Bully (Angel & Demons Trilogy Book 1)

by Ashley Love

  Her eyes are wide, and her face is red, and she has a half-chewed bite of cobbler just sitting in her mouth unfinished. She looks like she's in shock, and all at once I understand why I'm suddenly feeling overwhelmed. This is going to uproot Sophia's life even more than it already is. It's going to uproot my life, too.

  I've had an illusion in my head for years now. I've always thought—hoped—that one day my parents would quit their jobs, and they would come home, and the four of us would settle down somewhere in a permanent location, and we would live a normal life. But if my parents get divorced...that's never going to happen.

  Basically, I'm sitting here right now, trying not to listen to an argument that is ultimately going to crush any hope left of me and Sophia ever having any sort of normality.

  And I'm not sure if I can quite fathom that right now.

  I stare at the wall across the room, zoning out of the argument, only picking up a few words here and there like "his name is..." and "slut" and "adulterous bitch" and "that's uncalled for".

  So this is it. This is the end of my family. Funny how that works. One single argument can tear an entire structure apart. It's weird. And I feel every bit of it in the way my heart is suddenly slamming in my chest and my throat is constricting.

  I have no idea how long my mother and father just stand there shouting at each other, leaning over the table and forgetting about the fact that their children are sitting right there. When Dad reaches down in a fit of rage and picks up his plate of apple cobbler, throwing it across the room and smashing the entire dish against the wall, the room instantly falls silent. I snap out of my anxious daze and look up.

  My parents are standing there silently, glaring at each other, breathing hard like the argument was a work out. Sophia is sitting at her place with her mouth hanging open. Apple cobbler from Dad's plate slowly begins to drip down the wall where it hit, pooling on the floor in a sweet, sticky puddle.

  In the dead, awkward silence, the heater kicks on again, that signature car crash sound reverberating through the quiet house, and the whir of the air coming out of the vent above the doorway fills in the sudden hush.

  Nope. Nope, nope, nope. I can't stay here. I can't handle this. This is too much. I'm seeing carefully structured pieces of my life slowly falling away right now, like someone launching a nuke into a game of Tetris and shattering the symmetry of it all.

  Sophia moves first, and she stands up quickly from her chair and runs out of the room. Me and my parents stand there and listen to her run up the stairs and slam her bedroom door, and then a few seconds later, loud music starts to play. That's alright. That's how Sophia works out her problems. She drowns them in the latest horrible pop music from the radio.

  I generally run away from my problems and try to pretend like they don't exist.

  That sounds like a brilliant idea right now.

  I don't look at either of my parents as I stand, and I'm feeling a little disoriented with the sudden overwhelming turn my life has taken in the past five minutes. I turn, and calmly leave the house, walking out the front door into the icy stillness of Christmas night. The sky is heavy with swollen clouds that look like stacks of black eggs. It might snow later, but not yet. It's dark out, but the streetlamps on the side of the road light the way, and as soon as I step out the front door, I take off running.

  I don't know really where I'm planning on going, or even what I'm doing. I just know that I want to get away from my house. I want to pretend for a moment that the whole conversation at dinner didn't just happen. That Mom isn't having an affair. That my parents aren't getting a divorce. That my sliver of hope towards a normal life hasn't burned out. That there isn't apple cobbler dripping down the wall of the kitchen that I will more than likely have to clean up by myself later.

  I start crying somewhere between where I'm headed and where I'm coming from, and I have to stop running or I'm going to trip and fall because I can't see. Everything is dead quiet. That should help, but it doesn't, and I'm on the verge of panicking. This is so stupid. Why the hell am I crying?

  I feel faint—I'm breathing too hard. I need to calm down. The icy cold air burns as it slides down my throat into my heaving lungs, and my tears are freezing on my cheeks in shining tracks of frost. I realize belatedly that I don't even have my jacket, and wrap my pale arms around myself as if that will keep in the warmth.

  I look up after a while of just walking aimlessly, and somehow I've ended up at Hartley's Bend, and that just makes everything worse, because this is where me and Zane first met—or, at least, crossed paths. And I could really do without thinking about Zane Peterson right now while I'm dealing with my angry father and adulterous mother. And, oh God, I left Sophia alone with them.

  Great, a little bit of guilt at my selfishness to stack on top of the growing pile of shit my life is becoming. I know I'm being a little melodramatic. Parents get divorced all the time, and the world goes on.

  But these are my parents, and this is my life coming apart at the seams. And even if my parents are really never around, it still hurts.

  I drop down on my ass on the cold sidewalk next to the swing set, pulling my knees up to my chest and resting my forehead on them, fisting my hands in my hair to warm my fingers in the thick locks of brown. I close my eyes and try to pretend that this isn't how my Christmas is going, that I'm around some huge dinner table drinking egg nog instead and passing a honey ham from person to happy person like something straight out of Whoville.

  Instead I'm sitting at Hartley's Bend, crying pathetically.

  I sit there for God-knows how long.

  And then, there's someone approaching me from behind.

  I hear the footsteps and hopes that it's just some night owl taking a PM jog. Instead, the footsteps are coming towards me and slowing down the closer they get. I smell cigarette smoke next, and my heart leaps with butterflies at the same time that stomach sinks with dread.

  I know it's him even before I lift my eyes, sniffing loudly as I glance behind myself and see Zane fucking Peterson standing a few feet away in his big leather jacket, cigarette pinched between his thumb and forefinger. I just stare at him for a long moment, my tears silent and annoying, rolling in fat blobs down my cheeks.

  Zane doesn't have that look in his eyes that he gets when he's with his friends, the look that says that I should book ass in the other direction and hope I run faster than them. No, this time he has a confused sort of puppy look to him, and it makes me tear my eyes away, because I'd rather just pretend he's invisible. I don't need to deal with the way Zane's been looking at me for the past several weeks right now. It's messing with my head.

  I face forward again and ignore the smell of the cigarette, staring at the swings hanging stiff and unmoving in the frozen air. Zane's boots crunch a bit on the gravelly asphalt.

  "You know, if you keep going outside without a jacket, you're gonna get pneumonia," he says matter-of-factly, his voice low and rough and a little too loud in the dead silence of the park.

  I grit my teeth and say nothing. I don't really want to think about the last time I'd been outside without a jacket and encountered Zane. I'd rather not wake up tomorrow morning in a bathtub.

  When I don't reply, he shuffles a little, and then his footsteps are coming forward again. I hear rustling behind me at the same time as Zane's cigarette drops onto the asphalt next to my hip. I glance at it out of the corner of my eye as his boot stomps the glowing tip out, and then flinch perhaps too violently as he drapes something warm and heavy over my shoulders. His leather jacket.

  My forehead creases in confusion and I look back at Zane, finding him in just a black long-sleeved shirt and worn jeans. He plops down next to me on the sidewalk, bending his knees and resting his elbows on them, breath a cloud in front of his face as he sighs and looks over at me. We're entirely too close at the moment, but I restrain the urge to scoot away, or to lean in.

  "What are you doing?" I ask, my voice rasp
y and cracking embarrassingly with tears.

  Zane shrugs nonchalantly. "Had to get out of the house, figured I'd come here."

  I know that Zane comes to Hartley's Bend almost daily, so it isn't exactly weird to find him here. Subconsciously, maybe I knew that, and came here tonight out of instinct. And that's all kinds of fucked up.

  "No, I mean what are you doing?" I demand, staring at him even as he breaks the gaze and scans his green eyes across the empty park. I shift a little, and even though the warmth of the leather jacket feels heavenly on my cold goose-bumped skin, I begin to pull it off to give it back to him.

  We aren't friends—this isn't something a bully and his victim do. We don't hang out, we don't take each other's jackets. We don't help each other. No matter how much I like Zane.

  "Hey, whoa, whoa, keep that on," he says, reaching over and pulling the half-shed jacket back onto my shoulders. "Seriously, you're gonna turn into an icicle."

  I flinch just a little when Zane's hands come near me, and then I wish I wasn't such a fucking wimp. Zane seems to notice and grimaces a little, pulling his hands away the second he's sure I'm not going to try to take the jacket off again.

  I lower my eyes and stare at my torn up shoes, and even though Zane Peterson is right next to me, so close our shoulders are brushing together, and even though we're alone together in the middle of the dark, and we don't really know each other, it doesn't feel particularly awkward. We sit in silence for several minutes, and in those several minutes, my mind wanders back to the reason I'm out here in the first place.

  All at once I'm crying again, but it's so silent that Zane doesn't even notice until I sniff a little, surreptitiously reaching up to wipe a couple tears away from my cold face. He glances over.

  "Are you okay?" he asks, his voice a little quieter than before, like I'm some scared animal. It's the second time he's asked me that in the past week. Why is he being so nice?

  I shake my head, sniffing again and resting my chin on my knees, biting my bottom lip in an attempt to stop crying. God, I'm so pathetic.

  "What happened?" Zane implores.

  My eyebrows press together, and I look over at him. "Why do you care?" I ask, ignoring how stupidly weak my voice sounds muddled with tears.

  Zane stares at me with pursed lips, like he doesn't know the answer to that. He glances away for a few seconds, and then shrugs a little. "I guess I figured people shouldn't be crying on Christmas," he replies. "It's weird."

  I huff a little snort. "Well thank you for reminding me that I'm so weird," I respond, trying to swallow back more tears, scrubbing my face.

  "Come on, that's not what I meant," he reasons, scratching the back of his neck.

  I shake my head before Zane can go on, silently asking for him to drop the subject. He seems uniquely good at taking hints, so he doesn't say anything more. We sit in complete silence for a while, but it's so comfortable that I almost forget that me and him haven't really been alone that much together.

  But isn't this a good sign? That our silence is comfortable and not at all awkward? Isn't that a sign that we should be friends? I try not to think about that, but I can't help it. Zane is sitting right next to me, the heat of his body right there, and it's almost irresistible.

  He moves suddenly, and I glance over as he reaches down and fishes in the pocket of his leather jacket that's draped over my shoulders. He pulls out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, and places one cigarette between his lips, lighting it up skillfully before tucking the two items back into the jacket. I stare at him the whole time he does this, watching the way his full lips wrap around the filter like the cigarette belongs there.

  It's unbelievably hot, even though smoking honestly shouldn't be that hot.

  Zane seems to notice that I'm staring at him, and he looks over, taking a drag on the smoke and blowing it out of his nose like a dragon so he doesn't blow it right into my face.

  And then, he smiles.

  I just blink at him as he smiles at me. It's small, barely there, but it softens his whole face, and it makes me freeze up. This is the first time Zane's smiled at me. Cara assigned me to smile at him, and I have a couple times, but he's never smiled back.

  The smile doesn't last very long, but it makes everything in my body melt. And then he places the cigarette back in his mouth and looks away, taking another drag. The tip of the cigarette crackles almost inaudibly in the silence surrounding us, and he kind of stares at the glowing red embers for a moment with a strange look in his eyes.

  I just stare at him, for as long as I can before I feel like I'm being creepy. Then I force myself to look away and look at the forest behind Hartley's Bend instead, half expecting to see Elsa Hartley's ghost just hanging out there in one of the trees, because that's just the kind of weird night I'm having.

  "You ever heard the stories?" Zane asks suddenly, and I use him speaking as an excuse to look at him again.

  "What?" I ask. He's looking out into the trees as well.

  "All those stories about Hartley," he says. "Like the whole suicide thing?"

  I sniff, nodding. "My friends told me," I reply, and I realize that I'm not crying anymore. My voice is still scratchy, but there are no more tears falling from my eyes, to my relief.

  "Pretty crazy, huh?" Zane says, with another little smile. "It's like there's this whole back story that's just lost in time here."

  I wipe the remaining tears off my face, flexing my hands in the cold. "What do you mean?"

  Zane looks over at me again, and I have a hard time concentrating on what he's saying when those green eyes are right there and those lips are so close. Goddammit.

  "Try going anywhere else in the world, even Johnson or Stowe like 45 minutes away from here, and no one will know what you're talking about if you bring up Hartley," Zane says, as if it's just the craziest thing. "This whole tragic love story thing has just been lost in time."

  I just look at him for a second as he takes another drag on his cigarette, his big green eyes staring off towards the forest. His eyes look almost maroon in the darkness.

  "I guess it just goes to show how stuck we are here," he continues when I don't say anything. "You know? Like if a story that tragic gets lost in time here, imagine how stuck we are in Windsor Falls. It's like time just stops here."

  I feel a tingle in my chest, because Zane is just up and talking to me like we've been friends forever. And what he's saying is profound and inquisitive, and frankly, adorable. And I want to kiss him. God, I want to kiss him. He's sitting right next to me. All it would take for me to kiss him would be just leaning a few inches to the side and capturing those lips in mine.

  But I can't. Who knows how badly he would react.

  And then I remember why I'm here, and my whole stomach drops again, and I want to sit here and just be depressed and cry. And suddenly, it almost feels safe here with Zane. So I just say it.

  "My parents are getting a divorce."

  Zane sucks in another drag of his cigarette as he pulls his eyes away from the woods to look at me once more. He cocks his head to the side a little, blowing the smoke out from between his pale pink lips. "Sorry," he says, and it actually sounds surprisingly genuine. "That sucks."

  I don't usually talk about my problems to people. Ever. But something about Zane being here feels so safe, and I shouldn't feel that way because Zane is a dangerous guy. But I can't help it. It's like a magnetic pull I feel, to just melt into his presence and bask in it, to feel like nothing else matters in the world.

  And before I know it, I just keep talking.

  "My mom had an affair," I say. "And she just...told us at dinner like it was nothing."

  Zane pops an eyebrow. "Kind of a shitty thing to do on Christmas."

  I swallow and nod, looking back down at the toes of my shoes, hugging Zane's jacket tighter around myself. "My dad threw a plate at the wall," I continue, because I can't think of anything else to say about it.

&n
bsp; Zane surprises me by laughing, and I look back up at him.

  "What's so funny?"

  He lowers his eyes and shakes his head, chuckling a little. "Nothing, nothing," he says, waving it off and taking another quick drag on his smoke. "It's just...breaking dishes. I don't know, it's funny."

  I have no idea why that's funny, but seeing Zane laugh, seeing the tiny crinkles that form at the edges of his eyes, is so fucking endearing that I can't even find it in myself to mind that he's laughing about something dumb.

  It makes me feel a little better, to see him chuckling quietly to himself as he takes one last drag of his cigarette, and then stubs it out on the ground, flicking the filter away. But I still feel really low, and I can't make it stop. I'm trying to think of something else, but that nagging thought is still at the back of my mind, reminding me again and again that my family is going to split apart. My parents are both stubborn, so the divorce won't be easy. It will be full of arguments and custody battles and fighting over who gets to keep that stupid coat rack.

  I zone out staring at Zane's profile, and memorizing every detail of his face, because this is the closest I've ever been to him before, and all I want to do is forget about the divorce for a second. I notice a little scar on his cheek, and there's some faint bruising around his eye that looks a few weeks old. He has day-old stubble, and there's a tiny bump in his nose that might indicate that he broke it once. His lips aren't chapped at all, despite the cold, but that might have something to do with the fact that his pink tongue pops out every few minutes to lick them, leaving them shiny with spit.

  We sit there for another several minutes in just complete silence, and eventually he turns his head so he's looking back at me. He probably knows that I've been looking at him for a while, but I figure I'm entitled to stare for a bit, since he's been staring at me non-stop for weeks now in school.