Chapter 82 Notice Me
Molly had not been sleeping well.
Her mother, on the other hand had not been making things easy for her. Since they returned from the mission, her mom had locked herself in the study doing God knows what in there, only occasionally coming out for a random book or another bottle of wine, sometimes two.
Molly had felt so guilty since the moment Grace had stepped out of the car, she wondered what she was up to now. She felt so bad about betraying her friend.
And even though it was the last thing on her mind, she decided to go to school as she couldn’t deal with all the emotions right now. She needed a somewhat noisy area.
Molly sat in third period with her chin propped on her hand and stared at the whiteboard without reading a single word on it, her mind running. Circling. Arriving at the same places and finding them just as unresolved as the last time she'd been there.
All those police officers were dead.
That was the part she couldn't move past. She'd watched the news with her mother the night Grace had disappeared into that camp, both of them sitting in the living room in silence as the reports came in. Officers down. Multiple casualties. An operation gone wrong in ways that the official statements didn't fully describe. Her mother had sat with her wine glass and gone very still, and for the first time since the kitchen conversation Molly had seen something crack in her mother's composure. Not guilt exactly. Something adjacent to it, the specific expression of a person reckoning with the distance between what they'd intended and what had actually happened.
They hadn’t heard from Ryan at all, and she hoped he was alright.
Her mind circled back to Grace again, already thinking of how to apologize if their paths crossed again.
The bell pulled her out of it.
She gathered her things on autopilot, moving with the rest of the class through the corridor. She let it carry her as far as the lockers and then stepped out of it, spinning her combination and pulling the door open, she stared into the locker without fully registering what she needed from it.
She needed her chemistry book. She stood looking at her chemistry book and thought about the police officers and thought about Grace and thought about her mother's face in the living room, and then she thought about what she was, apparently, which was a witch, which was something she had not had time to fully address because the week had not paused long enough for her to sit down with it properly.
She grabbed the chemistry book and closed the locker.
And then she did what she had been doing at least once per school day for the past two years without fully admitting to herself that she was doing it. She looked for Zion.
It was reflex at this point, the looking. It happened before the conscious decision to look, she had tried various times to stop doing it and had not succeeded, she couldn’t help it. Now, her subconscious thinks she would feel somewhat okay if she could just see his face.
Zion, whom she had known peripherally for years before she'd known what he was. Zion, who now occupied the uniquely complicated position of being her long-standing crush and also a werewolf, which was information that should have resolved the crush into something more manageable and had not.
She found him down the corridor.
He was standing with a group near the water fountain, one shoulder against the wall with both hands in his pockets, he took up space without even needing to try. Molly observed this from a distance and told herself she was simply walking in that direction because chemistry was that direction and not for any other reason, though she couldn’t help observe how his left brow raised when he listened to what his friend was saying.
She was perhaps ten feet from her turn-off when Zion looked up.
He looked directly at her. Like he had known she was there before she was fully in his sightline, which she now understood was probably exactly what had happened.
She kept her expression neutral and kept walking.
"Molly."
Her legs instinctively clenched, just his voice did that to her. And, it’s not like they haven’t spoken before, they’ve met in the library once or twice, each time he was sitting in a corner with his eyes closed while she studied a book, they had both acknowledged each other’s presence and coexisted.
Now, this was different, because he was talking to her. She stopped because the alternative was visibly ignoring him and she had enough dignity left not to do that. She turned and he was already moving toward her, closing the distance between them with unhurried ease.
He reached her and smiled, invading her personal space as he easily towered over her. It was the smile she had catalogued many times without meaning to, the one that did the thing it did to her pulse regardless of what she knew now.
“Tell me,” he began. “Do you love to watch people, Molly?”
The way he said her name had her stomach flipping in ways she didn’t believe it could.
“What?” Was the only response she could manage.
He laughed. The richness of it made Molly internally swoon as butterflies ran free in her stomach, some flying up to her head. Yet, she managed to maintain a stoic expression.
“Are you free tonight?" he asked.
Molly stared at him for a moment, internally going to crush each butterfly so she could think rationally.
She ran through the reasons to say no. There were several good ones. He was a werewolf, which meant this was probably not a casual invitation. Grace was missing and Zion was connected to the people who were looking for Grace. Her mother had told her to be careful around pack members. Several police officers had died three nights ago in connection with the world Zion was part of.
She tilted her head to the side as all those thoughts ran through her head.
"I am," she heard herself say.