I glanced back over at the Seymores’ table to see if they had calmed down at all, and was only mildly surprised to see the two youngest ones gone.
Thinking nothing of it, or of the tense looks on the older guys’ faces, I half-listened to Joan and Macy gossip about some cute exchange student in their French class.
And that was when the big bowl of chili crashed in the middle of our table, its Styrofoam sides splitting with the force of the impact, splattering all four of us with pungent red sauce.
“Oops,” Gary said behind us. “My bad. Darn that feral upbringing.”
I hid a smile behind the napkin I was using to wipe my face and inadvertently met Rudy’s eye. Remembering that he was the one to hear those remarks first-hand, shame drove the humor out of me. I dropped my eyes quickly and went about getting as clean as possible.
After dropping my tray off, I made a quick stop by the bathroom. There was only so much a dry napkin could do to get rid of chili. Not that I was drenched in the gunk, just sticky enough that I could feel it on my cheeks every time I forced a smile.
Inside the bathroom, I washed my hands and splashed my face with water cold enough to chill my molars.
For reasons that I didn’t quite try to decipher, I avoided looking myself in the eye.
By the time the first bell rang, I’d washed off most of my makeup, but lacked the time to replace it, not that I was complaining. Every once in a while – despite what Julianne might have thought – pores needed to breathe.
Throwing my backpack over my shoulder, I took the small hike through the hallways and pushed my way into the classroom.
Rudy, Bradley, and Joan were all in my Spanish class. Joan was already seated, next to the free desk that was reserved for me.
For the first few minutes there wasn’t much talking going on. We listened to instructions, jotted down notes before finally being paired up to practice our conjugations. It was hard, though, to focus on what I was meant to be focusing on.
For reasons unbeknownst to me, my focus kept drifting to the Seymore boys.
Rudy spoke the language like a native, his pronunciations as close to spotless as spotless could get. Bradley, on the other hand, couldn’t roll his Rs to save his life.
I expected Rudy to give him shit for it, but all I heard from their side of the room was humor and a whole lot of patience.
“Don’t tell Julianne or Macy I said so,” I said quietly to Joan, indicating the Seymores with a tilt of my head. “But they seem almost human in here.”
Joan’s eyes widened. “I definitely won’t tell her you said that,” she snapped back, her voice serious. “And you probably shouldn’t say anything like it ever again.”
I wanted to push – her buttons, boundaries, my peace, but the teacher called on me then and I had to think fast. I fumbled through the rest of class, distracted.
Joan’s reaction had bothered me. Julianne had always held a grudge when it came to the Seymore boys, but now, it was starting to seem more and more personal. So much so that she was practically driving fear into everyone around us. And I know, Joan’s reaction could have very well been the repercussions of the whole Ouija board thing. Somehow, though, it didn’t seem that way.
Spanish class continued and ended without me mentioning the Seymores again.
My last class of the day was music, which I looked forward to almost as much as track.
I’d been taking voice and guitar lessons for years, and the music was almost as freeing to me as running was. Or it would have been, if Rudy and Julianne hadn’t also been taking that class.
Anxiety clutched at my core and for a second I fervently wished that I was back in a huge, anonymous school with huge, anonymous classrooms again.
Yolinda—the music teacher, who insisted on us calling her by her first name—had flowing lavender hair down to her waist and wore layers of silks and loose knits which swirled and dripped around her as she moved. She was a powerful presence who somehow managed to slip by the parental calls for “professionalism in the workplace.”
“She thinks she’s a witch,” Julianne giggled to me. She might have dropped her voice, but the music room was designed to carry sound.
I saw Yolinda’s shoulders stiffen slightly, but she didn’t turn around to say anything to Julianne.
“Better than being a bitch,” a low, masculine voice rumbled.
Julianne whirled around, eyes blazing, until she spotted Rudy in the corner. He was tuning his guitar, but his flat, menacing gaze was focused on Julianne.
“Oh look at that, Kennedy,” Julianne sneered. “A monkey who knows how to hold a guitar. Do you think they taught him that in the circus?”
The way he was sitting, I would have no choice but to walk past him to get my own guitar, so I didn’t say anything in response. Fortunately it didn’t seem like Julianne needed a response, as she tossed her hair and stalked past him toward the music lockers. Her violin sat in one of the smaller lockers, at the far end of the row, while my guitar was right behind Rudy’s left foot. He couldn’t have known that—could he?
“All right, ladies and gents and everybody in between, let’s get this ball rolling, shall we?” Yolinda said, smiling brightly. Her sky-blue eyes flicked once in Julianne’s direction, but didn’t linger. “If you don’t have your instruments in hand, please get them now. We’ll start things off with a little tune up, and then you’ll each get the chance to show me your skill level.”
Great. There was no way around it. I took a deep breath and strode across the room, my soft shoes making dull thuds on the shining oak floor. My heart picked up as I approached him, but I kept my eyes locked firmly on the locker. Too firmly. I was only a few feet from it when I tripped over his outstretched ankle, stumbled, and landed with a loud bang on the metal locker.
“Watch it,” he growled.
“No roughhousing around the instruments!” Yolinda snapped.
I wondered briefly if she would allow roughhousing away from the instruments, but I wasn’t about to ask. I mumbled a general apology, still without looking at Rudy, and pulled my guitar out of the locker with clumsy fingers.
“Great! That’s everybody. I’m going to organize you by instrument until I have a better feel for you. Oboe, you come over here, cello there, drums…” she kept calling out instruments and grouping their players together, but I stopped listening. I was going to be stuck sitting with Rudy—just Rudy, since we were the only two with guitars.
“…and guitar, there. Good! Now, you, um…Kennedy, why don’t you start? Play something for me, anything you’re comfortable with. The more proficient the better, but don’t be afraid to get a little creative with it.” She grinned and winked at me.
My anxiety was convinced that this was her way of getting back at the students who were talking shit about her. Even though I hadn’t said anything, Julianne had very clearly implicated me as an accomplice.
I swallowed hard, looking away from Rudy, whose eyes were burning into my left cheek. I strummed a chord—a bad chord – and shot Yolinda an apologetic look before hurriedly trying to tune my guitar.
“Let that be a lesson to always keep your instruments in tune,” Yolinda said primly, confirming my earlier suspicion. “Rudy, we’ll hear from you first while Kennedy gets herself together.”
My face burned and I focused hard on what I was doing. I fought to keep my ears on my own strings, but it was no use. Rudy played with the gentle heat and sweet spice of Carlos Santana, if not the speed.
His music filled the room, folding back on itself as it hit the corners, enriching the tune until it was something magical.
I looked over at him in spite of myself. Where the brutal, menacing creep should have been was a beautiful tanned boy, pouring his heart and soul into the guitar.
His face was peaceful, relaxed, except for the instances where his brow would furrow with feeling or his mouth would tighten, then soften, with the music.
When he was finished, he looked up at Yolin
da blandly.
“Satisfactory?” he asked into the still silence.
Yolinda blinked, then tilted her head in thought. “Satisfactory,” she agreed. “For now.”
He nodded as if he hadn’t expected any other response.
I gaped.
He was better than a lot of the professional guitarists I’d heard, an artist through and through.
I had been half expecting Yolinda to fall all over herself and find him a producer or something. She glanced at me and I realized that I still hadn’t finished tuning my strings. I went back to it, pretending that Rudy’s performance hadn’t paralyzed my entire being.
She frowned at me, then turned to Julianne. “You can go next,” she said.
Julianne told me once that she was born with a bow in her hand, but I’d never heard her play before now.
She did things with the bow that I couldn’t quite understand, drawing music out of a beast that had never done more than scream for me. Her notes were precise, her tremors exquisite—but whatever had given Rudy’s performance its hint of magic was missing from hers.
Yolinda nodded. “Very good. Very promising.”
She went around the room away from me, giving me time I didn’t need. I’d finished tuning my instrument before Julianne had finished, but maybe Yolinda was just sick of looking at me.
Every student in her room was proficient, some of them were good, but none of them held a candle to Rudy. It shook me to my bones.
Who could have imagined that this outcast bully would have an artist’s heart?
Finally, Yolinda made it back around to me. I played a song one of my nannies had taught me a long, long time ago. She said it was a Celtic lullaby, but not the one called Celtic lullaby.
It was complicated enough to impress and simple enough to do properly, but mostly I just loved it. It was comfort to me, a leftover scrap of someone giving a shit about me that I clung to in my darkest moments.
When I finished, Yolinda’s expression toward me had softened, but only a little.
“Satisfactory. Room to grow.”
I dared a look at Rudy, whose eyes were glittering with an expression I couldn’t read. His full attention was on me, though, which—well, I shouldn’t have liked. But after watching him weave love with his guitar, I was having a hard time disliking it.
I forced myself to look away and caught Julianne’s eye.
She was staring too.
All ice.
All fury.
Chapter Eleven
“What the hell was that?” Julianne demanded as we walked out to our cars. The tension that drifted off of her could have choked an entire nation.
“Music class,” I told her, shrugging my shoulders as though the mood was feather light.
“You know what I’m talking about. You and Rudy had a moment. I saw the way you were looking at him while he was playing.” She wrinkled her nose in disgust. “Circus music for the circus monkey. Yours was way better. I couldn’t see his face, but I hope he was glaring at you. Damn it, I wish you didn’t play the same stupid instrument. I’m not sure you’re ready for that kind of frontal attack, Kennedy.” She frowned thoughtfully, looking for all the world like one of the generals out of an oil painting. Well, a female version anyway.
“I can hold my own,” I said dismissively.
I knew asking what she meant by frontal attack would just lead me down a rabbit hole and I would end up playing as a pawn in one of her convoluted schemes.
She was still looking thoughtful, so I pulled out my phone and pretended that I had something important to check.
“Dad’s going to call this afternoon, and he likes to make sure the house is still in one piece when he does,” I told her.
It wasn’t exactly a lie. Dad could call this afternoon, or any other time he wanted to—and he usually did ask to take a look around the house. Usually after one of his friends or coworkers reminded him that teenagers liked to hold out-of-control parties.
But it got me away from her before she could suggest something I couldn’t figure out how to refuse.
I drove toward home, but I didn’t stop there. I had too much on my mind to sit around and do nothing and too many rebellious thoughts and feelings to trust myself around any of the girls.
If Julianne even suspected how restless I was getting under her thumb, she would cut me loose.
I couldn’t risk it.
Not with knowing just how much of a brutal bitch she was to those who betrayed her.
My Dad was a lot like Julianne, though I hadn’t realized it until that moment. Sensitive and insensitive in equal measure with a sullen and sudden temper.
But they were also both charming and charismatic, commanding attention, respect, and obedience through the power of their presentation.
They held that same air, an atmosphere around them that made you feel like they could give you life or take it away on a whim—but you did what they said because you wanted to, not because you were afraid.
Because they wanted you to want to.
Because showing fear would hurt their feelings, and if you hurt their feelings you were the villain by default.
Because how could one so beautiful, so charming and magnanimous, gracious enough to give you the time of day, ever be frightening?
The road blurred in front of me and I wiped my eyes. Tears of frustration, I told myself, because being able to see the game they played didn’t mean I knew how to extract myself from it.
“No,” I disagreed with myself out loud as I left the suburbs behind for the grey stretch of asphalt set timidly against a tangle of wilderness.
The river was just around another bend, and an old concrete bridge would take me over the deepest, narrowest part. “I do know how to extract myself. From her at least. It’s my father that I’m stuck with. But Julianne—all it would take is honesty. If I told her straight to her face that I didn’t like what she was doing, and that I was no longer willing to be a pawn in her game, she would cut me off cold.”
I frowned, thinking about it a little longer, and shook my head.
“No, no she wouldn’t. She would argue with me. She would make me think I was crazy, and sucker me into one of her plots. One of those ridiculous and probably illegal ones, the kind I wouldn’t want getting back to my parents—or anyone else whose opinion might matter.”
Problem was, I couldn’t think of anyone else whose opinion mattered to me.
My parents barely even hit my radar anymore. They had shown me, time and time again, that they didn’t much care what I did, as long as I didn’t embarrass them in a way that couldn’t be spun into a funny story for their clients to bond with them over.
The school at large, as its own entity—maybe. Other than that, there really was nobody who cared. Nobody to impress and nobody to disappoint.
I crossed the bridge and all of its “swimming prohibited” signs and let the road dictate my path from there. It was ranch land over here, and every once in a while, a bit of pavement would pop up on the side opposite the river. Most of them had cattle grates, and all of them ended in dirt or steel gates.
I never really had a thing for cowboys, but sometimes it was exciting to watch a herd of cattle get moved from one place to another. They were so big and loud and looked so clumsy that I always held my breath, expecting them to crash over each other.
Kitty May used to love watching the cowboys work. Still did, probably, assuming they had cattle ranches in Alaska.
I had to keep reminding myself that she really wasn’t dead.
Before any of us could drive, she used to talk us into going for long walks over here just so she could watch the ranchers work. I’d enjoyed her company.
I wondered if Julianne would use me as a weapon against her enemies if I ever moved suddenly—and knew right away that she would.
Ranches gave way to houses, some of them new, some of them very old. I liked the old ones the best. They had the most character, and most of them had deep s
unlit cellars and huge old trees.
I followed the winding, branching, unplanned roads until I was thoroughly lost, but even then, I kept going. I could always find my way back home, using the river as my guide.
I ended up on a street that bordered the thick, dry forest on one side and seemed to end in a cul-de-sac. At the end of the road, a familiar sprawling, organic-looking house stood proudly over a tangle of growth which, in the daylight, was obviously deliberately cultivated.
I slowed as I passed the house. I could hear shouts and loud pops that I couldn’t immediately identify. My gut was telling me that everything was fine—but loud noises at the Seymore house were worth investigating anyway.
I pulled off onto a wide patch of dirt next to the forest. The Seymores’ cul-de-sac wasn’t really a cul-de-sac.
The road I had come down was set at a right angle to the one Julianne had used to show me the place. But there wasn’t a streetlight to be seen, and between the dark forest and the tall shrubs around the last house on this block, you would only find this street in the dark if you already knew it was here.
“Just going for a walk in the woods,” I told nobody in as casual a voice as I could manage. It wasn’t very casual. Not with two years of battle under my belt.
It felt very much like I was sneaking up on an enemy encampment. But it also felt a lot like stalking a crush.
Not that I had a crush on Rudy. It’s just that his playing had had more of an effect on me than I wanted to admit. More than it should have. More than… God, it made me feel something for the first time in a very long time. It made me stop. Made time stop. And most of all, it made me curious.
I slipped through the trees as quietly as possible until I was standing on a ridge overlooking the Seymores’ backyard and the reservoir beyond. And that’s when another pop echoed through the air. It wasn’t as scary as I imagined the pop of a gunshot would be, but it still caused me to startle.
I shifted my eyes in the direction of the sound and smiled.
Them Seymore Boys: An Enemies to Lovers Bully Romance (The Seymore Brothers Book 1) Page 6
