I stay suspended in my pretend world for God knows how long, until I feel someone staring at me.
When I say feel, I literally feel it, just like someone is reaching out and touching my face with their fingers.
Glancing up, I suck my breath in when I find dark eyes connected to mine, eyes so dark they’re almost black, and the energy in them is enough to freeze me in place.
A boy is attached to the dark gaze.
A man.
He’s probably no more than twenty or twenty-one, but everything about him screams man. There’s no boy in him. That part of him is very clearly gone. I see it in his eyes, in the way he holds himself, in the perceptive way he takes in his surroundings, then stares at me with singular focus, like we’re somehow connected by a tether. He’s got a million contradictions in his eyes….aloofness, warmth, mystery, charm, and something else I can’t define.
He’s muscular, tall, and wearing a tattered black sweatshirt that says Irony is lost on you in orange letters. His dark jeans are belted with black leather, and a silver band encircles his middle finger.
Dark hair tumbles into his face and a hand with long fingers impatiently brushes it back, all the while his eyes are still connected with mine. His jaw is strong and masculine, with the barest hint of stubble.
His gaze is still connected to mine, like a livewire, or a lightning bolt. I can feel the charge of it racing along my skin, like a million tiny fingers, flushing my cheeks. My lungs flutter and I swallow hard.
And then, he smiles at me.
At me.
Because I don’t know him and he doesn’t know better.
“Cal? You ready?”
Finn’s voice breaks my concentration, and with it, the moment. I glance up at my brother, almost in confusion, to find that he’s waiting for me. The hour has already passed and I didn’t even realize it. I scramble to get up, feeling for all the world like I’m rattled, but don’t know why.
Although I do know.
As I walk away with Finn, I glance over my shoulder.
The sexy stranger with the dark, dark gaze is gone.
3
TRIBUS
Finn
FuckYouYouCan’tDoAnything. HurtMeMotherfucker. YouCan’tDoAnything. You’reSoFucked. HurtMe. HurtMe. HurtHer. Can’tDoAnything. KillMeNow.
Like always, I ignore them…the voices in my head that whisper and hiss. They’re always there in the background, inside my ear. There are several of them, mostly women’s voices, but there are a couple men’s voices, too. Those are the ones that are harder to ignore, because sometimes they feel like my own.
It’s really hard to ignore your own voice.
And even though I can push them to the back of my consciousness most of the time, I can never make them go away. The colorful pills I used to take every day couldn’t even silence them, not always.
Because of that, since they made me nauseous and didn’t work anyway, I added another chore to my to-do list the other day. It was an easy one to cross off.
Stop taking pills
Don’t tell Calla or dad.
I picture my mental list in my head, with perfect clarity, because that level of focus tends to muffle the voices for a second. My list is on white notebook paper, lined with blue, a pink line running vertically down the left side. After I complete a task, I draw a mental line through it, crossing it out. It makes me feel accomplished.
Without my list, I can’t get through the day. It’s too hard to think without it, too hard to concentrate. Without it, I can’t even appear normal. Its compulsory for me at this point, just one more thing that makes me bat-shit crazy.
No one except Calla and my dad know how crazy I am. And even they don’t know the extent of it.