Page 72 of Swallow Your Sorries

As the soft hum eventually moves away, I hedge around the dining hall and sprint toward the greenhouse, pretending the giant ink dot behind it doesn’t exist. But as I duck into the greenhouse’s shadows, I don’t spot Rin.

I’m about to creep towards the other side when a male voice stops me in my tracks. It sounds familiar, but I can’t place it.

So, is Rin secretly hooking up with some mystery man? Is that who she was hinting at meeting on the first day of school when she said, “You’ll see?”

Unless he’s a teacher, or already taken, I don’t see how some late-night tryst can help me. Half the school probably hooks up after hours.

But as the boy’s angry whispers reach my ears, I quickly realise it isn’t Rin’s fake, airy voice that’s responding. In fact, I’ve never heard this girl’s voice before.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing here?” the boy hisses. He’s obviously livid, but his tone is even and measured. It’s like how Gant’s was in the auditorium. Frighteningly calm.

Goosebumps erupt over my bare arms, but they have nothing to do with the night’s chill.

“I didn’t want to come here,” a soft, feminine voice laced with fear responds. “I told my father it was a bad idea.”

“You’re damn right. What part of I want nothing to do with you doesn’t he understand?”

“I-I don’t know. But I didn’t come to make any problems, I swear Z-.”

A muffled sound, like skin-on-skin contact, fills the air, followed by the vibration of glass a few panes up. Had he pushed her into a wall?

“I told you to keep my name out of your fucking mouth. Just the sound of it on your lips repulses me.”

I flinch, undoubtedly with the girl he’s barking at like the damn dog he is.

What the fuck was his problem?

“Why do you hate me so much?” she asks pitifully and my heart breaks with hers that I know is shattering into a million pieces because I can hear it. And I can hear the words she isn’t saying, just by the hollow croakiness in her throat.

Why don’t you love me?

“Because you exist. You’re a stain on my life that I can’t get rid of no matter how much I try. Everywhere I turn, there you are. You either get out of Beaulieu by the end of the term, or I’ll make you wish you had. That girl, Eloisa? Her life will seem like a fairytale compared to the way I’ll dog walk you.”

Suddenly footsteps sound, and I shrink behind a nearby bush, pressing my back tight against the building as the steps get closer.

In the moonlight, a flash of dirty blonde hair streaks past me, but not before I catch sight of the boy’s face.

Zedd.

By the time he passes and there’s enough distance for me to emerge from my hiding spot, it’s too late to see the girl whose retreating form is already halfway down the path in a full-on run.

And of course, Rin’s nowhere to be found.

Gant

My dove trapped herself in her gilded cage over the weekend where it’s safe, or so she thinks. I’d broken into the girls’ dorms a dozen times over, but I let her have her space to digest her new circumstances.Ournew circumstances and our recurring pasts, too.

We’d both had near-death experiences. But her father, the fucker who had an affair with my mother, was the cause of her brush with death.

I bet he’s the cause of many things.

“What’s wrong with your father?”

“Everything.”

My mother had chosen to cheat with a man who tried to end his own daughter’s life. My father may have never put my life in jeopardy physically, but that’s solely because I’m his only heir.

A few days ago, my mother’s cheating had been easier to digest when I could pretend that Jarett must be better, in some way. But he wasn’t. He isn’t. I know from Elle’s haunted look. At the lake, she hadn’t seen me when I pushed her. She’d seen her father.

---