Pretty When She Cries - Black Mountain Academy

My tablet.

My stomach flips, and my mom says something else, but it doesn’t register. Where the hell did this come from? Did Landon put it there last night?

“Kail?” My mom waves her hand at me, trying to get my attention.

“Huh?”

“Jared’s here.” She points at the alert on her phone.

“Oh, right.” I nod. “Okay. I’ll see you later.”Jared escorts me inside the building, and we head for my locker first. When I see Landon there, waiting for me, I nearly burn skid marks into the floor.

“You okay?” Jared asks as he looks back and forth between us.

“Yeah.” I force a smile. “I’ll just put this stuff in my locker, and we can go.”

“I’ll be right here.” He leans up against the bank of lockers a few feet away and meets Landon’s irritated glare with one of his own.

“Are we playing this game again?” Landon asks as I open my locker and start stuffing my books inside. “I thought we were past the fake boyfriend bullshit."

“Cool your jets.” I roll my eyes. “Why do you care who I’m with? And why are you standing here waiting for me?”

“I told you we need to talk.” His voice lowers, and from the corner of my eye, I can see him reaching out to touch me before he thinks better of it. “I fucked up, Kail. I get that. And I have so much to say, but I need you to listen to me. I’m trying to make things right.”

His words are everything I thought I wanted to hear. Except he can’t make it right. He can’t erase the sound of Audrey touching him. The auditory loop I hear on playback every single night won’t go away just because he apologizes. I’m not even angry with him anymore. I’m just… hurt. It hurts so much, and I know I can’t go through this again. Too much has happened, and Landon has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’s capable of breaking my heart. I have to preserve what little dignity I have left.

“You should move on,” I tell him gently as I shut the locker and turn away. “I already have.”30LandonAfter Kail’s ice-cold rejection, I spend the rest of the week nursing my wounds and trying everything I can to get her to talk to me. She hasn’t moved back into the pool house yet, and since Theo threatened to chop my balls off if I upset her, catching her alone isn’t as easy as I’d hoped.

At school, if she isn’t with Jared, she’s with Courtney. When I wait for her at her locker, she refuses to acknowledge me. Lunchtime doesn’t fare any better. The first day back, I pulled up an empty chair and sat down with all three of them. Kail got up and left without a word. She’s slammed the door, but I’m determined to pry it back open somehow. I’m just not sure what it’s going to take.

On the second day back, I had an arrangement of Dancing Lady Orchids waiting for her in her locker. When she saw them, it only seemed to make her more withdrawn if that was possible. So I left her a box of chocolate-covered macadamias for the third day, which I knew were her favorite. She barely glanced at them and slammed her locker shut. The fourth day, I left her my Cougars hoodie with my uniform number on the back. That day, she actually sighed, so it was something.

On the fifth day, I decided to go big or go home. I had a huge stuffed pineapple and a balloon waiting for her, which only managed to humiliate her even more. It wasn’t my finest decision, but I was going out of my fucking mind. She’d shut me out completely. Being close enough to touch her but knowing that I couldn’t was like staring down a cupcake after a hunger strike.

I’m starving to death without her. Nothing tastes as sweet. Even the oxygen I breathe feels tainted. I don’t know how to get through to her. And watching her hobble around in that fucking boot makes me murderous. Someone hurt my girl. Someone crushed her ankle with a goddamn baseball bat, and I can’t even comfort her because she refuses to break this crushing silence.

Knowing I deserve her wrath and more doesn’t make it any easier to accept. If I thought it would make her feel any better, I’d tell her to mace my ass. Punch me in the face. Whatever she wanted. But Kailani doesn’t even seem angry anymore. She’s just quiet and sad. Of course, the exception is when she’s with Jared fucking Price. He makes her laugh. Fucking asshole.

When the weekend rolls around, Alana shows up at my door. It’s a little awkward, considering the last time we spoke, I had just broken into her daughter’s bedroom. But she didn’t come to bust my balls. She came to invite me to dinner. I feel like a dick for disappointing her when I decline. As much as I want to go, I can’t sit next to Kail while she ignores me. We need to hash our shit out in private, where we can fight it out and then make up. And by make up, I mean get her naked and worship her until my dick falls off or we die.