Page 8 of Revenge At Raleigh High
Like nearly everyone else on the face of the planet, I’m well acquainted with the story of Romeo and Juliet. I’ve read the book. The adaptations. I’ve seen the movies. I’ve swooned over the devotion and all of the suffering held within the pages of Shakespeare’s tragedy, but I’ve never understood it. Never really felt it before. Now, though, that fire burns inmychest. I feel it from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep at night. Seems to me, no one else in the world has ever been this turned-around by someone before, this consumed or swallowed whole by another living, breathing, flawed human being.
This love is so overwhelming, so hot and so bright, that it has to be unique in all of creation. Because how would the world keep on spinning if everyone felt this way? How would governments not collapse, and wars not cease, and the whole of society not come to a crumbling standstill if there were other people in this world who felt for one another what I feel for Alex Moretti?
It’s late. On the corner of High Street and Paulson, a figure stands in the shadows, leaning against the brick wall ofHarrison’s Home Hardware and Electrical Supplies, looking up at the sky. He doesn’t seem to have a purpose as he gazes at the heavens. Doesn’t seem to be waiting for anything in particular. A passerby would probably frown at his presence, casting suspicious eyes over him and making their small-town judgements of him as he does nothing more sinister than dare to stand still and scan the midnight sky for stars.
At first glance, his hair, thick with waves, is impossibly dark. Up close, it’s easier to see that it isn’t black but a very dark, textured brown—the darkest of browns—shot through with the odd stand of red that unexpectedly catches the light from time to time. His eyes are dark, too. I’ve seen such warmth and humor in them before, but that isn’t what the rest of the world sees when they look into his eyes. Strangers are generally met with a cold, predatory disregard. I suppose the sterile assessment of his gaze could sometimes be described as frightening.
Vines with full-bloomed roses and studded with thorns circle his throat like a collar, the black ink peeking above the neck of his shirt, hinting at what else might lie beneath the fabric of his clothes. His jeans are ripped, his leather jacket worn, the collar popped against the biting wind and the halfhearted sleet, but there he stands, at ease, oblivious to the fact that winter has officially arrived, giving off the impression that he simply doesn’t feel the cold.
He’s an artist’s rendering of something fictional and make-believe. A charcoal smudge against a bleached-out backdrop, drawn in swift, sure, mad lines that defy the laws of physics and confuse the eye but somehow seem all the more real because of it.
I see him, and I see all of these things about him, in the time it takes to inhale a lungful of sharp winter air and step off the curb on the main street, heading in his direction. When he looks over and sees me, our eyes lock, and I realize just how incredibly, totally, absolutely fucked I am.
Alex Moretti isn’t just the kind of guy you fall in love with in high school. He isn’t just the guy who steals your heart for a summer, and then fades from your affections, becoming nothing more than a rose-tinted memory in your rearview mirror. Alex Moretti is the kind of guy who sweeps into your life like a wildfire, torching anything and everything you’ve ever cared about before he makes himself perfectly at home, rooting himself down so deep into your soul that it becomes impossible to differentiate where you end and he begins.
A slow, wicked smile spreads across his handsome face and my heart does a triple pike backflip off a fifteen-meter high board. The world’s such a big fucking place, and Raleigh is so damn small. The odds that I’d be born here, and that Alessandro Moretti would end up moving here to work at an establishment of ill-repute are so infinitely small that it all feels orchestrated. Like the universe picked out the trillions of molecules required to construct our individual bodies and arranged for them to come together at this specific time, in this specific place for some specific purpose.
Alex pushes away from the brick wall of Harrison’s Home Hardware and Electrical Supplies with a leonine grace and begins to walk toward me like some sort of demi-god, freshly fallen to the earth. The flare of amusement in his dark eyes promises trouble. He meets me at the curb, slowly removing his hands from his pockets and placing them on my hips. A second later, my feet are off the ground and he’s lifting me up the lip of the sidewalk and planting me down next to him.
“Hey there,Argento,” he says, the left-hand side of his mouth tilting upward so that the faintest hint of a dimple marks his cheek. “Figured you were about five minutes away from standing me up.”
A slow smile aches at my mouth. “So, if I’d shown up in five minutes, you’d have given up on me and left?”
He’s so tall—an imposing, muscled, broad figure of a guy, towering over me, dark hair backlit from the sodium-yellow glow of the street light over our heads. He still looks entertained, his eyes slightly narrowed as he dips down closer to me. His warm breath chases away the cold night air as he whispers softly into my ear. “You know I wouldn’t have left,Argento. I’m a lovesick dog. You told me to meet you here, so here I would have stayed, in the rain and the snow and the cold until you eventually came to find me and put me out of my misery.”
My pulse quickens in the hollow of my throat, erratic and dizzying. He’s playing. He wouldn’t have waited here for me if I’d stood him up. No way. He would have come to find me. He would have tracked me down no matter what the weather was doing and stolen me away into the night, kicking and screaming. Except I wouldn’t have fought my abduction. He won me fair and square. I belong to him now, the same way that he belongs to me. We’re connected, sealed together, so immersed in each other that some days I’m a little intimidated by how in tune we are. Cut one of us and the other bleeds. Maybe not physically true, but emotionally…
Alex stands straight, cupping my face in his palms. It’s below freezing tonight. He’s been waiting outside the hardware store for god knows how long, but his hands are still warm. “Your hair’s full of snow,” he murmurs.
“So’s yours.” A fat flake lands on the tip of his eyelashes, brilliant white against the black, curved strands that rim his eyes. For a second, the very sight of him standing in front of me, his strong jawline, and his pronounced cheekbones, and his intense, penetrating gaze boring into me makes my ribs squeeze tight in a protective cage around my heart.
He's so devastatingly handsome. He’s so imperfectly perfect. He’s so…he’s so fuckingdangerous. I’ve always been so careful with my feelings, even before Jacob Weaving came along and blew up my life, but now it feels as though I’ve been reckless. I put on a good show for myself. Pretended I wasn’t going to fall for the most inappropriate guy to ever walk through the doors of Raleigh High, but it was all an embarrassingly flimsy act. I knew I was going to hand myself over to him blindly, with a rash kind of abandon that now scares the living shit out of me.
If he wanted to, Alex could crush me in a way that would affect me for the rest of my life. He could break my heart into a trillion pieces, grind it to dust and scatter it on the frigid northerly wind and there would be no way of retrieving it. I’d have to live out the rest of my days, a heartless, broken, hollow girl with the aching memory of his lips on my mouth and there would be nothing I could do about it.
His salacious smirk fades a little as he rubs the pads of his thumbs lightly across the lines of my cheekbones. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
I am amazing at hiding my thoughts and feelings.Amazing. Which makes it all the more intimidating that Alex can just look into my eyes, reach down into my soul, and pluck out my truths. I have no way of hiding myself from him.
Nervously, I smile, forcing out a shaky laugh. “Oh, y’know. Just pondering how terrifying you are.”
His smile turns tight. Reproving, and just a tiny little bit sad. He bumps the end of my nose with his own, playful, but there’s a heaviness to his voice when he speaks. “And here I was, thinking I’d found a girl who wasn’t afraid of me.”
“I’m not afraid ofyou. Just what’ll happen if…”
He arches an eyebrow, very still, waiting for me to continue.
“If you decide to move on, crush my heart under your boot heel, and break me,” I rush out, giving him another round of awkward laughter that sounds kind of pathetic, actually.
Alex’s face goes blank, but his eyes burn with a fire that makes me forget we’re standing out on a snowy street in the middle of November. “Break you?” he whispers. “I don’t break the things I love,Argento. I fix them. I repair them. I treasure them. I do ridiculous, insane, very illegal things to make sure I don’t lose them. I sure as hell don’tbreakthem. I also do not wear boots.”
I’m not an insecure person. I’m not the kind of person who worries about their boyfriend leaving them all the time. At least, I hope I’m not; I have zero experience when it comes to boyfriends. The stakes just seem so high in this particular situation that a little worry seemed prudent. Looking up at Alex, all of that worry and niggling doubt disintegrates, though. He’s telling the truth. He dug up a dead man through eight feet of frozen dirt to get his mother’s necklace back, for fuck’s sake. If he’d do that for a necklace, then whatwouldhe do for me?
He leans down, pressing his mouth against mine, and I fall slack against him. It happens every time—my body is so ill-equipped to deal with Alex kissing me that it always feels like I’m about to disintegrate myself. Like the molecular bonds that fuse my cells together are shaken loose by his closeness and I’m slowly, irreversibly beginning to drift into the ether. He parts my lips, guiding them open, and I moan softly into his mouth as he slips his tongue past my teeth, probing and sweeping, insistent as he tastes me. I lean into him, my back arching, my chest crushing up against him, and Alex slides a hand down to the small of my back, pulling me even closer. His breath hitches in his throat, catching, and he lets out a pained groan.
I’m so grateful that I didn’t wear gloves as I reach up and wind my fingers into his hair. The thick, fullness of it feels amazing as I collect myself up off the floor long enough to kiss him back. His breath quickens, dragging in and out of his nose as he sucks my bottom lip into his mouth and roughly bites down. The sharp spear of pain makes me gasp, a startled, needy, pant of sound that seems to have a pretty wild effect on Alex. He slides his other hand away from my face, around to the back of my neck, and he grips me there, holding me in place against him as he forces my mouth open wider, tugging at my top lip.
My head spins faster than a centrifuge as he grinds his hips forward and his erection digs into my hip, demonstrating just how rock-hard the kiss is making him.
