Page 25 of Reckless At Raleigh High
At the mention of my name, Silver’s head snaps up, her brightly shining eyes searching me out. It kills me that her go-to reaction is immediate worry; I can read it on her face from a mile away. Her cheeks are still flushed from the cold outside, the end of her nose adorably pink. She’s so damn beautiful, it makes me breathless to even look at her. I smile in an attempt to quash the look of panic she’s wearing, hoping that her mind will stop racing quite so much. “I requested a class change, Ms. Swift. I don’t feel adequately challenged in my current English class.”
“Uhhh…” Ms. Swift looks down at her iPad, flitting through a couple of screens. “I don’t see a transfer notification from the office here, Alex. You can’t just show up to an AP class because you feel like it. Making it into an AP class is…well, it’s kind of a big deal. So…”
The students on the front row avoid eye contact with me, staring down at their open textbooks like they’re afraid I’m about to hulk out and trash the place. A couple of the kids on the second row brave a glance or two at me while also watching Ms. Swift, waiting to see what she’ll do.
I’m not really paying attention to any of them, though. I’m too focused on Silver, trying to communicate a stumbling apology to her with my eyes. “I won’t bring your class average down,” I inform Ms. Swift tightly. “I’m here to learn.”
“You’re sure? Because it looks like you came to make eyes at Silver Parisi rather than open your mind to the brilliance of the English language.”
I turn my full attention to her now, my gaze drilling into her face. “I swear. I won’t cause any trouble. I’ll sit by the window. I won’t even be near Silver.”
She doesn’t look too convinced. Doesn’t sound it either. “All right. By the window it is. Waste our time and we’ll boot you outta the room quicker than you can say ‘Geoffrey Chaucer who?’And I will be checking with Karen after lunch to make sure you put that request in. Sit your butt down, Mr. Moretti.”
I go and claim the only available seat left in the room—third row, directly under the AC vent, which is churning out cold air despite the fact that there are icicles dangling from the top of the casement on the other side of the window. “Uh, great. Umm, I actually need to borrow a pen. And some paper. And a textbook.”
Ms. Swift eyes me balefully. “Ah. You clearlydidcome here to learn, didn’t you?” Her frosty smile doesn’t affect me. I’m chilled to the bone and only getting colder with the AC continually blasting me, and I’ve just seriously screwed myself over by electing to bump myself up a class—the workload’s bound to be way harder than my regular class—but that’s all background noise. I’m breathing the same air that Silver’s breathing. I feel the proximity of her, and the wild, frenetic beast inside of me that’s been bucking and pulling on its chains finally calms, finally breathes a massive sigh of relief. This is where I’m supposed to be. And if joining yet another AP class and burning my brain cells to a crisp means that I get to be near her, then so fucking be it.
14
ALEX
Itell her about Zander’s confession concerning my father. I tell her about my run-in with Monty. I tell her I won’t be working at the Rock anymore. Once I’ve reassured her that I won’t be struggling to pay rent for a long while yet, she seems to take everything in stride. Predictably, she’s not too happy that I vanished on her, though.
“You get to be sad, Alex. You get to be lost, and hurt, and turned around. What you don’t get to do is ghost me. I’m not okay with that. We don’t do that to each oth—”
She deserves to chew me out for the shit I’ve been pulling over the past couple of days. I owe her better than I’ve been giving her, and she has every right to tear me a new one for vanishing on her so spectacularly, but in this moment, the air shivering with snow out of the Camaro’s window and everything so peaceful and quiet, all I want to do is kiss her.
I hold her by the nape of her neck, quickly pulling her to me, and I bring my mouth down on hers before she can finish her sentence. She tastes of cinnamon, and mint, and the ginger tea she likes to drink sometimes; I consume all of it, all of her, plunging my tongue into her mouth with a wild abandon that halts her breath in her lungs.
I guess she wasn’t banking on being kissed like she’s about to get fucked. It takes her a second to respond. When she does, it’s with a shuddering sigh that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up straight.
Her fingers wind into my hair, tracing down the sides of my face, running over my collar bones until she’s driving her nails into the tops of my shoulders, panting out sharp blasts of air down her nose. She’s so fucking bitable. I suck her lower lip into my mouth, tugging on it with my front teeth, and Silver lets out a little whimper that has another part of me altogether standing to attention.
Reluctantly, I break off the kiss before we go too far. Sure, I want her real bad. Goes without saying that I want my dick inside her, with her shivering out an orgasm on top of me, but this is more important than sex. I need to make things right with her. If we apologize and make up, communicating only through sex, we’ll forget how to actually talk about our shit, and I’m no genius when it comes to emotions but I’m pretty sure that’ll end in disaster.
I cradle her face in my hands, committing the dazed, heated look on her face to memory. Then I gently stroke the tip of my index finger down the length of her nose, rubbing away the wet sheen of her mouth so I can’t be distracted by how hot she is, all pouty and swollen like this.
“I let you down,” I whisper. “I’m fucking sorry.”
Her eyes still unfocused, she shakes her head, swallowing. “You didn’t let anyone down. That’s the whole point. No one expects you to just get up, dust yourself off and move on like nothing happened. You lost him, you lostBen, and—”
The words, sharp as knives, flay me to the bone. I’ve been trying to outrun them ever since I found out Ben was dead, but this time I settle into my seat and I face them, Ifeelthem, and I try not to flee from the truth.
Ben’s dead.
My brother is gone, and he isn’t coming back.
I’m never going to sit across from him at the diner and dip French fries into a milkshake with him. We’re never going to watch scary movies together. The sound of his incredibly rare laughter is never going to fill the spare room of the apartment I got just so he could come and live with me.
These are hard realities to face. I don’t want to accept any of it, but that’s the thing about death. It can’t be ignored. You just have to find a way to live with the hand it deals you, and that sucks more than I can bear.
Silver clears her throat, plucking at the collar of my t-shirt, worrying at the stitching. “I’m not mad at you for disappearing. Not really. I don’t know how you’re supposed to handle any of this, okay? There are no guidelines for coping with grief.”
“There are actually. There are millions of them online, and every single one of them is horseshit. I’m gonna be okay. I just need to figure out how to put one foot in front of the other, and…”
She rests her chin on my shoulder, curling my hair around her finger. “And?”
“And…I’m supposed to go to college, then get a good job, right? Pay off my loans over the next twenty fucking years and get a mortgage. Become a responsible human being who regrets covering himself in tattoos. That’s what comes next.”
