Total pages in book: 155
Estimated words: 152045 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 760(@200wpm)___ 608(@250wpm)___ 507(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 152045 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 760(@200wpm)___ 608(@250wpm)___ 507(@300wpm)
“Hunter,” Dewitt calls, seeing me go.
I keep walking. Around the Pirate float. Through the Pirate football team. To the front of the pack where my brother walks.
I fall in next to him, keeping pace.
“Do you remember the time at the lake when you got me to jump off the dock?” I ask, raising my voice so he can hear me over all the music. “You’d done it a dozen times already, and I was scared.”
He stares ahead, and I see Stoli on his other side, keeping an eye on us.
“You waded in the water for five minutes,” I tell him, “encouraging me until I dove in?”
That was a good day, and the older we got, the less I remembered from being that young. But I always remembered that. He was in my corner, wanting me to succeed.
“Five years later…” I turn my head, staring ahead with him. “We were twelve, swimming in the same spot, and you got all of our friends to rush from the lake and leave me behind by myself.” I swallow the lump in my throat. “Your friends,” I correct myself. “All of you hid from me the rest of the day, and I went and read in the back of Dad’s car, alone.”
It hurt to feel like I was on the outside. Unwanted.
What hurt more was that they planned it. He told them to do it.
“I used to think ‘I love him, but I don’t think I like him much,’” I say. “Now, I just fucking hate you.”
And I don’t care that tears fill my eyes or that I see my father on a podium to my left, watching us.
“If you ever impersonate me again,” I growl under my breath, “I’ll beat the shit out of you.”
“Do it now.”
And I fucking do.
I can’t contain it. Fisting his shirt, I slam my fist across his jaw and barely see him hit the ground before I’m on top of him.
“Oh, hell no!” someone shouts.
“Fight!”
Screams and shouting go off in the crowd, curses coming from the team. I straddle my brother and hit him again, my knuckles knocking the back of his hand as he shields himself.
He doesn’t stay down for long, though. His friends try to catch my arms, but Kade wraps one of his around my waist and hauls me off. Rearing his fist back, he punches me across the face, and I barrel into him, planting my shoulder in his stomach.
We crash back to the pavement, my hands scraping against the hard ground.
“You boys stop it!” a woman cries.
Someone calls out over the loudspeaker, “Break it up, break it up!”
And then Dylan is there, her arms around me. “Stop.” She comes in between us. “Please stop.”
I rise to my feet, Kade doing the same as more fights start around us, Rebels and Pirates never needing an excuse to join in on the fun.
“He needs to stop!” I tell her. “Aren’t you pissed? He made you think it was me with another girl in my bed? Don’t you have anything to say to him?”
He deserves this, and she needs to understand why.
But she just looks at me, her misty eyes hiding under my cap. I see her trembling lips, though.
“Dylan doesn’t want to be mad at anybody,” Kade says. “You never really did see her, did you? She always had my back.”
“And I had her in a way you never will,” I spit back.
Silence seems to fall around us, people still moving and fighting, the parade massacred.
But I don’t hear any of it, and the words have left my mouth and I can’t get them back.
All I feel are Dylan’s eyes.
I blink. No. I didn’t just say that. She’s not a competition. I didn’t beat Kade at anything by getting her into bed.
But that’s how it just sounded.
I look at her in time to see a tear spill down her cheek. She starts to back up, and I grab her to take her into my arms, but she shoves me away and runs.
She runs away, so fast, disappearing into the crowd.
Dylan
I went to the only place I wanted to be. Not to the Loop. Not to a friend or to Aro or to Quinn.
Home.
I climb up the tree between my house and Hawke’s, not really trying to hide, but thankful for the cover.
And for the view.
The street where I learned to ride a bike. A street that looks amazing covered in fall leaves in a neighborhood that smells great on a summer night filled with grass, grills, and bug spray.
I can barely look up, though. Tears drip onto my hands as I play with the button on my shirt.
I thought maybe I loved him.
I don’t.
I misjudged my connection to him as something more than it was, and maybe it was necessary to get here. We needed to scratch the itch in order to get past it, otherwise we’d always wonder.