No one talks. No one moves other than the boy. Even the kids who darted past us stop to turn and watch. What are they looking at? I open my lips to thank the boy, but he leans in, sucking the air from my lungs.
My guardian angel dips his head, heating my forehead with his breath, before he inhales deeply like he is trying to determine if I am something he can eat. My breath catches low in my throat, and even though black spots dot my vision, I refuse to breathe. He inhales again, his nose kissing the top of my white-blonde hair, so light compared to his own. He catches the single lock of black that runs alongside my temple and rolls it in between his fingers.
He doesn’t glance at Molly. He doesn’t look at anyone else, only me.
“What is your name?” he asks, his voice low and rough like he gargles with a bit of gravel every night.
“Harlow Weathersby,” I say, but it’s so soft I think only he and I can hear it.
“Harlow.” He repeats my name as though he savors the taste of it.
My mouth waters as I lean into him. A foreign fire untangles low in my belly from a knot I didn’t realize was there before.
His steely gaze returns to my black lock of hair in his hand, but disinterest now replaces the fire I thought I saw there. He meets my gaze, his gray irises locked on my blue, and for a moment, the world disappears around us, lost to the shadows while we live on together in brilliant technicolor.
The darkness inside my chest rips me apart, shredding at my insides as it tries to claw free.
The boy drops my lock of hair as Molly cries softly beside me on the grass. Then he slams into me, his hands boxing me in on either side of my shoulders. I hiss through my teeth as the stone wall behind me cuts into my back.
“She,” he growls, leaning in so close his words kiss my mouth, “is mine.”
Then he pushes away from me, and I fall to the ground, my knees giving way underneath me.
He is no angel.
He is a wicked, wicked boy.
3
Ian
My heart batters against my chest like a run-away jackhammer as I stalk away toward the administration building. I breathe in deeply as Chase, Everett, and Archie take their place at my sides. She smelled like fresh-cut granny smiths, my own personal apple pie.
I groan, my eyes rolling back into my skull as I think about how good she felt pressed against me, the heat of her soft skin brushing against mine, her nipples hard against my chest. My cock twitches, ready to go back and play. I wanted to fuck her right where she stood, but I doubt she would be into voyeurism and I don’t like to share.
“Ian,” Everett says, brushing a rogue curl away from his hazel eyes. My name is both a question and a statement.
Archie and Chase let him take the lead on this one. How smart of them.
“You can’t help her,” he says, his words not judgmental, just matter of fact.
My nostrils flare when I remember Berkshire and the smug look on his stupid face. Why did she have to pick the Thing as her friend?
“What the fuck do you know?” I snap.
Everett’s expression remains guarded. He’d let me beat the shit out of him just to get this…this…girl out of my system. Of course, he’d then beat the shit out of me, but I’d definitely make him work for it.
“What’s your plan?” he asks.
A curse erupts from behind my clenched teeth. I want to slam my first into something. Where the fuck is that football? I rip it away from Chase and punch it angrily between my hands like I’m playing hot potato with myself.
“I don’t know,” I reply, my words more misery than vowels and consonants.
“You know the Rules,” Everett says.
“I don’t give a fuck about the Rules!” We made them a long time ago, or at least, it feels like it was a long time ago.
“She chose her, Ian,” Everett says. “There’s no way out of it, and you know it.”
But the girl doesn’t know, I want to scream. She does not understand what bomb just landed on her. We were drunk and angry and stupid and…
Archie interrupts my murderous thoughts.
“There is another way,” he says, looking at his phone like we are already boring him, his thumb swiping lazily at the screen.
“What are you…” Everett begins, but Archie cuts him off, flashing a shit-eating grin and raising one self-assured eyebrow.
“The girlfriend exemption.”
I am torn between kissing Archie on the lips—God knows what rumors that would start—and grabbing him by the lapels and demanding to know why he is smiling like that.
When Archie proposed it two years ago, late in the morning at Aurora’s pool house, I had rolled my eyes and given him shit for weeks. He was always thinking of the next girl, the one he was certain existed, though he hadn’t met her yet. I voted for it out of love for my brother, and Aurora joined me out of…whatever for me, breaking what would’ve otherwise been a tie.
“There’s no way, man,” Chase grunts, shaking his head. “That clause was a joke. You know the Rules.”
“At least Ian called dibs,” Everett muses. “No one’s ever done that before. Well, except Finn with the Thing.”
I roll my eyes. It’s always been a game, just a foolish game. Until now.
Everett lowers his voice, though you’d need a death wish or at least an AWOL self-preservation instinct to try to listen in on us.
“You play by the Rules, Ian.” He grips my forearm, and we all stop walking as he stares at me, his lips thinned into a wan line. “You know the price if you don’t.”
“I know the price,” I bite back.
As the sun beats down on my face, I roll
