Adrian
The night air should have helped.
It didn’t.
The front door slammed shut behind us, muting the music to a dull, relentless thud. Evangeline stepped onto the porch beside me and folded her arms across herself as the cold caught at her bare skin. For one brief, irrational second, all I could see was Jasper’s hand on her hip.
I looked away before the memory became something worse.
The porch was crowded with students smoking, laughing, and shouting over one another. None of them paid us much attention. To them, nothing significant had happened inside. One man had pushed too far. Another had intervened. The girl had left.
An ordinary scene at an ordinary college party.
My fingers still remembered the bones beneath Jasper’s wrist.
I descended the steps without speaking. Evangeline
