“Hey Raf, can you actually stick around for a minute?” she asks sweetly, batting her lashes and glancing past me to the few students that remain.
I narrow my eyes in suspicion, but curiosity gets the best of me. Professor Turner’s hot, and I’ve heard Ford bragging abouther blowjobs being top tier. “Sure,” I mumble, sidestepping and leaning a hip against the edge of her desk.
She’s quick to hand off the last few papers, and when only the two of us remain, she approaches me with my assignment.
“I had no idea you had such deep feelings,” she coos, her voice soft like she’s talking to a damn child. “But I’m glad you’re working through them.”
I blink back at her in confusion, and she seems to take my silence as some kind of invitation.
“If you need to talk about it, or let it out, I’ve got office hours,” she offers, finally handing over the damn paper.
My fingers curl around the edges as I take it from her, eyes dropping the bright red ‘A’ circled near the top, then bouncing back up to meet hers.
The fuck is she talking about?
“The parallels you drew between Ethan Frome’s emotional and spiritual numbness and your own experience with your mother’s death brought me to tears,” Turner breathes, her big green eyes rounded in earnestness. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been so moved by a literary analysis paper, most students just half-ass these things. Really well done, Raf.”
I think I’ve stopped breathing, my heart ceasing to pump blood through my body. I’m stuck in some strange state of suspended animation, my mind tripping over itself in a struggle to process what the fuck is happening right now.
What does Ava even know about my mother, about how her death affected me? How much has the little bitch pieced together, and how fucking dare she expose me by writing about it?
The longer I stand here, the more I feel like I’m going to explode. I try to look down at the paper again, to make out the words on the page, but I can’t discern anything through the shadowy haze distorting my vision.
Professor Turner just keeps staring at me expectantly, and it makes me want to punch something.
Someone.
“I’m sure it wasn’t easy to open up like that,” she says, reaching out to set a sympathetic hand on my arm. “Like I said, I’m here if you want to continue exploring those feelings, try to process some of your emotions through other literary works that might resonate with what you’ve been through.”
The way she holds my gaze tells me she’s dead serious, but that only adds fuel to the fire. I don’t need some random fucking college professorpityingme. And here I thought she wanted me to stay after class so she could blow me since Ford couldn’t get it up yesterday.
“I’ll let you know” I grit out, shaking her hand off my arm and pivoting toward the door.
I immediately bolt, taking the stairs two at a time back up the aisle, blood boiling, fists clenched, on a mission to fuckingdestroyAva Morrow.
She isn’t waiting in the hallway when I push through the door to exit the classroom, though, and she’s not loitering outside the building either. The fact that she bailed– that she disobeyed a direct order from a King– makes me even more murderous. I storm through campus in the direction of the dorms, past clusters of students who take one look at my face and step the hell out of the way. I’m halfway there when I abruptly stop to actually try toreadthe paper again, needing to see for myself exactly what Ava wrote, and every line sinks in like a blade. Different metaphors for grief, how it can leave a person feeling numb or directionless or full of rage. Tying it all back to my mother’s death and how I’m still living that experience every day.
The fury feels like it’s burning me up from the inside out. Ava’s words are all I can see, laid out neat and perfect on thepage as if she knew exactly what she was doing. The worst part is, it’s like she pulled them straight from my own brain, like she fuckinggets it. This is the second time today that it feels as if I’ve been punched in the gut by this girl, but this time, I’m not stopping myself from hitting back.
“Hey, Raf,” a random voice calls– someone I don’t know and don’t care to. I ignore it, ignore everything except the paper still clutched in my trembling grip. I want to ball it up, tear it to shreds, light it on fire… but all I can do is stare at the words, reading them over and over like a goddamn masochist until they all start to blur together.
Ava’s got no idea how deep this runs, no clue who she’s messing with. I never thought she had the balls to pull something like this, but now the fucking gloves are off.
The sky is low and gray, clouds pushing down as I resume my rampage toward Sutton Hall, adrenaline and fury taking the wheel. Everything narrows into a single, focused point.Find Ava. Make her hurt. Make her pay.
The anger feels like a living, breathing thing, wrapping its claws around my throat, choking the life out of me. She left after I told her to stay because she knew exactly what she did. She did it on purpose to fuck with me, knowing how deep this would cut. Knowing it’d make me bleed.
I pick up my pace, shoes hitting the pavement hard and relentless as I approach the back door of the building. Another student is coming out and he holds the door open, says something, but I’m already past him and pounding up the stairs on a mission.
I storm into our top floor apartment like a fucking hurricane, my rage leaving a trail of destruction as I slam my backpack against the wall and kick the door closed behind me. Wes and Ford are on the couch in the living room, glued to the TV screenwith Playstation controllers in their hands. They don’t even glance back as I stomp up behind them, roaring, “Where is she?”
Ford slowly turns his head, raising an eyebrow. “In her room.”
I blow past them and down the hallway, still clutching the paper in my fist. The hinges almost give way when I kick her door in, Ava sitting up on her bed with a start as I rush toward her. She opens her mouth, but before she can get a word out, I’ve got hold of her wrist, hauling her off the bed and to her feet as her books clatter to the floor around us.
“Ow, Raf, you’re hurting me!” she whines, brown eyes wide with fear and confusion as I wrench her arm behind her back, shoving her chest up against the closest wall.
I can’t even hear her over the roar in my head as I crowd in behind her, pinning her to the brick with my weight. The shadows have me now, the darkness inside swallowing up any last trace of rationality. “What the fuck is this?” I demand, shoving the paper in her face, the words on it still burning in my brain like a brand.
