Page 33 of Stray
Chapter 12
Ella
Ella had been sitting in the waiting room outside the headmaster’s office for the last hour and a half. To her absolute horror, she was just about the only person in that room who hadn’t been called in, including Natalia and Emily.
Mr. Bryant was still in there with them, and she wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. It was bizarre to have so many people discussing her own wellbeing without her, and there were several times when she wanted nothing more than to burst into the room and put an end to it.
Of course, nothing was ever that simple where cats were concerned.
All she could do was sit and wait. She looked down at her phone and saw the unread messages from Beatrice, who was dying to know how things at the Academy were going. She felt guilty for not responding, but she didn’t want to lie and wasn’t ready to get into everything that had transpired over the last few hours.
Halfway through her texts, Ella realized one of them was from a number she didn’t recognize. Nonetheless, the sender seemed perfectly familiar with her.
“Where the fuck are you? We need to talk”
She frowned, tempted to ignore it, but she had gotten the phone pretty recently. What if it was urgent?
“Sorry, I think you have the wrong number.”
Dots appeared on the screen immediately.
“Don’t bullshit me. It’s Axel.”
Her heart plummeted in her chest. Axel? For once, she realized he’d been the furthest thing from her mind with everything else she’d had to deal with over the last day and a half. Now she was even more certain ignoring him was the best course of action, but another message appeared on her screen.
“Where are you?”
She scowled down at the phone. Even in text, he was a demanding asshole.
No.Especiallyin text.
Not that she’d even expected him to want to talk to her after she’d embarrassed him in the hallway. No matter how many times she told herself she’d done nothing wrong, and that he deserved all that and more, she couldn’t escape the guilt.
Was this Stockholm syndrome? She wasn’t sure if it was even possible to feel that with someone who’d wanted her out of his life from the beginning, but she couldn’t think of anything else that fit, either.
She finally decided to respond, if only because she had nothing better to do. And when she inevitably had to return home with him on break, she didn’t want it to be pure torture.
“How did you even get this number?”
He started responding immediately. At least in text, she knew he had to read what she’d said in order to have something to respond to, unlike in person.
“It’s on your profile for the school portal,”he wrote back. She was both surprised he’d responded and annoyed that she’d given the school the number in the first place. The last thing she wanted was Axel having a direct line to harass her.“Where. Are. You.”
“I can read. If I wanted to answer, I would have told you the first two times you asked.”
She tapped her foot on the floor, waiting for him to respond. Her mouth twisted into a small smile. She’d never have the guts to say that to him in person, but after their encounter in the hall, she was feeling bold. It was a hell of a lot easier in text, too.
He started typing, then stopped, then started again.
“We can talk here,”she said, hurrying to send the message before he could say anything.“What do you want?”
More typing. In fact, he typed for so long she was sure he was working on a way to jump through the screen and ream her out himself.
“I just beat the shit out of Brad Long and I want to know if it was justified.”
She blinked at the screen a few times, trying to make sense of the message.“What are you talking about?”
“He said you were in heat and you went off to fuck that smugass professor Bryant.”
