Page 55 of Redeeming the Villain
It wouldn’t usually bother me, but my quiet, safe space became anything but. Sometimes, my mind is too loud, and I either need complete silence around me to help calm me or I need overstimulation to drown everything out. There’s no real in-between, which can be rather frustrating when I don’t even know which one I need.
It’s been a lot better since they let me move in though. I have my tiny section of the mansion I stick to. I have everything I need. I don’t think me living there is ever going to become a problem for them, but getting me to leave might. Because it’s going to be damn hard to walk away from those amenities.
I’ve been lost in my mind all morning, running my brain ragged with nonstop thoughts—anything I can do to distract myself from the growing wound reopening in my heart.
I wish I could just black out and skip this part of the year and wake up after the fact. I feel like that would be less painful. Both for me and everyone around me.
My chest tightens as I stride into class. Alora’s doe-eyed gaze locks on to me immediately. I stop in my tracks without meaning to. Her stare is blank and unreadable. But I can’t miss it—the glimmer of hope in her eyes. My chest twists tighter.
She can’t have hope that whatever happened in her dorm has changed something between us.
It hasn’t, and it won’t.
Right?
The class is nearly full already, but my seat between Asher and Griffin is waiting for me.
Needing to kill that hopefulness, I tear my gaze from her without so much as blinking and glance to the ground as I walk to the second row.
Slipping one side of my headphones off of my ear, I step past a few smiling girls, giving them a wave, and they giggle in response.
Walking past Dean and Asher, I drop into my seat, setting my backpack on the ground by my feet.
Griffin immediately greets me. “About time. Thought you weren’t going to make it.”
“Funny,” I mutter, slipping my headphones off, folding them up and tucking them into my sweatshirt pocket. “The professor’s not even here yet. We still have, like, three minutes.”
His stare lingers for a second too long, and I can feel the concern in the weight of his gaze.
He leans over, turning his head to the side so only I can hear what he’s about to say. “You all right, man?”
I shoo his concern away with a nonchalant shrug. “I’m fine.”
“You know I’m here whenever you need. Even if you just need someone to listen. Don’t bottle it up,” he murmurs.
His kind words would probably soften anyone else, but all they do is lock down my heart even more, the thorns of my emotional barricade tightening and constricting more by the second. It’s not his fault though; it’s my own fucked-up brain’s.
Nodding sharply once, I take my notebook out of my bag, along with a pen. Setting it on my notebook, I bend back down to get my water bottle and bump the desk. As if frozen, I watch in slow motion as it rolls off of the notebook and drops to the ground … right beneath Alora’s seat.
Fuckinggreat.
It makes a loud sound as it hits the metal of her chair leg. She glances down and picks it up.
Just keep it. Just keep it and never turn around.
Sliding her arm across the top of the backrest, she twists in her chair and looks up at Griffin. “Did you drop this?”
He shakes his head, glancing at me. “It’s Malik’s.”
Clenching and unclenching my jaw, I fight the urge to look straight down at her as her attention shifts to me. But when I see the redness around her eyes, I stare unabashedly.
She lifts it in the air toward me, and as I reach out, my eyes fall to the letters tattooed on my right hand’s knuckles—Mon my thumb,Ion my pointer finger,Con my middle finger, and so on as Micah’s name is spelled on my skin.
A surge of anger floods my system as I remember who she is. One ofthem. The ones who look down on everyone beneath them.
Someone who will never understand what my life is like. Who could never understand why I am the way I am.
“Here,” she murmurs softly.
