The Bully's Blind Spot

The boy who dumped milk over my head spent hours in a freezing lake, diving for the rings I'd thrown away. He stayed in that water from afternoon till deep into the dark. The police had to drag him out by force.

And me?

I deleted his number. I never answered a single message again.

But it all started on my first day at Westlake High.

Day one, and I walked in wearing the same top as the most popular girl in school.

The school bully got in my face. "Scheming little fake. You're too ugly to copy her look."

He poured a whole carton of milk over my head.

Then, mouthing a sorry he didn't mean, he flipped up my heavy bangs.

He saw my eyes. His lip curled.

"Wow. Colored contacts, at school? Who exactly are you trying to seduce?"

I stared at my shoes and answered, very quietly.

"They're not contacts. It's a prosthetic eye."

He froze where he stood.

Chapter 1

"What?" Kai Mercer looked like the words hadn't landed.

His brow creased. Something strange and uncertain crossed his face.

"Say that again. If those aren't contacts, then what are they?"

I sighed. The one thing I dreaded most about transferring, arriving right on schedule.

Calm, I pushed his hand away. Raked the milk-soaked hair straight back off my face. Wiped my cheeks clean with a tissue until there was nothing left but a bare forehead and a face with no blood in it.

I looked him dead in the eye. "Watch."

He frowned, lost.

Then I peeled back my eyelid, one smooth practiced motion, and in front of the entire homeroom, I took my eye out.

I set the gold prosthetic down in front of him. His face had gone paper white.

I repeated myself, flat and even.

"It's not a contact lens. It's my prosthetic eye."

"Clear enough for you?"

The classroom had been loud a minute ago. Now it was a morgue.

Kai stared at my empty left socket for a long, long moment. Then he stumbled back two steps.

"How..." His voice came out wrong. His hand lifted on reflex, reaching for my eye socket.

I blocked it.

Head down, I slotted the prosthetic back in and worked it into place. It took effort. I knew exactly how wrecked I looked right now.

Didn't matter. I'd survived far uglier moments, more of them than I could count. This one didn't even sting.

I settled the eye, looked up, and met an expression I couldn't name.

"I thought you..." His lips trembled around the rest of it.

The bell rang.

I didn't wait. I stepped around him where he stood rigid, and went back to my seat.

My hair kept dripping. I wiped it down with a tissue, saying nothing.

It didn't help. The milk clung to me, sticky, impossible to ignore.

One pass through my hair and my tissues were nearly gone.

Fine. I gave up on the stains on my shirt and pulled out my book for class.

Kai stood beside my desk, lips pressed thin, not moving.

He watched me clean myself up without a word, the milk carton still crushed in his fist. The one he'd emptied on me.

When my hands went still, his eyes settled on my half-dried hair.

Finally he rapped his knuckles on the desk in front of mine. Delaney's desk.

"Give me your tissues." His voice came out rough.

Delaney glared at him. "Kai, what is wrong with you? The teacher's about to walk in. Go sit down."

"I said, give me the tissues!" His voice cracked through the room. "Are you deaf?"

The whole class was already pin-drop quiet.

Every head turned.

Delaney flinched. She bit her lip, eyes rimming red, dug half a pack of tissues out of her desk, and hurled it at his chest.

"You're insane. Do not yell at me."

He ignored her. Took the tissues. Held them out to me.

I didn't reach for them.

His hand hung there in the air.

"They're yours. Use them." His face was stone, and something frayed ran underneath his voice.

Slowly, I lifted my head and looked him in the eye.

"So is this you apologizing?" I asked, perfectly calm.

Chapter 2

One look at my gold iris and Kai flinched like he'd been jabbed with a needle. He whipped his head away, anywhere but my face.

"What are you staring at," he snapped. "They're yours. Take them."

It hit me a beat too late: from the second I took my eye out, his whole attitude had flipped a full one-eighty.

"If accepting your tissues means I'm forgiving you, then no thanks."

I kept my voice even and watched his brow knot up. "I'm not accepting your apology. So please take your things and stay away from me. Thank you."

His face went dark on the spot.

He could see talking wasn't working, so he skipped it. He shoved the tissues straight into my desk.

The moment he turned, I dropped them on the floor.

He picked them up without a sound. Moved to hand them back.

That was when the teacher rounded the doorway, textbooks in arm.

Delaney had been watching us go back and forth, and it was eating at her.

Before the teacher stepped in, she stood, grabbed Kai's arm, and hauled him toward the back.

"She wants nothing to do with you. Why are you still crawling back for more?"

On the way past, she slammed her hip into my desk. Hard.

I kept my eyes forward. Didn't give either of them a sliver of my attention.

Then, halfway through class, from the back row: two sharp cracks. Skin on skin.

Loud. You could tell whoever swung hadn't held back.

Half the class turned around to look.

Even Delaney, right in front of me, twisted around again and again.

And every time she looked back at Kai, she made sure to shoot me a glare on the return trip. Accusing. Like I'd committed some unforgivable crime.

Kai. Delaney. I couldn't be bothered with either of them.

I went blind and deaf on purpose.

Somehow I made it to the end of class. The sticky film on my skin had gotten worse.

I stood to go rinse off in the bathroom, and something caught my ankle.

The floor came up fast. I got my hands out in time, barely, but the fall still tore skin off my forearm in raw stripes.

A hiss escaped through my teeth.

Blood was already welling along my wrist where the skin had split, soaking into my sleeve, blooming into a stain big enough to scare people.

I braced to push myself up.

Someone shoved through the ring of gawkers, said nothing at all, hooked one arm around my waist and the other under my legs, and hauled me clean off the floor.

Chapter 3

I had zero warning. My hands grabbed his shoulders on pure instinct.

"Are you okay?" Kai's voice, right against my ear.

He saw the blood still running down my arm and his brows slammed together.

"Stop squirming. I'm taking you to the nurse's office. Now."

"I hurt my hand, not my foot." I kept my voice cold. "Put me down. I can walk."

He acted deaf. His arm clamped around my waist and stayed there.

"I can carry you." He flicked a glance down at me. "Quit playing tough."

The laugh that almost escaped me was pure disbelief. I opened my mouth to argue.

And that was when his ankle rolled.

His whole body pitched sideways.

Freefall. The weightlessness swallowed me whole, and something old and ugly flashed behind my eyes. Every muscle in my body locked.

"Kai!" The scream tore out of me.

He reacted fast, one hand flying up to cradle the back of my skull.

It didn't matter. Momentum slammed us both into the floor.

And since I was locked in his arms, I took the full weight of him, crushed underneath.

The back of my head cracked against something hard. The world rang like a struck bell.

Right before the dark closed over me, I heard him shouting at the crowd, panicked:

"Delaney, get over here! Your cousin just passed out!"

Something in my chest dropped.

So Kai knew. He knew I was Delaney's cousin.

No wonder he'd hated me on sight.

I woke up at exactly the wrong moment.

"You promised me! You said you'd teach her a lesson!"

Delaney's voice, shrill, drilling straight into my ear. "So why are you backing out now?"

I kept my eyes shut. From somewhere close came the sound of Kai's fingers drumming a slow rhythm on a desk.

My fingertip shifted inside my pocket. Without a sound, I pressed record.

"I did say I'd teach her a lesson."

Kai clicked his tongue, volume rising with his temper. "You never told me she was disabled!"

"You want me to torment a disabled girl? What do you take me for, Delaney? An animal?"

Delaney's outrage jammed in her throat and came out as a wounded howl.

"She's just some crippled little bitch!" Her voice climbed into a shriek. "If she'd wrecked your life, if she'd stolen everything you had, I'd love to watch you play saint and forgive her!"

Kai went quiet. Thinking, maybe. The drumming stopped.

Delaney stared at him, eyes red, and bit off every word.

"Kai. You promised me."

"Last time, I took the fall for you. I ate that suspension. You owe me."

"I don't want anything else. I just want you to handle her."

Her footsteps crossed the room. Then her voice dropped, right at his ear, every syllable ground out through her teeth.

"Destroy her."

"I don't care how."

The nurse's office went silent for a long, long time.

I could hear the wind lifting the curtain by the window.

I could hear Kai's sigh, so faint it barely existed.

And then I heard him say it.

"Fine. I'll do it."

Chapter 4

With Kai's promise in hand, Delaney's fury flipped to sunshine in a single breath.

She didn't even hold his attitude against him. She wanted to treat him to lunch, all smiles.

He didn't say no. The two of them left the nurse's office, one after the other.

The moment the door clicked shut, I opened my eyes.

My head still ached, a dull throb. Nothing serious.

I stopped the recording on my phone and sat up.

Look, I'd always known Delaney didn't like me.

The day I moved into her family's house, her face had said everything.

Her hostility just lived underneath all those fake smiles.

I'd simply never guessed how deep it went.

Deep enough to put the school bully on me. Destroy her, she'd said. I don't care how.

I thought about Kai slapping himself twice in the middle of class because he regretted bullying me.

Then I thought about his "Fine. I'll do it."

Hilarious. Genuinely.

But honestly? A part of me was looking forward to it.

I wanted to see exactly how Kai Mercer planned to destroy me.

I made it back to the classroom before lunch ended.

I hadn't even stepped through the door when his voice hit me, loud and full of swagger:

"Listen up! From today on, Wren Hale is off-limits!"

"Anybody says cripple, says one-eye, says any of that in front of her, I hear it once, I hit you once!"

My feet stopped at the doorway. My brow pulled tight.

No one had said any of those words. No one except Kai himself.

And now, after this little stunt, my name would be welded to them for good. Cripple. One-eye.

They were facts. Fine. But nobody enjoys being handled like a special case.

I turned to slip away, and a hand snatched my wrist.

"Wren's right here!" The person holding me sang it out, thrilled with herself.

I couldn't pull free. I looked up, straight into Delaney's smile, so bright it hurt to look at.

"Where'd you run off to? Kai's been looking everywhere for you."

She shoved me forward, into the center of the crowd, and right on cue Kai came down from the front of the room, walking straight at me.

"Wren Hale. I owe you an apology for what happened today!"

He planted himself in front of me and took my hand right out of Delaney's grip, his face the picture of sincerity.

"I'm sorry. I didn't know about your condition, and I said some ugly things!"

"And this morning I... accidentally dropped you."

He paused there. For half a second his expression warped, then smoothed itself back to earnest.

"So I am formally apologizing! You have to forgive me. Otherwise I won't sleep a wink tonight."

The instant he finished, every pair of eyes in the room converged on the two of us.

This was a stage play, directed by Kai and Delaney.

And I was the lead they couldn't run it without.

They'd already shoved me under the spotlight. There was no dodging this one.

Then again.

I wasn't planning to dodge.

Chapter 5

I stared straight at his face, no flinch in me anywhere.

"An apology with zero sincerity? I don't accept."

Kai's eyebrow ticked up. Whatever answer he'd expected, that wasn't it.

"How is this not sincere?" He gestured at the students behind me and blinked, the picture of earnestness. "I'm apologizing in front of the entire class. What more do you want?"

"You hurt me. And your idea of fixing it is to corner me in front of an audience and squeeze forgiveness out of me. You don't see how funny that is?"

A laugh actually slipped out of me. His logic was that good.

"You don't think you did a single thing wrong. You're handing down a 'sorry' from your throne and waiting for me to be grateful for it. You are a genuine hypocrite."

His smile froze on his face. Something dark moved behind his eyes.

Around us, the class clearly hadn't expected me to swing back that hard. Little gasps went up on every side.

Even Delaney, parked at my elbow to enjoy the show, arched an eyebrow, her expression hard to read.

I figured Kai's mood was in the gutter right about now.

And that was my problem how, exactly?

"So." I tilted my head and asked him, dead serious. "Can you get lost now?"

He stared at my flat expression for a long beat.

Then he laughed. Out loud.

He swept an arm out like a doorman, stepped aside, and cleared my path.

And called after me, loud enough for the room:

"Hey, Wren Hale! I'm going to show you sincerity!"

He meant it, apparently.

From that day on, he stopped going out to smoke between classes. Instead he took over the desk next to mine, propped his cheek on one hand, tilted his head, and just watched me.

Credit where it's due, the face was good.

When he looked at you like that, really looked, his eyes ran deep with something that could pass for devotion.

Too bad the face was all he had going.

He watched. I treated him like air and went about my day.

A few days passed like that, no incidents.

Neither of us said one extra word to the other.

Except things kept materializing beside my desk. A flower. A carton of milk. A chocolate.

Once, a sticky note with a cartoon pig doodled on it.

Under his expectant gaze, I gave none of it a reaction.

I gathered every last item and dropped the pile in the trash.

Kai watched me do it and smiled through clenched teeth.

"You've got nerve, Wren. You've really got nerve!"

I looked at him, quiet. "Stop playing this juvenile little pickup game. It's boring."

That startled an angry laugh out of him. He ran his tongue along the inside of his cheek, face going cold, and walked.

He figured out the trinket routine wasn't winning my heart.

So he switched strategies. Fast.

Before, he'd practically lived at my elbow, making sure I saw him and his bargain-bin "gifts" every time I turned my head.

Now? Days went by without him drifting past me once. Like he'd forgotten everything he said.

It changed nothing about my routine. I did what I always did.

Delaney, though. Delaney was getting antsy.

More than once I caught her pulling him into the stairwell, whispering about something.

Day after day she came back from those little conferences choking down her temper, while Kai carried on exactly as he pleased.

The two of them looked one push away from a screaming match.

For a while, I honestly wondered if their plan had fallen apart.

Chapter 6

Then came Friday, and the rain.

On my way back from the bathroom I passed the trash can, and there was my umbrella. Cut to ribbons. Stuffed into the corner of the bin.

I paused half a step. Lowered my eyes. Walked back to my seat like I'd seen nothing at all.

So. The plan to destroy me was finally starting.

Good. Let's see what kind of show Kai Mercer had prepared.

He had swapped seats with the person behind me, and he greeted me with a grin. "Wren. Lend me a pen?"

I ignored him. He didn't mind, just kept smiling, kept fishing for topics.

"You washed your hair last night, huh." He wound a lock of my hair around his fingertip, toying with it, idle.

Without a word, I pulled my hair back out of his fingers and scooted my chair forward a solid foot.

He took in my raised guard, a smile that wasn't quite a smile playing on his mouth.

To his credit, after hitting two soft walls he mostly left me alone.

The rain lasted the whole day. By final bell it hadn't eased at all.

I packed up slow, in no hurry to get home. Kai strolled along behind me, taking his sweet time.

At the bottom of the building I looked up at the downpour, gritted my teeth, and got ready to run for it.

A hand caught the back of my collar.

That absurdly good-looking face slid into view, thick with amusement.

"Where do you live? I'll walk you."

I lifted my eyes and met his, something flickering in them.

This time, I didn't say no.

The storm had blown in hard, and the rain came down in sheets.

His umbrella was small. Fine for one person. A squeeze for two.

I shrank in on myself as much as I could and still got soaked along one side.

Kai had it worse. He was tall to begin with, and he kept tilting the umbrella my way, so his white tee had soaked through ages ago. The wet fabric clung, and under it, faint, you could just make out the lines of muscle he usually hid under loose clothes.

"Come here." He hauled me in against him.

We were already close, forced together under one umbrella.

One pull, and there was no space left. My whole body was nearly flush against his.

He ran furnace-hot. Half holding, half shielding, he tucked me into the curve of him, out of the rain's reach.

I tipped my head up to look at him, and caught the faint smugness sitting in his eyes.

"What's with that look?" He bent closer, close enough that his breath landed warm on the tip of my nose, a smile threaded through his voice. "Don't tell me you've fallen for me."

I let his teasing hang in the air for a long moment.

Then I said, "You've been smoking. The smell's pretty strong."

His expression cracked. He stared at me like I'd spoken another language.

"No. Hold on." He looked genuinely lost. "In this exact scenario, you're supposed to blush a little. Get flustered. Something. And your one takeaway is whether or not I smoked?"

Fat raindrops hammered the umbrella, a steady rattle overhead.

The rest of the world, I could barely hear.

His indignant voice came through crystal clear.

I tilted my head back and let my gaze travel his face, unhurried.

And as his last word landed, I rose onto my toes and pressed a kiss to his lips.

Light. Quick. Gone in a blink.

But Kai stopped. All of him. Frozen where he stood, unable to move a single step.

He stared at me like I couldn't be real, fingertips drifting up to brush his own lips, parted around nothing.

Shock in his eyes.

And under it, a flicker of panic.

Chapter 7

"Wren. You kissed me?" Kai couldn't hold the question in.

"Yes," I said, level as ever.

"It has to at least go that far before anyone blushes or gets flustered."

It took him a second to realize I was answering his question from before.

He swore under his breath and clapped a hand over his own reddening cheek.

I'd had my fun. I was soaked anyway. Might as well jog the rest of the way home.

I made it two steps before he yanked me back.

No warning, no give. He pulled me into the mouth of a back alley, angled the umbrella to block the street from view, pushed me up against the wall, and bent down and took my lips like they'd never belonged to me.

He didn't really know how to kiss.

He kissed like something feral. All instinct, tongue prying my lips open, reckless and everywhere at once, like he refused to stop until he'd left his taste on me for good.

Our breath tangled, broke, tangled again. His came fast and rough, and the narrow space between the wall and his body caught heat.

It took a cold raindrop landing on his burning cheek to bring him back.

He held me and dragged in air, breathing so hard I could see his chest heave with it.

I leaned into the crook of his arm, eyes lowered, and heard his voice come out wrecked.

"Wren. That's how you kiss someone."

"Got it?"

I didn't answer.

Instead I tipped my chin up and breathed out, one slow breath, right across his face.

While he stood there stunned, I said, offhand, "Minty."

He froze. Then I watched the realization land on him like a dropped weight.

The cigarettes he'd smoked today were menthols.

He'd left his taste on the good girl. Marked her with it.

His breathing went heavier at the thought. I could hear it change.

His gaze dropped to my lips, kiss-swollen and red, and his body leaned in on its own, like he was going to do it all over again.

I tilted my head back. Waiting.

But this time he didn't close the distance.

He dropped his head back against the wall instead. Thunked it there. Hard.

A long moment passed. Then, very low, I heard him curse.

"Fuck."

"How is she this sweet..."

After that day, something about Kai changed.

Before, he'd been a walking question mark who occasionally saved up a bellyful of mischief just to mess with me.

Now I walked in to find my classroom chores already done, my desk wiped down, and a carefully arranged breakfast sitting on it.

I arched an eyebrow.

"You don't need to do any of this." I found him and set the breakfast back down in front of his face.

He sat with one ankle crossed over his knee, chin propped in both hands. He didn't answer. He asked his own question instead.

"You don't like bagels and orange juice?"

"I'll bring milk and sandwiches tomorrow, then."

I frowned, and he kept muttering to himself like I hadn't spoken.

"You're way too skinny anyway. Picking you up was like picking up air. You could stand to gain some."

This boy did not listen to a word anyone said.

"When I say I don't need it, I mean no. As in, don't."

I restated my position, slowly, clearly. But I'd forgotten his brain wasn't wired like other people's.

"Oh," he said. Then he smiled, sweet as anything. "What if I make it myself? Want it then?"

I stopped wasting words. I took the breakfast he'd pushed over and smashed it into his face.

And when I turned around, Delaney was standing in the doorway.

Bone-white. Staring at Kai.

Chapter 8

I raised an eyebrow. And then, sitting right there in my chair, I smiled.

Under the full weight of Delaney's glare, I turned to Kai and said, "If you make it yourself, I might do you the honor."

His eyes lit. Whatever picture just formed in his head, the corner of his mouth climbed like it had somewhere to be.

"Deal." The grin bled into his voice. "Tomorrow. Made by me. Lucky you!"

I gave him nothing either way.

I just watched Delaney slam her bag down, knuckles squeezed white, shaking from head to toe.

Kai noticed none of it. He'd gotten his answer, and he was in a mood to hum about it.

Again and again Delaney started to turn toward him. Each time she met my eyes instead, and whatever she found in my not-quite-smile sent her swinging back around, unsatisfied.

By noon she couldn't stand it anymore. She called him out of the room.

The two of them left, one after the other.

I thought about it for a second. Then I closed my book and followed.

I stopped just short of the stairwell corner. Through the gap in the railing, I could see them both.

"Have you lost your mind?!" Delaney's voice tore up the stairwell. "I told you to destroy Wren, not to become her personal simp!"

"What is this? Homemade breakfast? Are you actually sick in the head, Kai?!"

Lucky for her, almost no one wandered the halls at lunch. Screaming like that would have drawn a crowd.

Kai had clearly done that math too. His voice came out cold.

"Go on. Scream louder."

"You that worried the whole school doesn't know you're cooking up something rotten?"

Delaney shook with rage, eyes burned red, glaring at him like she could set him on fire.

A lighter clicked.

He'd pulled out his cigarettes, ready to smoke. Then his eyes caught the label on the pack.

MENTHOL.

He stared at it a beat too long, somewhere else entirely.

Then he slid the pack back into his pocket, unopened.

"I said I'd help you, and I keep my word." Impatience leaked through his voice. "You want Wren's name dragged through the mud. You want her life to feel worse than death. Then she has to get her happiness first, doesn't she? And then you break it."

Delaney went blank.

He pressed on. "Didn't you say her childhood was miserable?"

"Tell me about her past. And the thing with her eye. All of it."

"Why do you want to know?" For a second, Delaney's brain actually came back online.

"Because it's useful, obviously!" he snapped. "Stop asking questions and talk!"

With him set on it like that, whatever questions she had left died unasked. Under his prodding, she emptied out my entire history.

It really wasn't much of a story.

I was around ten when my parents and I got caught in a crash on the highway.

Two dead. One survivor.

I lived. My left eye didn't.

After that, I got passed around the relatives like a piece of furniture.

Delaney told him none of the relatives wanted me. Only her mom brought me home and treated me like something precious.

She said I stole her bedroom. Said I was a two-faced little sneak who had her whole family wrapped around my finger. Said they forgot her eighteenth birthday entirely, but somehow remembered to throw mine.

In Delaney's telling, I was a disgusting little fake, and she hated me enough to choke on it.

Kai listened for a long, long time.

Then he asked, "So what does she like to eat?"

The curse Delaney had loaded and aimed jammed dead in her throat.

Chapter 9

I stretched, done listening, and wandered off to the front office to sign myself out for the afternoon.

By the time Kai and Delaney came back, one after the other, I was already gone.

He assumed I was sick. A dozen texts landed in a row.

I couldn't be bothered to answer. I muted him.

The next day, I didn't go to school either.

He sent me a photo of the breakfast he'd made. Then a second photo: the back of his hand, blistered in three fat welts.

[Him: This hurts SO bad. Made breakfast for a certain heartless little someone, burned actual blisters onto my hand. And that someone didn't just skip school. She hasn't sent me one single text. I'm tired, emotionally.]

He kept it up, wounded to the core, a crying emoji every few minutes.

I thought about it for a while.

Then I found a kiss-it-better emoji, the little figure blowing gently on a boo-boo, and sent that.

The other side of the chat went instantly, completely silent.

No more crying emojis. Nothing. For a long, long time.

I didn't even have to guess. I could picture exactly what shade of red his face turned the second he understood what the little figure was doing.

He looked like the school's resident menace. All swagger, all trouble.

But underneath it, Kai Mercer was weirdly, hopelessly innocent.

I didn't come back until the third day.

The instant Kai saw me he went stock-still, something leaping in him, halfway out of his seat before he wrestled it back down.

He held out until final bell. Until the last classmate cleared the room.

Then he moved. Both doors, front and back, locked before I could blink. He crossed the room fast, dropped into the seat beside me, and crowded me into the corner, glaring like he meant murder.

"Wren. Were you off pulling heists for two days?"

"I sent you over a hundred messages and you answered with one lousy emoji?!"

"Do you know I got up at five in the morning to make you breakfast!"

He ground it out through his teeth, looking one breath away from biting me in half and swallowing me whole.

I packed up my desk, unhurried, and let the storm blow itself out.

Then I reached into my drawer, pulled out that breakfast, and asked, "Did you make this with your own hands?"

He blinked. Nodded.

One second later he watched me open the bag, calm as anything, and put his cooking straight into my mouth.

He lost it. He smacked the food out of my hand, voice cracking sharp.

"That's been sitting there for two days, it's spoiled! Why would you eat it?!"

I didn't much care either way.

"I promised you. If you made it, I'd eat it."

I wiped the corner of my mouth with one finger and looked up, straight into an expression with too many things in it.

I don't know why, but meeting his eyes just then, the rainy day came back to me. His voice under the umbrella.

"What's with that look?" I asked, a smile that wasn't quite a smile. "Don't tell me you've fallen for me."

He snapped back to himself, gaze hazy on my face.

I waited for the sputtering. The outraged denial.

A kiss landed instead.

He dragged his chair in, like whatever held him back had finally snapped, caged me inside his arms, and kissed me like nothing else in the room existed.

It was nothing like the rain. Nothing like that heat.

This kiss, out of nowhere, felt solemn. Like it was signing something.

And while it turned my head inside out, I heard his voice, scraped raw.

"Yes."

"I think I've fallen for you."

Chapter 10

I opened my eyes to the look of a boy who'd just set down something heavy.

"Wren Hale. I like you." He said it again, dead serious this time. "Do you want to try? Being with me?"

His eyes were all hope, nothing held back.

I stalled for half a second. Then, under that gaze, I let a faint smile through.

So this was it. The carefully crafted opening act of my worse-than-death.

I was genuinely curious how Kai Mercer planned to make me happy.

And what move he'd use, when the time came, to shatter that happiness with his own two hands and drop me into hell.

Don't disappoint me, Kai.

Under his waiting eyes, I nodded, slow, and gave him one word.

"Okay."

Go ahead, then. Try.

His eyes blazed like stadium lights.

The news that Kai and I were together tore through the class in a day.

The boy who'd once jabbed a finger in my face, who'd dumped milk over my head without a flicker of mercy, now orbited me like a devoted dog.

I mentioned offhand that I wanted something sweet. He cut class and came back with a full-sugar boba.

He smoked. Then one day I covered my nose and said, "The smoke's really strong. I don't like it."

He didn't argue. He announced, on the spot, that he was quitting.

Then he dropped every cigarette left in his pocket into a cup of water and threw the whole mess out.

In all the days after, he never smoked again.

"One word from Wren and it's law around here!" Delaney sniped from the sidelines. "Kai, look at yourself. Completely whipped. She says jump, you jump. Have you no shame?"

He rolled the lollipop to the other side of his mouth and gave her half a glance.

"'Cause I want to. You got a problem with that?"

Delaney shook, head to toe.

He didn't spare her another look. He went back to playing with my hair, focused, and tuned her out of existence.

In the end she ran out of the room in tears.

I finally lifted my head from my worksheet. I watched Delaney's back for a moment.

Then I turned to Kai. "You made her cry. Go apologize."

He clearly didn't want to.

So I set down my pen and leaned in to his ear. "When you come back, I'll give you your birthday present early."

"Really?" His eyes lit instantly. Every ounce of reluctance evaporated.

He left me a "be right back" and hurried out after Delaney.

I watched his back disappear through the doorway.

Then I rose, unhurried, and walked to Delaney's desk.

Pressed under her pencil case was a note. Two words on it: PA ROOM.

The place she'd picked, ages ago, to have it out with Kai.

I took the note, tore it into little pieces, and let them flutter into the trash.

Once this gift was delivered, no one would ever know that someone had read her script in advance.

I went back to my seat, propped my chin in my hand, and listened to the classroom speaker mounted on the wall. Praying, quietly.

Praying Delaney would be smart about this.

I'd nudged her this far. Surely she'd get it.

Today also happened to be Kai's birthday.

If Delaney played her part, she'd be helping me deliver his big present.

Delaney had been holding this in for weeks. She was dying to have it out with Kai, face to face.

And the PA room was the single best place in this school to have things out.

Because every word spoken in that room could travel, untouched, straight into the speaker on our classroom wall.

And then, right on cue, the speaker crackled to life with Kai's impatient voice.

"What is your problem now?"

"Didn't I tell you already? Everything is going according to my plan!"

My lips curved. So Delaney wasn't that stupid after all.

Her voice came through next, soaked in tears she wanted him to hear.

"I think you've gotten addicted to playing boyfriend. You actually think Wren is your girlfriend now, don't you!"

Chapter 11