“I didn’t say I don’t love you. But it’ll be horrid being around you all day—”
“Yeah, yeah. You feel bad for the guy. I heard you the first time,” I interrupted before he could stick his foot any further into his mouth.
“When you’re with someone else,” he finished with a smirk.
Okay, so his remark wasn’t the catastrophe I thought it would be. I smiled and kissed him on the cheek. The teacher looked at us and cleared his throat. I blushed. Chay ducked his head, looking at me through his dark lashes.
Geez, he’s gorgeous. If he only knew Xavier has nothing on him.
When class ended, I pushed my things into my book bag and left it lying on the table. I didn’t even try to pick it up anymore. Chay carried it to and from my classes for me. He wouldn’t let me touch it. I’d given up arguing with him. I decided I’d become an independent woman’s rights activist after high school. During school, I was going to let him do all the heavy lifting and door opening I could.
I turned around and faced Xavier. My breath hitched in my throat. His eyes were such a piercing shade of crystal blue. I’d never seen eyes so… sparkly before.
Focus, Milayna.
“What’s your next class? We’ll walk you,” I said.
“Oh, ah.” He flipped open a folded piece of paper and scanned it. “AP calculus,” Xavier answered. He even had a great voice. No wonder all the girls were drooling.
“With Ms. Morzetti?”
He looked at his schedule again before answering. “Yeah.”
Chay groaned. I elbowed him in the ribs.
“That’s our next class, too. Let’s go. Her class is on the other side of the building.”
Chay and I went directly to our assigned seats when we entered the classroom while Xavier stopped at the teacher’s desk to check in and receive his seat assignment.
“Who’s he?” Muriel asked, eyeing Xavier.
“New guy. Xavier.”
“I want one.”
I laughed out loud. “You and every other single girl in the school.”
“Probably some not-so-single girls, too. What’s he like?”
“He seems nice, I guess. I haven’t been around him long enough to know.” I shrugged a shoulder.
“Does Chay know him?”
I almost started laughing at her question since Chay was already in the Anti-Xavier Fan Club. In fact, he was the president and founding member. “No, why?”
“You three walked in together.”
“Oh, Mr. Ferguson asked me to show Xavier around today. That’s all.”
“Some girls get all the luck,” Muriel muttered and pulled her homework out of her binder, passing it forward.
As it turned out, I would have been lucky… if I’d been interested in Xavier. He shared five out of seven classes with me. Thankfully English, which I shared with Chay, wasn’t one of them. I wasn’t up for the jealous boyfriend thing. He was acting possessive enough knowing Xavier and I had so many classes together. Not that it mattered. My heart belonged to Chay, no matter how sinfully gorgeous and sexy Xavier was. And he was all of those things and a bag of chips.
***
My stomach twisted painfully and my head started to pound like someone dropped an anvil on it, like in cartoons. A vision. That was how they started. My duty as a demi-angel was to protect humans—a demi-angel was the child of an angel and a human. When I was able to step in and change a situation, to right a wrong, I had to. I had no control over the urge, and I couldn’t fight it. The visions were something else I had no control over. They came whenever and wherever I was. Sometimes, I’d go days without having one. Other times, I’d have three or four in a day. I never knew what my day would hold. It made scheduling a bitch.
That day, I was on number two. The sights and sounds of the students in the hallway faded and were replaced by images of things that hadn’t happened yet.
Sela. Tears. Falling.
Sela. I could see her face clearly in my mind. She was crying as she ran up the stairs, her heavy books in her hands making her unsteady. She was going to slip and fall on the wet tile. I could see blood seeping onto the step beneath her. The images ran in front of my eyes like a slide show. I could see everything before it happened—I had to step in and stop her before she got hurt.
Water. Falling. Blood.
“Sela,” I called.
She kept going. The vision didn’t change.
“Sela. Wait up.”
She stopped and looked at me. Her face red and eyes swollen from crying. “What?”
“Don’t take those stairs. They were just mopped. See?” I pointed at the yellow ‘Wet Floor’ sign.
“Crap.” Fresh tears fell from her eyes, and she swiped them with the back of her hand. I held out a tissue and she took it, giving me a small smile. “Thanks.”
“You want to talk about it?”
“Just guy stuff. John dumped me in history class. A little ironic, huh? Dumps me in history… we’re history.”
John’s a jerk. I never knew what you saw in him in the first place.