Total pages in book: 124
Estimated words: 117415 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 587(@200wpm)___ 470(@250wpm)___ 391(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 117415 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 587(@200wpm)___ 470(@250wpm)___ 391(@300wpm)
And I’m completely lost what the hell any of that meant.
I feel like I’m on some covert mission that makes no damned sense when I turn the corner and find Raj’s room. Wily is in his own across the hall, his door wide open, back facing the hallway as he scrolls on his phone. I surrender to an instinct to be as quiet as possible when I slip into Raj’s room and close the door.
Someone in an oversized Soul Biter shirt and hat sits in front of the snack table. He looks up from a basket of fruit, eyes on me.
I stop short. “Timothy?”
He rises from the table at once. “Austin.”
I can’t tell whether that’s an angry Austin, happy one, or a “still-processing-this” tone of voice. I plain can’t tell anything. He is blank. Wide-eyed. Standing by a basket of fruit.
He’s here. He’s really fucking here.
And shouldn’t be. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Austin … Chase … Holt,” he mutters, still in a daze.
“It isn’t safe to be with me. If someone sees you …”
“I feel … so stupid.” He just spent the last hour and a half with this information and still looks like he learned it five seconds ago. “How’d I not know it was you? I’m smarter than this. I’m the one everyone in my class came to for test answers. I’m singlehandedly responsible for AJ passing statistics. I tutor advanced calculus.”
I come up to him, if anything but to bring down his voice. “I’m serious, Timothy. You shouldn’t have come here.”
“I was just returning your hat.” He takes it off his head. Then he looks down at it. “Except it isn’t your signed hat. It’s just … a signed hat—which you signed—from the merch table where those two horny guys need to figure out they love each other already.”
That last part flies over my head. “Look, I didn’t want to lie or hold back the truth about who I am, Timothy. I was just—”
“I know.” His response surprises me. “I don’t blame you. Not even angry about it. I think.” He says all of this to the hat. “I was fully prepared to leave you alone. That’s what you wanted, right?”
It was what I wanted, technically. But hearing it from him, in his own words, feels hurtful. “Of course that isn’t what I want.”
“What do you want, then?”
“I want you to look at me, for one.”
He looks up from the hat.
Right into my eyes.
And I’m looking back, lost in them at once, as captivated as I was during the show, seeing only him in the storm of loud faces.
“And … And I want …” Suddenly I’m not sure what I want. For him to leave? For this to never have happened? My words change as they fall from my lips. “I want … to live in a world … where none of this shit matters. Where there’s no eyes on me all day and night long. Where I can just follow my heart and … and do what I want. See who I want. Kiss who I want.”
“Is that what you found in Spruce?” he asks, a touch softer. “Is that what you found in me?”
These questions are torture.
Or maybe it’s the kind way in which he asks them.
This would be so much easier if he was just mad like a normal person and not all sensitive and thoughtful and intelligent, which only makes pushing him away that much more impossible a task.
“What I found …” I start out, sounding agitated, angry at every damned obstacle standing between us, myself most of all. “… was a guy who …” I keep looking away from him. Back at the door. At the annoying mirrors, none of which are covered up, showing me in every angle. All I feel inside is fear. “… who I wish I’d not met yet.”
“Yet?”
I circle away from him, grab Raj’s denim jacket off the back of a chair, and toss it over the nearest mirror, then lean back against the counter in front of it, fingers curling, trying not to shake. “You deserve to know what you’re gettin’ yourself into when you get close to me. There’s a reason I have no friends. Other than all the pressures coming from my manager and the label to seem a certain way, I’ve gotta deal with stalkers, obsessed fans … I’m tellin’ you, people in my life, none of ‘em are safe. They’ve tracked down my brothers. Sister. Mom. It ain’t fair to you, to put you through the gauntlet of bein’ in my life when you never asked for any of this.”
“How about you let me decide what I put myself through?”
I lift my eyes off the floor, meeting his, struck.
He crosses his arms, hat still hanging from one of his hands. I don’t know what he’s thinking right now, but I definitely see the storm churning behind his eyes. It’s the first time since us meeting at the Horseshoe that I’ve seen him look so troubled.