by Callie Hart
“Okay, okay,” Ayala says—I can hear her broad, infectious smile in the tone of her voice. “Call me, Elodie.”
“I will.”
The line goes dead. I just lie there for a minute, staring up at the ceiling, feeling the pressure of the headphones in my ears, not willing to take them out and admit the call is over just yet. It went dark a long time ago. The tiny lamp by my bed casts a fuzzy orange halo on the ceiling, warped and stretched by the pitch of the ceiling’s uneven surface.
I will not check the time.
I will not check the time.
I won’t fucking do it.
A door slams a few rooms over, and a gaggle of high-pitched female voices ricochet off the corridor walls as a handful of my fellow classmates head off out together somewhere. I close my eyes, fidgeting on the mattress, which still feels too new and too hard and not broken in yet.
Take a look.
What’ll it hurt?
Knowing the time isn’t going to knock the planet off its axis, dumbass.
Just open your eyes, for fuck’s sake!
I relent, even though I don’t want to. The clock in the top righthand corner of my cell phone’s display reads seven forty-nine in the evening. Eleven minutes to eight. Wren’s probably walking up the driveway to the academy even as I’m lying here, moping around like some sort of friendless, hopeless, moronic loser. I get up, pretending to myself that I need to stretch, which is so pointless and stupid that I give myself a firm telling off in my father’s voice. I know perfectly well that I’ve gotten up to look out of the window and trying to convince myself otherwise is pure folly.
Frustration sweeps over me when I realize I can’t see the driveway from the vantage point my window offers. Only the maze, and the sprawling expanse of lawn is visible from the east wing of the house, which means I won’t be able to see if Wren’s on his way here or not.
He won’t come. He’s testing you. He wants to know if you’ll jump when he commands. You are not going up into that attic, Elodie Stillwater.
I don’t know why I’m repeating this to myself. I already know I’m not going up into the attic. I do have a little self-respect.
The clock on my phone updates: seven fifty-three p.m.
If I had my laptop, I could be watching re-runs of The Office right now. I could be doing some of my homework. I could spend five hours spiraling down a YouTube hole, watching videos about rescue dogs finding their furrever homes, and Adam Driver, and Timothée Chalamet, and fifteen hundred movie trailers promoting films I’m never likely to watch.
Hurling myself back onto my bed, I close my eyes, stacking my hands on top of my stomach. “God, this is so fucking stupid,” I mutter.
Vrrrn Vrrrrrrrnn. Vrrrn Vrrrrrrrnn.
I’m so startled by the powerful vibration that buzzes my ribcage that I nearly fling my phone out of my hands. My ears are full of the sound of rushing blood as I check to see who the message is from.
WREN: Don’t disappoint me.
And that’s all it takes. Suddenly, I’m livid. Just who the fuck does he think he is? Don’t disappoint him? He’s not my father. In actual fact, he’s no one to me. I owe him nothing. I definitely don’t have to worry about making him fucking happy. He can kiss my fucking ass.
Launching myself off the bed, I grab my hoody off the back of the door, jamming my arms angrily into the sleeves as I fly out of my room and down the hall, toward the cleaning closet by the bathrooms. I’m muttering under my breath like a crazy person when I reach the closet door, not caring if anyone hears the very colorful and highly offensive curse words that tumble out of my mouth.
The inside of the closet reeks of bleach and must. I breathe through my mouth as I flip over a steel mop bucket, standing on its dented base so I can reach the lip of the crawl space that leads to the attic. Curse my short ass; without Carina here to give me a boost, it takes three failed attempts before I manage to jump high enough to pull myself up using my upper body strength. I graze my knuckles and scrape my back in my haste to drag myself through the crawl space, telling myself that my hurry is all about my simmering rage and not my claustrophobia.
Finally, I reach the other side, huffing and puffing and spitting wads of dust out of my mouth, still cursing like a sailor. I slide from the crawl space without a lick of grace, landing with a hollow thud on the ancient, splintered floorboards of the attic.
“Wow. It’s like watching a fully grown, fully clothed person emerge from a birthing canal.” The voice, emanating coolly from the other side of the attic, doesn’t sound all that impressed by the miracle of birth. Rather, he sounds quite put out by it. I sit up, slapping the sleeves of my hoody, whipping up a cloud of dust that makes me cough.
“Fuck…you…Jacobi…” It’s all I can manage around the hacking and spluttering. A glass of water appears directly in front of my face. A glass. A real one. Cut crystal, with a pretty flower design etched into its surface. Where the fuck did he get this kind of a glass up here? Stunned, I look up, prepared to tell him that I’m not drinking out of a receptacle that’s been packed away in a travel chest for the past three decades, but then I see the thick pile of very new, very luxurious looking blankets on the floor, and the basket, and the wine, and the hundreds of candles that have been placed on top of every available surface, their flames flickering and waving as they work industriously to drive back the dark, and the words turn to ash on my tongue.
“What the fuck is—” I finally look up at Wren, my tongue suddenly seems too big for my mouth. Holy hell, he looks incredible. His hair’s perfectly messy, tumbling into his face. Black shirt, with actual buttons down the front, the top button of which is unfastened. His sleeves have been cuffed to his elbows, exposing muscled forearms. His jeans are faded and frayed at the heel, and the denim smells distinctly of laundry detergent. I know, because he’s standing so close to me that his knee is right in front of my face. Not that I’m smelling his freaking knee. That would be weird.
Wren smirks down at me, and an unbearable ache swells in my chest, all the way up to the base of my throat. I can’t fucking breathe around it. “What the fuck is this?” he asks, finishing my sentence for me. “This is what a Friday night attic date looks like. No need to look so horrified. I didn’t bring any weapons with me.”
“I wish I had,” I growl. “You’re delusional. You know that, right? This is not a date.”
Wren spins around, holding the glass to his lips and draining the water inside. I force my eyes to the ground, mortified by the fact that I don’t want to look away. He walks back to the cozy set-up he’s arranged, sinking heavily to the floor. He faces me, lounging back onto the blankets, toying with the glass in one hand. “What would you call it, then?” he asks. “Maybe…a war council? You wanna go to war with me, Little E?”
“I just want you to leave me alone. Is that so much to ask?”
Wren huffs down his nose, his gaze wandering around our cluttered, curious surroundings. “You don’t really want that, though, do you.” He states it—a raw, undeniable fact. “You daydream about my mouth on yours all the time. I can see it playing out in your head. It’s quite the show. You imagine what it would be like, trapped in a dark room with me, my hot breath in your ear, my sweat on your tongue, my dick rubbing up against your cunt, and you can barely sit still. And when you really lose yourself, you let your mind off its leash and you fantasize about what it would be like to have me actually inside you. You sit so very still, beautiful Elodie. So, so still. You don’t move a muscle, not even a twitch. You stare straight ahead, you don’t even dare to breathe, but I see your white knuckles and your pulse hammering away in the hollow of your throat. The way your eyelids shutter. The red shame that colors your cheeks when you’re done with me in your head.” He picks up the bottle of wine next to him and rips out the cork, holding the mouth of it to his lips. “It’s the most distracting, arousing, incensing thing I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen some shit, let me tell you.” He drinks, just as deeply
as when he just polished off the water a second ago. This time I force myself to make eye contact as he swallows once, twice, three times.
When he sets the bottle down, I get to my feet and slowly walk toward him. “You know what?” I whisper.
“What?” he whispers back.
“I wish I could pick up that bottle and smash it over your fucking head, Jacobi.”
“What’s stopping you?” He fires back the taunt so quickly, he must have known I was picturing that, too.
“Because I’m not insane. I don’t just go around assaulting people because I feel like it. I’m not a slave to my compulsions.”
“Shame.” Wren lets his head fall back; he looks up at me with a lazy, self-assuredness that makes me so angry I want to cry. “If you were, we’d have dispensed with this bullshit and fucked already.”
I curl my lip up at him. “Is that all you care about? Fucking me? If I gave in and let you have me, would you finally grow bored and move on to your next victim?”
“No.” He says it without surprise or condemnation. “I won’t ever be done with you. Just as you’ll never offer yourself up to me just to get me to leave you alone, sweet girl.”
“Don’t call me that. I’m not sweet.”
He laughs. “That’s the part I like the best. When was your last tetanus shot?”
“What?”
He points the bottle of wine at me. At my feet, specifically. “You forgot your shoes, Stillwater. I did my best, but it’s far from clean up here. You’re also bleeding from your hand.”
I look down, shocked to see my own bare feet against the floorboards. How the hell did I neglect to put shoes and socks on? Kicking and scrabbling my way through the crawlspace alone could have cut me to ribbons. Damnit, what the hell was I thinking?
That you wanted to kill the conceited asshole lying on the blankets in front of you, that’s what.
Urgh. I was in such a rush to get up here and tear him a new one that I wasn’t thinking at all. My knuckles buzz with pain as I clench my hand into a fist, inspecting the damage I did there. It’s not as bad as it could be—the gash isn’t that deep, but it definitely is bleeding. I pull my hoody sleeve down over the injury, covering it up with the cuff. “It’ll be fine,” I clip out. “It’ll stop in a minute.”
Wren’s sharp gaze flays me down to the bone. “Sit down, Elodie.”
“I will not. I only came up here to ask you who the fuck you think you are.”
“And once I tell you who I think I am, you’re gonna wriggle back into that crawlspace and disappear back downstairs?”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“Exactly. Okay. Well I think I’m the only guy in this godforsaken hellhole who you’ve looked twice at. I think I’m the guy you can’t stop thinking about. I also think I’m the only guy who’s ever made your heart race out of your chest. Am I wrong?”
I narrow my eyes to slits. “Yes.”
Using the wine bottle again, Wren points at me rudely. “You are completely incapable of telling the truth, aren’t you? That’s pretty sad.”
“I am telling you the truth.”
“Okay. Then deny all I’ve said. Tell me I’m wrong. You don’t imagine me. You’re not plagued by me day and night, the way I’m plagued by you. See, I have no problem with the truth. I made friends with it a long time ago. A lie only makes a fool of the liar. The truth always comes out. I am besieged by you, and it fucking sucks. You’re in my head when I wake up. You’re in my head when I wander around this wretched place, and you’re still there, tormenting the ever-loving shit out of my when I close my eyes at night. So, do it. Lie to me some more, Little E. Please feel free. But you’ll excuse me if I choose to get wasted while I settle in for the show.”
I wasn’t expecting this confession out of him. I’ve always thought him too proud and too arrogant to ever admit that he has a weakness out loud. It’s impossible to comprehend that I am that weakness.
Wren takes another drink, then spreads his arms wide, as if encouraging me to get on with it. He’s so fucking sure of himself. He’s so certain that he knows me. Knows precisely what I’m going to say. I don’t plan on living up to his expectations. “Fine. You’re right. I’m rotten and eaten up on the inside because of you. Is that what you want to hear? I let something spoiled and bad into my head, and now I can’t rid myself of it, and it’s festering away, driving me madder and madder by the day. Congratu-fucking-lations. I’m going against every ounce of common sense I own every damn day, and I’m making decisions I know are fucking stupid, and I can’t do anything about it! How fucked up is that!”
If I were back in Tel Aviv, this wouldn’t be a problem. None of it. Colonel Stillwater’s foreboding presence would have nipped this bullshit in the bud the day I arrived here. I wouldn’t have been weak enough to let my head run away with these thoughts, and Wren…well, let’s face it, Wren would probably be dead by now. My father would have cottoned on to what he was doing and the guy would have mysteriously wound up in pieces, scattered along the embankment of a fucking highway in black garbage bags.
He drums his fingers against the side of the wine bottle, shifting so that he’s lying on the welter of blankets now instead of sitting. His shirt’s risen up, exposing a few inches of bare stomach, and my chest pinches tightly. I’m the worst kind of addict. I know precisely how bad he is for me, and yet I can’t stop myself from craving more. I had my first taste of him in the gazebo during the storm, the memory of his naked torso’s been driving me to distraction ever since, and now I want that shirt he’s wearing gone. I want it fucking gone, and I hate myself for it. Where’s all of the self-control my father taught me? And the common sense?
Like a sated cat, basking in a patch of sunlight, Wren closes his eyes, resting one hand on his solar plexus. “Was that so painful?” he murmurs. “Sit down, E. You have questions for me.”
“I don’t. I—” For fuck’s sake. Why is it so hard to be straight with him? I have a million questions, and I’m dying to know the answers to all of them but sitting on that blanket is inviting a kind of trouble into my life that I don’t need. “Whatever questions I have are irrelevant. The answers aren’t going to change anything,” I tell him. I’m beginning to feel a little hopeless now. This situation’s miserable; I’d give anything to get myself out of it, but the bitter irony of it all is that I’d also do anything to have him.
He’s the bad guy. The monster that crawls out of the shadows to hurt and maim those around him. Nothing good can come of him. But fighting this attraction I feel for him seems so futile and pointless that my will no longer feels like my own. I’m his prisoner, and Wren Jacobi is not a benevolent jailer. He’ll keep me under his lock and key until he’s bored of me, and I get the impression that his obsessions are for life.
“What harm can it do?” he murmurs. “You speak. I speak back. It’s a conversation, Elodie. It won’t fucking kill you.”
My heart is a sharp-edged lump of rock. It refuses to beat as I step onto the blanket, the thick woven material soft on the soles of my feet, and I lower myself down into a seated position. Wren smiles to himself and my temper spikes. “I don’t know why you’re grinning. You haven’t won anything. Don’t go marking your score card yet, Jacobi.”
Instead of squashing his smile, my annoyance only encourages it to grow in size. “I’m not keeping track of points. And the only thing I’m interested in winning—”
“God, don’t even say it,” I interject. “Do not. It’ll only make me hate you more.”
He opens his eyes, watching me askance, his lips slightly parted. Both his eyebrows shoot up, and I know he’s going to finish his ridiculous sentence. “—is your trust.”
“When I was six, I stayed up every night, waiting for Peter Pan to fly through my window. I waited every night for him to come take me away. I wanted fairy wings, and a beautiful dress, and I wanted to escape with him to Neverland. Guess what? It didn’t happen. I grew up and I realized it was dumb to wish for things
that were impossible. You should probably do the same.” My tone is so thick with sarcasm that it feels oily and uncomfortable coming out of my mouth. I’ve never spoken to anyone like this before. Honestly, I don’t like how it makes me feel.
Wren rolls onto his side, his brows crimping together. He props his head up with his hand. “Have you stopped to question why you harbor this kind of negativity toward me, Stillwater? I mean, really asked yourself why?”
“I know why. You’re an arrogant fuck boy with no conscience who terrorizes the people of this academy without a second thought.”
“And you have proof of this?” he asks evenly. “You’ve seen it with your own two eyes?”
“Are you serious? You’re being serious right now?”
He nods.
“Well. Let’s see. You dumped a load of rotten meat in my desk. It smelled like rotten meat, anyway. And you threatened Tom when he didn’t want to manipulate me into giving him my phone. And you broke into my room—”
“You know I didn’t do that.”
“I know you did,” I argue.
He shrugs a shoulder, laughing bitterly under his breath. “What else do you know?”
“I know that—I know that you—you’re—” Ahhh, fuck.
“You know that Carina doesn’t like me. She’s been your primary source of information about me, right? And she’s so wounded over Dashiell slighting her that she’d hate me and Pax along with Lord Lovatt no matter what. What else?”
“Just because I haven’t experienced you being a dick firsthand doesn’t mean that it’s not true.”
“So, I put a couple of frog’s legs in your desk. I’ll admit, that wasn’t very nice. I apologize for it. And I’m sorry I threatened Tom. I’m not very good with people sometimes.”
“No shit. That has to be the understatement of the century.”
