Ray grinned from ear to ear. “You’re a life saver.” He grabbed her bag and kissed her cheek, right where Aaron had kissed her earlier.
That wasn’t weird at all, she thought sarcastically. She opened her locker and grabbed the books for her next class. She heard Ray at her feet shuffling through her bag: pushing the papers and headache medicine bottle out of the way to get a pencil. Funny, she didn’t think it would be that hard to find it.
“Got it,” he said, putting his hand in his pocket. “Thank you.”
“It’s a pencil, Ray. I didn’t give you gold.” She grinned.
“You have no idea.” He stood there for a second looking at her like he expected her to say something back. She hated to tell him, but she had nothing. Not really. “Um… so, I’ll see you at my house after school.”
“Yeah… yeah, I’ll be there.” He nodded several times more than necessary. “We’ll get to the bottom of this. There has to be an answer.”
“I just hope it’s not ‘Sloan’s crazy’.” She tried to make a joke out of it, but it fell flat.
Ray took her hand and squeezed it gently. “No matter what my brother says, I believe you. I know you would never stage this stalker, split personality or not. It’s not like you.”
Her heart fluttered, and she felt a smile tug her lips. “And you know me so well.”
“I do,” he said very seriously. “Better than anyone. I’ll see you after school.” He kissed her knuckles and walked away, leaving Sloan dumbfounded.
Both brothers had an effect on her. She couldn’t deny that. And she couldn’t deny that both had feelings for her. Strong feelings, and it wasn’t right to lead them both on. She needed to pick, and pick quickly before things got even more strained between them.
With Ray gone to his next class, Sloan shut her locker door and started down the hall to hers. At a minute until the bell, the hallways were starting to clear. She really needed to start getting to class sooner.
As she rounded the corner, her eye caught a glimpse of Boyd’s old locker. She remembered the first day of senior year, seeing him standing there. He’d dumped her a few days before. It still stung, still fresh. And Darcy had just coined the term “Saint Sloan”. It had been an eventful few weeks.
Sloan had to laugh at the memory now: big strapping jock unable to get the combination lock on his new locker to open, the guys standing around him, Darcy included, laughing. He wasn’t amused, and she wondered if they’d known what they knew now, if they would have laughed so hard.
She stopped dead in her tracks. Wait. Darcy had said she knew Sloan’s combination to her locker because they had been best friends and she’d seen her open it numerous times.
That was her junior locker, not her senior one. When they were seniors, Darcy hated her. She’d never been to her locker except to taunt her, and she sure hadn’t opened her locker in front of her.
Darcy had lied. To her face, lied. So how did she really know the combination to her locker? And why?
The late bell rang, and she started toward her next class. She only made it two steps when she turned around and marched back to the office. When she got inside, she smiled politely at Mrs. Baker, the secretary, and signed her name and the time out. She was eighteen now and legally could check herself out of school. Next to the reason, she wrote sick.
“Feel better soon.” The short, slender lady smiled from behind the counter.
“I will. Thank you,” Sloan said with her best impression of a sick person.
With that, Sloan left the office, went down the hallway, exited the building, and went to her car at the far end of the lot. It might be crazy, but for the first time, she knew what she had to do and how she had to do it. There was no sense running from any of this. She knew exactly who she had to talk with to get answers.
She unlocked her car door and slid inside. With her foot on the brake, she pushed the start button, causing the Charger to roar to life. Determined, she pulled out of the parking lot and onto the main road out of town. Once the businesses turned into houses and houses into farmland, Sloan turned left onto Brown Hollow Road, down a road she hadn’t been on since that November night she’d rather forget.
A few miles down she saw a two-story white farmhouse sitting off the road. With her heart beating a mile a minute in her chest, she slammed on her brakes.
What was she doing?
This was Boyd’s house. Boyd Lawrence. The same guy who’d tried to rape her twice and then tried to kill her. The same guy she’d put in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. She rubbed her eyes, trying to figure out if she was thinking clearly. It had been a few hours since she’d taken the headache medicine, and she didn’t really feel like she needed it. Didn’t mean she didn’t want it though.
This might be a bad situation and hurting didn’t appeal to her.