“Baby, look at me.” He grabbed both sides of my face. “Are you okay?”
“Of course I’m not okay. Isabella is trying to freaking ruin my life. She wants you to leave me. She said she was going to turn everyone against me. I can’t handle being on edge all the time. I feel like I’m about to lose my mind.”
“Isabella can do whatever the fuck she wants. But she’ll never tear us apart. And she’ll never break you down. Do you hear me?”
I nodded. I wanted to believe him. But Isabella was hellbent on ruining us. On ruining me. And it wasn’t a fair game. Instead of fighting fire with fire, I’d stopped fighting altogether. I swallowed hard.
“Are you sure you can breathe alright?” he asked.
“I’m okay.” I shook my head. I wasn’t okay. Not really. “Isabella’s framing me. But I didn’t put those pictures up, Matt. I didn’t…”
Matt winced. “I know you didn’t. Come here.” He pulled me back into his arms.
“She’s never going to stop,” I said.
He didn’t respond. He just held me for a few minutes in silence. Until the laughter in the hallway died away.
“Give me your phone,” he said. “Enough is enough. You’re supposed to call your security detail if Isabella ever does something. You can’t let this one slide.”
I didn’t want to stop Isabella with my dad’s help. That always made everything worse. I wanted to freaking fight back myself. But Matt and I had already had this conversation. He’d said I was better than Isabella. And I wanted to show him that I was. I didn’t want to stoop to her level. I didn’t want to become her. So I pulled my cell phone out of my blazer pocket and handed it to him.
He lifted the phone to his ear. “Hey, it’s Matt. There’s been an incident with Isabella.” He tried to give me a reassuring smile. “Some inappropriate pictures. She’s upset, but no, I’ve got it covered.” He looked over at me and pulled the phone away from his ear. “Do you want to go home for the day?”
I shook my head. I refused to let Isabella drive me away from school. Her games weren’t going to make me leave.
“No, she’s okay,” Matt said.
I noticed that there was a hole in one of the knees of my tights. Crap. That didn’t look good when there were jokes going around about me being on my knees.
“Thanks,” Matt said and hung up the phone. “They said they’d pull her out of school for the rest of the day. Not sure what will happen after that.”
“Okay.”
I watched Matt loosen his tie. He pulled off his blazer and rolled up the sleeves of his uniform dress shirt.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m going to go get my varsity jacket for you to wear the rest of the day so people know that you’re mine and only mine. Do you want me to grab anything else from your locker?”
That wasn’t what he was about to do. Well, maybe it was. But it didn’t look like the only thing he was planning. I grabbed his arm. “I don’t want you to fight my battle for me.”
He lowered his eyebrows. “It’s our battle, Brooklyn. We’re a team. And no one - no one - talks about my fiancé like that.”
“If you want me to be the bigger person, you have to be too.”
“The things they were saying…” his voice trailed off.
Yeah, I’d heard it too. I’d seen it written. And now literally everyone at Empire High had seen me in my underwear. Holding James’ hand. Isabella was trying to make it seem like I was with James so that Matt would dump me. But Matt had said we were fine. So I should have been able to drop it and move on. Maybe it was the Pruitt blood in my veins. Or the fact that I had a mobster father. But all I wanted to do was make Isabella pay for this.
Hell, I wanted to roll up my sleeves and punch Isabella in her stupid face. But Matt said that wasn’t me. And it wasn’t the Matt I fell in love with either.
“I’ve been patient, Brooklyn. When you told me what happened between you and James. When you told me you were seeing someone else when we were fighting. I’ve been trying so hard to be understanding. But the things our classmates are saying about you? I’ve been patient with you, but I don’t need to be patient with them. No one should ever talk to you like that. And what kind of person would I be if I didn’t go out there and defend you? I can only take so much. I’m about to snap.”
I could see that. I knew he had a temper. And I knew that my behavior had tested him. I didn’t want him to lose control because of me. I took a deep breath. “Well, your fiancée doesn’t want you to get kicked out of school.” I put my hands on his chest. “You said it yourself. Isabella’s not going to break us. And if you want me to be better than her, you have to be better than all of them too. Because I know you are.”
He ran his hand down his face and sighed. “Fucking Isabella.”
I laughed. “I think you meant…fuck Isabella.”
He laughed too. “You are better.” He ran his thumbs beneath my eyes to remove the rest of my tears. “And I’m trying to be better for you too.”
“I’m really sorry about the pictures of me and James…”
“I don’t care about some stupid pictures. I know you’re not in love with James.”
I smiled up at him. “No, because I’m very much in love with you.”
The corner of his mouth ticked up.
“How long do you think it’ll take for someone to remove all those pictures?” I asked. The thought made tears come to my eyes again. My uncle would have had to clean up that mess. He would have seen the pictures of me in my underwear and all those nasty words. The thought made me mad all over again.
“I’m going to go talk to the principal and make sure he knows what actually happened,” Matt said. “And I actually am going to go get my jacket out of your locker for you to wear. Stay here, okay?”
I nodded.
He placed a kiss against my lips. “Us against the world, Brooklyn.”
I watched him walk out of the bathroom and I leaned against one of the sinks. Us against the world.
My phone buzzed and I pulled it out. There was a text from Rob: “So what’s the going rate, Sanders?”