Chapter 9 Chapter 9

Chapter 9 Chapter 9


The bonfire was Derek Chen's idea.

End of January, back field behind the school, the kind of event that wasn't officially sanctioned but wasn't officially stopped either because the teachers had long since accepted that Silver Ridge students were going to gather in fields and make fire regardless of what the handbook said. Someone brought speakers. Someone always brought speakers.

I had almost stayed home.

I had been almost-staying-home a lot lately — constructing reasons, testing excuses, holding them up to the light to see if they were convincing enough. But Chloe had texted at six-thirty with please come I need my person there and I had put on my coat and gone because I was her person and that was not something I knew how to stop being.

The fire was big. It pushed warmth into the cold air in waves and made everyone's faces glow amber, which was flattering and disorienting and made the whole field feel slightly outside of real life. People stood in loose circles, cups in hand, the specific end-of-week looseness that came when Silver Ridge students were temporarily off-duty from performing Silver Ridge students.

I found the group near the right side of the
Leo and Mika were sharing a blanket, Leo talking with his hands about something I caught the tail end of. Maya was there, standing slightly apart, watching the fire. Chloe was—

I found Chloe.

She was on the other side of the fire, her yellow jacket bright in the dark, her head tilted slightly toward Jax who was standing close enough that their shoulders were almost touching. She was talking. He was listening with that particular quality of attention he had — the kind that made you feel like the only moving thing in a still world.

Her head dropped to his shoulder.

Small. Natural. Like it had been there before and knew the way.

Something moved through my chest — not the slow pressure from the bleachers, not the splinter from the sleepover. Something quicker and hotter that I felt in my hands before I felt it anywhere else. My fingers tightened around my cup.

Stop looking.

I looked at the fire instead.

I watched the flames for approximately ninety seconds before my eyes moved on their own and found Liam.

He was ten feet to my left, standing with two of his teammates, laughing at something. Normal. Easy. Golden in the firelight the way he was golden everywhere.

And then — the way things happened at bonfires, the way you caught things at the edges of your vision that you weren't supposed to see — he looked across the fire.

Not at me.

At Madison Clarke, standing on the opposite side, red cup in hand, watching him back.

It lasted three seconds.

A look that had a whole language inside it — history and arrangement and the specific intimacy of two people who knew each other in ways I had chosen not to acknowledge for months.

Three seconds.

He looked away. She looked away. Both of them moved back into their separate conversations like nothing had punctuated them.

My cup crumpled slightly under my hand.

I set it down on the nearest flat surface — a cooler lid, someone's bag, I didn't check — and I walked. Not toward the fire, not toward the group. Toward the outer edge of the field where the bonfire light got thin and the dark filled in the spaces between people.

I needed sixty seconds of no one watching my face.

I got forty-five.

"You're doing the thing."

I turned.

Jax was standing three feet away, hands in his jacket pockets, the fire behind him making his face half shadow. He had followed me or arrived here separately — I didn't know, I hadn't heard him — and he was looking at me with those flat, reading eyes that never gave me any warning before they took something apart.

"What thing?" My voice came out harder than I meant it.

"The thing where you hold everything in so tight your jaw goes white." He tilted his head slightly. "You've been doing it since you got here."

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine."

"You don't know me well enough to tell the difference."

Something shifted in his expression. Not offense. More like interest — the kind that sharpened rather than softened. "I know you better than you think, Princess."

The name. That name. It detonated in my chest the way it always did and I was so tired of it detonating and I had three weeks of Madison's placeholder and Chloe's window and sleepover reports and invisible treatment sitting directly behind my sternum like a physical object and it all came out of me at once before I could sort it or shape it or make it safe.

"Don't." My voice was sharp. "Don't call me that. Don't do the thing where you act like you see me and you know something the rest of us don't. You don't get to look through me for three weeks and then follow me to the dark part of a field and act familiar."

The silence after it was wide and very still.

Jax looked at me. Not surprised. Not defensive.

Waiting.

"You were fine ignoring me," I said, lower now, the sharp edge bleeding into something more honest and therefore more dangerous. "At practice you looked right through me. In Lit you say one word and then nothing. You want to act normal? Fine. Be normal. Stop—" I stopped. Pressed my lips together. "Just stop making it— inconsistent."

His jaw moved slightly.

Then he said, quietly and completely: "You told me I wasn't your type, Princess."

The fire crackled behind him.

"I'm just giving you exactly what you asked for." His eyes didn't move from mine. "You made it very clear. In front of everyone, multiple times. You don't want my attention." A pause — half a beat, no longer. "Don't get mad now that your best friend is smarter than you."

The last sentence arrived without cruelty. That was the thing that made it land hardest — it wasn't a weapon. It was just a fact, delivered evenly, like something he had decided a long time ago and was only now saying out loud.

I had nothing.

Not a word. Not a deflection. Nothing in my carefully maintained arsenal of responses covered this particular sentence delivered in this particular voice in this particular dark field while the fire glowed thirty feet away and Chloe's yellow jacket moved somewhere in the amber light.

Jax held my gaze for one more second.

Then he stepped back, turned, and walked back toward the group without looking over his shoulder.

I stood in the thin dark at the edge of the field.

The f
ire was still going. Loud and bright and completely indifferent.

“Your best friend is smarter than you.”