’t need her.
I dug my keys out of my pocket, not caring where Kai and Michael had disappeared to. Everyone would find their way home.
I turned around. “I gotta go.”
“Will.”
But I didn’t stop. Heading outside, I jumped into my truck and sped out of there, charging back onto the highway, and I didn’t care if that asshole pulled me over again.
I rubbed my hand over my face, shaking my head as that whole conversation replayed in my mind.
Emory Scott hated me, but she hated nearly everyone. So, she was making me work for it. So what? I’d be disappointed if she didn’t. She didn’t respect Michael, Kai, or Damon, either. It shouldn’t hurt.
But it did.
I always liked her. I always looked for her.
And over the years, passing her in the halls and feeling her in the classroom next to me, she got hot as fuck in ways no one else seemed to notice but me.
God, she had a mouth on her. I loved her attitude and her anger, because I was always too warm and I needed the ice.
It made me smile.
But I also saw things no one else did. The cute way she’d trip over a sidewalk slab or walk straight into a mailbox, because her eyes were lost in the trees over her head instead of watching where she was going.
How she’d push her grandmother in her wheelchair down to the village, both of them smiling and eating ice cream together. Emmy would hold her hand the whole time they sat.
The way she worked so hard, all by herself, without anyone to keep her company on her creative projects around town.
There was so much there that people didn’t see. She shouldn’t be alone all the time.
But Damon was right. She’d never be on my arm. She’d never let her guard down.
I turned, going past her street, and straight to the village, stopping at the gazebo she had started building before the school year started. Some project she’d convinced the city to let her build in the park at the center of the square.
She seemed to be here working if she wasn’t at school or band practice. I stopped along the curb outside of Sticks, looking up into the park and the beams rising up toward the sky but no roof yet.
She wasn’t there.
It was Saturday. She’d probably been there all day, but I’d missed it.
Pulling back onto the street, I drove past the cathedral, about to head home, but just then, I saw her.
She pulled the hood of her hoodie over her head, her long brown hair spilling out as she gripped the bag over her chest.