I shimmied further down until my head was resting on his chest. His heart was beating a steady rhythm, if not a little fast. My guess—he was either excited or nervous, possibly both. I knew I was. His natural scent clung to his shirt and made my body respond in ways I couldn’t control. My gut stirred with desire as I breathed him in. Nothing on the planet smelled as good as Drew. Until earlier in the year, I would never have thought I’d be on a date with Drew Graves. We were worlds apart in the social hierarchy of high school. To put it bluntly, I’d thought he was entirely out of my league. He perused around, a social butterfly, and I—well, we’ll just say I was socially awkward. We sat in silence, watching the space station, as I let my mind take me back to the moment when everything changed.
****
Nine months before…
The lie I’d been living had finally caught up with me. As I hunched against the concrete wall under the bleachers, mud seeping through the hem of my jeans, a quote I’d read at least a thousand times skipped through my head, “And the truth shall set you free!” The only problem was, telling the truth at that moment would likely have made things worse—not better, and right then, I needed better.
The foul scent of cheap alcohol and the pungent odor of weed enveloped him as he staggered past the girls in his company to tower over my shaking form. They all laughed and mistook my trembles for fear, but I was shaking because it was mid-October and eleven o’clock on a Friday night. I was freezing, and the homecoming game had just ended in defeat for the second year in a row. Jennifer, my best friend, had just gone to get us some hot chocolate when Aiden and his feminine entourage took the window of opportunity to corner me. Bending down until he was inches from my face, he swayed and peered at me through cold, calculating, blood-shot eyes. Every other time he’d cornered me, it had simply been an annoyance, but this time something different—something darker, lurked in his eyes.
“Rumor has it that your freak factor just went through the roof. The word around school is that you have more than one person living in that head of yours, Garrows.”
Well now, isn’t he just a piece of work. He has no idea just how close to home he’s hitting, does he? The sassy sixteen-year-old voice in my head and the emotions being carried through my body because of it were not my own, and yet, I couldn’t agree with her more.
Aiden waited for a beat, and when I didn’t speak but instead stared at the mud I was standing in, he continued. “So, the rumors are true, you do belong in a nut-house. You do have different personalities, so who am I talking to now, or are y’all sharing the same name.”
“It’s called multiple personalities, Aiden,” Clarissa chimed in from behind him with an air of supremacy accompanied by a judgmental tone.”
Slowly, my gaze turned toward the grating cadence of Clarissa’s voice. I pinned a resentful glare to my Volleyball teammate because I knew she was more than likely the driving force behind what was about to happen to me. It was bad enough living in a small southern town that was predominately white when I wasn’t. What made it worse was the only other mixed girl my age, in the entire school, had an annoying habit of going out of her way to make my life a living hell.
“Are we done here, Aiden,” I said, facing him again, “because honestly, I have better things to do than sit here and listen to your arrogant, stupid…”
I was practically spitting the words in his face, when he shut me up by shoving me—hard, against the cold, damp wall of concrete. My head smacked into the wall, air whooshed from my lungs, and I couldn’t catch my breath as he lifted me off the ground by my neck. Panic ceased my throat as the trembles from the cold morphed into fear, racked tremors. Black spots drifted into my peripheral as my vision fragmented under the pain blooming at the back of my head.
“Aiden put her down!” one of the girls shrieked, “You’re killing her!”
He didn’t listen but instead slammed me against the wall again and again as the smell of whatever he’d been drinking, and blood flooded my senses. I dimly registered that the coppery scent was likely my blood.
Fight back, Eden!
Echo screamed in my head as if her demanding that I take action could somehow make me do just that. I clawed at the hands around my throat, trying to break his grasp. As the breath I struggled to take was being pinched off, I started flailing my legs around, trying, in vain, to wiggle myself free, but the black spots were getting bigger, and darkness was closing in. I knew if I passed out, I’d be as good as dead.
“Aiden—damn it! Aiden, let her go! What the hell are you doing,” a deep voice—a new voice demanded.
One moment I was on the brink of losing consciousness, and in the next, I was crumbling to the ground, gasping for air in a shallow puddle of mud.
