Chapter Five
881 Words
"You didn't sleep."
Maya says it the second I drop into my seat in the lecture hall, because Maya has known me since we were eleven years old and she can read a sleepless night off my face from across a room.
"I slept fine."
"You're a liar and your eye bags are snitching on you." She flops into the chair beside me and pulls out a notebook she has no intention of writing in. "Talk. Right now. Is he being a d**k? Do I need to fight him? I'll lose, I'll lose badly, but I will absolutely do it for you."
I told Maya everything the day I moved in, which means Maya has spent eight days texting me variations of HE SAID WHAT and IS HE STILL HOT and ARE YOU GOING TO PRISON, and I have spent those same eight days lying to her by carefully leaving out the part where I am starting to understand why every girl in this school makes a complete fool of herself over Ace Calloway.
I last about ninety seconds.
"He almost kissed me," I say under my breath.
Maya's pen hits the floor.
"He WHAT."
"Keep your voice down, oh my God."
"Wren." She grabs my arm with both hands. "Wren. He almost kissed you. Ace Calloway. The drugs off the stomach guy. Your sworn nemesis. The reason you might literally go to prison. Almost. Kissed. You."
"And I let him get close enough to do it." I put my face in my hands. "Maya, I didn't stop him. He flat out told me to tell him to stop and I just stood there like an i***t and said nothing."
"Because you wanted him to do it."
"I hate him."
"Sure. Absolutely. You hate him." She is grinning now, awful and delighted. "You hate him so much you let him back you into a kitchen counter. You hate him so much you are sitting here actually glowing about it. Babe, I have known you since the fifth grade, and you have never once in your life glowed about a boy. You used to call them a waste of good homework time."
"It cannot happen, Maya. He's Mason’s best friend. Mason would lose his entire mind. Mason would genuinely kill him, and then I'd have no brother and no place to live."
"Okay, but hypothetically." She drops her voice low. "If he wasn't Mason’s best friend."
I do not answer her, because the honest answer is the kind of thing you do not say out loud in a nine a.m. lecture.
The text comes through that afternoon while I am pretending very hard to study.
Got my flight sorted. Home Sunday night. Tell Ace I'm bringing the good whiskey, we're celebrating.
Sunday.
Three days.
Three days, and my brother walks back into the city, and this whole thing, whatever it has turned into, the kitchen and the couch and the almost, all of it ends. It has to end. The math is not complicated. Mason comes home, I find a new place to live, and Ace Calloway goes back to being the worst thing that ever happened to me instead of the thing I cannot stop thinking about at one in the morning.
I should feel relieved.
I read the text three more times and feel the exact opposite of relieved, and that scares me more than anything Ace has said to me since the night I caught him.
He is on the couch when I get home, game tape running, and he does not look up, and for a second I think we are going to do the merciful thing and pretend Wednesday night never happened, which is exactly what I told him I wanted.
"Mason’s home Sunday," I say.
His jaw does something. He still does not look at me.
"I know. He texted me too."
"So this is almost over."
That gets him to look at me. And here is the thing about Ace Calloway that I am only now figuring out, after four straight years of hating his guts. When he actually looks at you, all the way, with none of the smirk and none of the show, it is the single most dangerous thing about him.
"Is that what you want," he says. It is not really a question. It is a dare.
I open my mouth to say yes. Obviously yes. Yes is the entire point.
Nothing comes out.
He nods slowly, like I have answered him anyway, and turns back to the TV.
"Go to bed, Cole," he says, quieter than before. "We've got three days left. Don't waste them standing there lying to my face."
I go to bed.
I lie there in the dark, in my nemesis's spare room, in the apartment I have to be out of in three days, listening to the low murmur of the TV through the wall and the sound of the man I am supposed to hate moving around out there in the dark, and I finally let myself think the one thing I have been running from since the night I caught him on that couch.
I don't want to go.
And that one stupid sentence is going to burn my entire life to the ground.
- Writer
