Page 18 of A Little Bit Reckless
He glanced over at me next, and I guess it did look kind of weird. Bru and I were just staring at each other. I’d put distance between us, but we still looked like we were having some kind of intense conversation.
I mumbled nothing before wrestling around with the study materials again. I jammed my stuff into my book bag, and, when I glanced up, Wells and Bru were staring at each other. Wells had his eyes narrowed, and Bru did too.
Bru’s eyes narrowed harder.
“Yeah, it’s nothing,” Bru said before leaving the room. He mentioned something about heading downstairs to wait in the truck with Ares and Fawn, and, though I said something similar about our conversation meaning nothing, it felt different when Bru said it, harsher.
My insides tightening, I swallowed, but I was forced to push everything away when my phone buzzed.
Unknown:Stop ignoring me.
Unknown:Come back to me.
“You high in demand or something, Squeak? I find that hard to believe since you barely have any friends.”
I glanced up to find green eyes studying me, analyzing me. There was no way Wells saw my text from across the table. He was just being mean.
His head cocked, his stark blond hair passing over his eyes. Wells was just as beautiful as Bru, but in different ways, and I hated that he lost who he was. He became someone else because of me. He became darker and completely different than who he used to be when we were growing up. There had been a reason I loved him.
I said nothing to him, and, apparently bored with me, he started to leave the room. I took a step toward him. “Can we have our next tutoring session on the quad tomorrow around two o’clock? The forecast says it will be warm enough to study outside.” The Midwest had weird weather like that. One day it was scorching hot and the next blistering cold. Especially when seasons changed from winter to spring. I gnawed my lip. “The quad’s out in the open and people will be able to see us there.”
Hewould be able to see us.
My phone buzzed again, but I ignored it as Wells stepped up to me. He towered over me and looked at me like I was the worst person in the world.
He wasn’t far off.
I’d never be able to take back what I did to him, and I knew that as he analyzed me as if I was a piece of crap. Like I was worthless. His nostrils flared. “I’ll meet you. But remember, I’m playing your game because I need you. But, like I said in the library, no amount of looking buddy buddywill evermake me forget what you did, Squeak. It won’t because I know you, Squeak. Iseeyou.”
He did see me, and in the next moment…
He looked right through me.
I couldn’t remember the last time Wells saw me as a person. I may have been Thatcher’s little sister to Bru and a great friend to his sister, Sloane, but, to the rest of the world, I was the girl who screwed Wells Ambrose over.
I was the one who killed a girl.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
Bow - age 15
“God, Wells has no business being that fine,” my friend Leigh said.
I glanced up from my lounger, picking at the plastic beneath me. I sat cross-legged, and it didn’t take me long to spot Wells from across the pool. He twirled a whistle around his finger in a pair of red swim trunks, his abs flashing in the summer sun, and I immediately gazed away.
“Summer’s definitely been treating him right,” Leigh continued beside me, giggling. She was always talking about how hot Wells was. Him and my brother, Thatcher, which was complete ick. Thatcher wasn’t lifeguarding today thank God, and, really, none of my brother’s friends were spared from, well,myfriends. My brother had three best friends, Wells, Ares, and Dorian, and my friends talking about them got worse since I started high school.
I supposed the guys had developed.
My brother and his friends didn’t have baby faces anymore like me, and Wells certainly didn’t. He had a jawline that didn’t look like a boy anymore. It was chiseled, just like his abs, andwas golden just like the rest of him. He was even getting facial hair now like Thatcher, but he shaved it. I caught him once.
My nail continued to pick at the lounger, noticing Wells grinning at a girl in the pool. He hunkered down to her, her arms on the side of the pool. She kicked her tanned legs and had way bigger boobs than me in her bikini top. I had no boobs. Not really. Not yet.
Shifting, I cut off my stare when Jasmine tapped my shoulder. She was on the other side of me in her own lounger.
“Don’t talk to Bow about Legacy,” she said, referring to what basically everyone called my brother and his friends since coming to high school. Our families had all been going to Windsor Preparatory Academy, my school, for a long time, and people gave Thatcher and the other guys that label. We were the next generation, and I guess technically I was Legacy too. Jasmine laughed. “It’s like she has blinders to the fact that her brother’s friends are hot.”
