“C’mon,” I say to Lilah, coming around the bar. “Let me walk with you.” When her look grows wary, I hold up my hands. “The next time these are on you, it will be because you put them there.”
She nods and starts toward the door.
When I determine the sidewalk is empty, I scan for the red sedan. “I don’t care if it’s day or night, I don’t want you walking around out here alone.”
She starts toward her apartment. “He was pissed at you for making him look like the fool he is.” Her gaze finds my face as I keep step next to her. “He made his point, so I doubt he’ll be back.”
“Maybe you’re right, but I’m not going to chance it,” I say, casing the block ahead as we cross the street. “Call me if you have somewhere to go and you’re alone. I’ll come for you.”
“For how long?”
I stop and pin her in my gaze. “Until I know he’s gone.”
We walk, and my eyes are everywhere: in every alcove and recess of the storefronts we pass, behind us, ahead of us. Everywhere but on her.
But I feel her.
Every time her gaze flicks over me, it sends pins and needles over my skin and causes my breath to catch. When we reach her door, she’s already got her key out. She twists it in the lock and the door whines as she pushes it open. She steps up onto the landing at the bottom of the narrow stairs and turns back to me. We’re eye to eye and I feel hers draw me to her, like magnets for my soul.
But I need more than that if I’m going to touch her again. I need her to reach for me first.
After a long, electric moment, she backs a step deeper into the gloom of the stairwell. “Good night, Bran.”
“’Night.”
I wait for her to close the door, then test the knob. I still don’t like how flimsy the door is and I make a note to order her a steel security door at the hardware store tomorrow morning. I cross over to the other side of the street and head back to the bar. And when I glance back, Lilah is standing in the second story window, watching after me.
Chapter 12
Lilah
I fall asleep in eighth period algebra. Of course, I only know I’m sleeping when the bell rings and I wake with a start. The pencil in my hand goes flying and hits the football jock who sits in front of me in the back of the neck.
He rubs the spot and turns to smirk at me. “If you wanted my attention, you didn’t need to stab me in the neck. A tap on the shoulder would have worked.”
He’s reasonably hot, longish blond waves and blue eyes a few shades darker than Destiny’s. But he knows it, which makes him exponentially less attractive in my eyes.
I gather my things and shove them into my bag, and find he’s still watching me when I’m done.
“I’m Jon,” he says, handing me back my pencil.
“Lilah.” I shove the pencil into my messenger bag, then hike it onto my shoulder and start for the door.
He bounds up next to me before I reach it. “You coming to the Homecoming game tonight?”
“Wasn’t planning on it.”
I keep moving toward the front doors and my escape. I haven’t seen Bran since he walked me home Wednesday, and I was hoping that two days would get me past whatever this infatuation I have with him is. But every night as I lay in bed, instead of the memory of his kiss fading, it’s set down roots and blossomed into much more. In my dream last night it progressed to its logical end, and as he sunk his thick length inside me, I came hard. It woke me out of a sound sleep and I lay quiet for a long moment, afraid I’d woken Destiny with my cry of pleasure. If he can do that to me in my sleep, I don’t even want to know what would happen if I let him touch me again in real life.
So I can’t.
I skip down the three marble stairs to the sidewalk and find Football Jon still on my heels. “You should go to the game. There’s a dance after.”
“Don’t do dances.”
He shrugs as he lopes along beside me like a big, gangly puppy dog. “No one really dances. We just hang out…hook up or whatever.”
I look at him again, closer this time. “Are you asking me to the dance so we can ‘hook up or whatever’?”
A lopsided smile pulls at his inordinately large mouth. “What would you say if I was?”
It’s Friday. I still haven’t found an after-school job, so I need to play tonight.
“Busy, sorry.”
His eyes light up. “But if you weren’t…you would have said yes?”
I think about that. Hooking up with a guy my own age might get my mind off the ex-Marine with the soul as dark as his eyes. A soul that speaks to mine in a way no one else’s ever has.
I stop and fix Jon in my gaze. This puppy dog is clueless. He hasn’t lived through anything that’s shaken his sense of safety and challenged him to define his place in this world. He’s like a whim…a child with the emotional depth of a mud puddle.
The polar opposite of Bran.
“Yes,” I say, telling him the truth. If I didn’t have to play, I’d go to the dance, see where it led. If it led to me forgetting about Bran for a few hours, then all the better.