Page 91 of No Romeo
“Yeah.” Hendrix let go of my face, eyes searching mine before he frowned. “I’m coming.”
Then, without another word, he got up and grabbed his shoes, leaving me alone on his bed.
The front door closed a few seconds later, and I should have gotten up and gone back to my room, but I couldn’t. So, I lay on his bed, surrounded by his scent, and cried for everything we’d both lost.
He was going to ask me to marry him.
He had pawned his guitar…
The tears came harder.
I’d gone two years without Hendrix, and it had been awful. I didn’t know how I was supposed to survive a lifetime without him.
I’d told myself I couldn’t be with him, kept us apart, and for what? So, he wouldn’t do something that would get him sent to jail and taken away from me.
He was already away from me.Iwas keeping him away from me. And it wasn’t helping anything.
He still cared. I still cared. And he’d still kill Johan if he found out.
The only thing that stopped me from running after him and begging him to forgive me and be with me right then and there was the thought of looking at him five, ten, twenty years from now and knowing I’d lied. Knowing he would always think I once had betrayed him. There was no way that wouldn’t change things, wouldn’t burrow into his brain and taint the way he saw me. No way to erase the hurt and distrust I’d just seen in his eyes.
He was angry, but more than that, he was broken.
My phone pinged with a message.
Satan: Friends?
After all the times I’d told him I wanted to be friends, that one word shouldn’t have struck such a deep blow.
Hendrix was finally over me, just as I’d realized I would never get over him.
Me: Friends
Chapter34
HENDRIX
Thursday morning, the cheerleaders had vomited Dayton Pride crap all over the halls. Glittery banners. Streamers and ribbons. God, I hated this school.
Students shuffled behind me in the crowded corridors, locker doors slamming. Shoes squeaking.
I’d really hoped that getting Brown to lick my ass would have gotten me suspended, but no. That dickwheeze had seen right through me. He knew giving me three months’ worth of detention was way worse than a three-day suspension-vacation.
So, there I stood in the hallway, turning the combination to my dented, dick-graffitied locker.
Wolf clapped me on the shoulder. “Dude, the football team is giving Baites so much crap about getting turned down by Lola.”
Which meant the whole team would think they could ask her out, too.
Oh, what a motherfucking tangled web we weave when we try to pretend we don’t care who dicks down our used-to-be girl.
I fought the jealousy simmering below the surface as I put away my books and recanted the memory of Sid’s stuffed head rolling to the floor. But it blew like Mount Vesuvius the second I turned around and saw Daniel Baites.
Maybe it wasn’t so much that he’d asked her out.
Maybe it was the lack of respect. Or maybe it was the fact that she had cried on me the other night, and for the first time, I really saw how sorry she was. Whatever it was, it had opened that festering wound right back up and had me marching toward Baites like a death moth to a soon-to-be-dying flame.
He shoved his football bag into his locker.
