Chapter 32
KATHERINE.
I wiped away my tears with the sleeves of my T-shirt as my phone buzzed and I pulled it out of my pocket. It was a message from Helena asking where I went because I didn’t reply to her and when my gaze landed on the fees I’d paid to be here, anger surged within me again and I screamed. It was an ear-splitting scream and I wouldn’t have done it if I wasn’t alone so imagine my surprise when I found out that I actually wasn’t it.
A head suddenly poked out from behind the tree I was facing and my scream morphed from one of anger to terror before it died in my throat when it clicked that the head was attached to a body and it belonged to Theo who was currently frowning at me. “What the fuck are you doing here?!”
“What the fuck are ‘you’ doing here?! I was trying to sleep!” he shot back. This was the most disgruntled I’d seen him and the first time I’d heard him raise his voice.
“In the middle of the forest?!”
“Well yeah. I didn’t expect anyone crazy to come here.”
“I– …Did you just call me crazy?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at him, and he gave me a pointed look that said ‘What do you think?’ before I threw my hands up in frustration. “Ugh. I don’t even want to deal with you right now.”
I turned to the left and began to march down the path but before I could put any reasonable distance between us, a root peeking out of the ground tripped me and I ended up face-first on the floor. Pain shot through my right leg as I felt something rough cut my skin there and my eyes watered while I gritted my teeth, pushing myself into a sitting position.
There was a red mark close to my ankle that was rapidly turning redder as blood began to seep out of the cut the root had made on my skin and as I stared at it, I felt even more annoyed and wanted to scream again at how unfair today had been so far. Couldn’t I catch a break? First the dean and her injustice, then my pack and my uncle, and now this.
I felt miserable. I wanted to go back home to my brother. I wanted my parents back. I wanted things to go back to how they’d been before.
I didn’t realize I had begun to cry again till the salty liquid hit my lips and instead of stopping my tears, I found myself crying harder, not caring that Theo was within earshot, as the events of today went through my mind again. Several moments passed with me crying on the forest floor and as I was to get up and leave this place, something fell on my lap.
It was cream-colored and it took a couple of seconds for me to realize it was a handkerchief. I lifted my gaze to see where it had come from and saw Theo walking away from the tree he had been sitting behind before dropping my gaze back to the handkerchief which I now noticed had the initials ‘TF’ sewn into it in the corner.
Theodore Falone.
****
Hitting things felt good.
The training dummy in front of me swayed as I released my pent-up emotions by hitting it repeatedly and though my punches were uncoordinated and my kicks barely made the dummy shake, I didn’t care that I most likely looked ridiculous right now. This was cathartic. I just wished I could replace the dummy with everyone I was pissed with and they’d just stand there and take it without retaliating too.
“It’s a good idea your combat partner skipped today,” Hugh said with a smirk as he walked past me when I paused to take a breather and I snorted because he was clearly teasing me. He was the co-captain of the combat training club and according to him, he was one of the guys I’d had a drinking competition with the night of the bonfire. Also, he was one of the few people that were nice to me in this club.
Yes, only a couple of people in this club were nice to me. The rest were friends of Poppy’s and people who treated me like I didn’t exist because they were higher than me in the hierarchy. Thankfully, my partner in the club was one of the nice ones so I didn’t really pay attention to the others except for when Poppy’s friends loudly made comments like ‘If we hit her during training, she’ll report us to the dean’. That was incredibly annoying.
“She would have wiped the floor with me if she was here,” I replied. I’d never won in a one-on-one session with her.
“Give yourself some credit. You’re currently wiping the floor with Steve there.” Steve was the name of the training dummy I’d been hitting.
That drew a laugh from me before I caught the gaze of Poppy’s friend over his shoulder and she rolled her eyes at me. ‘Ugh.’
“I should get back to work then,” I replied and he gave me a salute before I returned my attention to the dummy.
Minutes later, I was done and getting ready to leave the combat training room. The room was in the recreation center and as I wondered if I should head to the pool to wait for Josie and Lenore while wiping my face with a towel, Theo suddenly came into sight, walking past the floor-to-ceiling windows of the combat training room as he headed towards the pool room, and my heart jumped in my chest.
It had been two days since that incident in the forest, two days since Theo gave me his handkerchief because I was a crying, pathetic mess on the floor, and I still had his handkerchief. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about his small act of kindness that day and I’d been trying to figure out how to give his handkerchief back but I dreaded the thought of approaching him since he saw me in ‘that’ state. I was embarrassed out of my mind.
I’d thought of giving Lenore the handkerchief but I ended up deciding against it because it was weird that I had her boyfriend’s handkerchief in the first place and I didn’t want to explain why he gave it to me, so it seemed like it was going to remain in my possession for the foreseeable future.
I began to panic, thinking Theo was going to notice me standing there, but he didn’t even glance in my direction till he was out of sight and I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. As I stared at the direction he’d gone in, I once again wondered what being friends with him would be like – I’d been wondering about it since two days ago – but I couldn’t exactly imagine it because of how closed off he was.
I let out a harsh breath and picked up my bag. I then texted Josie and Lenore to let them know I was going back to the dorm because I definitely wasn’t going to the pool room with Theo there before I made my way out of the recreation center.