Chapter 13 Chapter 13

Chapter 13 Chapter 13


The library on a Monday morning was the quietest place in Silver Ridge.

Too early for the lunch crowd, too late for the before-school rush. Just the hum of the heating system and the particular stillness of a room full of books that had been waiting patiently since Friday to be opened again. I had come here for a free period with the genuine intention of finishing the essay on The Great Gatsby that was due Wednesday.

I had my laptop open and my notes spread out and I had written one hundred and twelve words in forty minutes, which was approximately one hundred and twelve more than I had expected.

I heard him before I saw him. Not footsteps Jax moved quietly for someone his size, which I had noticed before and noted the way I noted everything about him without meaning to. It was something else. That same pressure change. That same shift in the quality of the air that happened when he entered a space I was in, as if the room recalibrated slightly around his presence.

He pulled out the chair across from me.

Sat down.

Did not ask permission.

"Free period?" he said.

"Essay," I said, without looking up from my laptop.

"Gatsby."

"How do you know?"

"Because you've had the same page open for ten minutes and you keep looking at the part about the green light." He settled back in the chair. "And you look like someone who relates to reaching for something she can't have."

My fingers paused on the keyboard.

I looked up then, because not looking up would have told him something I wasn't ready to give him. He was watching me with those flat, reading eyes, unhurried, direct, the kind of gaze that took things apart so methodically you didn't notice until the pieces were already on the table.

He was wearing a dark sweater, collar slightly pulled, and for one involuntary second my eyes went to his hands where they rested on the table, those hands, large and slightly rough, the ones I had felt in a dark corridor pressed warm against my mouth.

I looked back at my screen.

"Did you need something?" I said.

"No."

"Then."

"Nice necklace."

The sentence was light. Conversational. The tone of someone commenting on the weather.

My hand went to my throat before I could stop it, the automatic, revealing gesture, fingers closing briefly around the gold heart and I dropped it back to the keyboard immediately but we both knew. He had seen it. He had watched my hand move and he had filed it.

"Thank you," I said.

"Liam give it to you?"

My essay document blurred slightly at the edges.

"Yes," I said.

He nodded slowly. The way he nodded when he already knew the answer and was measuring the distance between what was true and what you were willing to say.

"When?" he said.

"Recently."

"Recently." He repeated the word, not mocking me, just holding it up to the light. "He mention anything else recently? Like the fact that he bought two of them?"

The heating system hummed.

Somewhere in the stacks, a book shifted on a shelf.

I held his gaze. I did not flinch. My fingernails were pressing into my palm under the desk and I held that sensation there, used it, let it be the thing that kept my face exactly where it was.

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said.

"Yes you do."

"Jax."

"You're wearing it to disguise your feelings." His voice stayed low. Even. Like we were discussing the essay. Like this was a perfectly ordinary Monday conversation. "Not because he gave it to you. Because you found both of them and you decided this one was going to mean something different than what he intended." He tilted his head, just slightly. "Am I wrong?"

The air between us felt thick.

I was aware of the distance across the table two feet, maybe less and how insufficient it was. He smelled like cedarwood and cold air and something else underneath both of those things, something that had no name but registered in the back of my throat, and I hated that I noticed it, hated the noticing with a particular fury that had nowhere useful to go.

"You're sitting in a library on a Monday morning making claims about my personal life based on a necklace," I said. Very controlled. Very even. "That's an interesting use of a free period."

"I find you interesting," he said simply.

"Find someone else interesting."

"I've tried." The corner of his mouth moved. Not a smile. Something more precise than a smile. "Doesn't work."

My nails were going to leave marks in my palm.

"You're dating my best friend," I said. The words came out harder than I meant them to, with an edge that revealed more than I'd intended, and I watched his eyes catch it and hold it before I could take it back.

"I know," he said quietly.

"Then act like it."

"I do act like it." His eyes didn't move from mine. "In every room that's not this one."

The sentence landed in the center of the table between us like something dropped from a height and neither of us looked away from the other while it settled.

In every room that's not this one.

I understood what he was telling me. I understood the precise, specific architecture of what those words meant and I felt them in my chest like a key turning in a lock I had been pretending didn't exist.

I closed my laptop.

"Stay away from me," I said. Not angry. Not pleading. Flat and final, the voice of a decision.

He didn't move. Didn't lean back or forward or give any ground at all.

"You don't want that," he said.

"Don't tell me what I want."

"Someone has to." He was quiet for a beat. "You've spent three weeks telling everyone, including yourself exactly what you don't want." His eyes dropped, just for half a second, to the gold heart at my throat. Then back to mine. "But you're wearing his lie against your skin as armor, and you looked at my hands the second you looked up, and your nails have been in your palm since I sat down." He stood up. "That's not a girl who doesn't want something, Princess."

He picked up his bag.

"That's a girl who's almost ready to stop pretending she doesn't."

He walked away between the stacks, and I sat in the chair with my laptop closed and my nails still pressed into
my palm and the gold heart cold against my throat and the smell of cedarwood fading slowly in the air where he had been.