of his packs and hold it out to me. I stare at it and then up at him, but he smirks and shrugs back.
“If you don’t want North or Nox to drive you home, then this is it, Fallows.”
He makes a great point.
I take the helmet and pull it out, fumbling with the strap a little to tighten it. He watches me, looking like he wants to reach over and help, but restrains himself, and once I’m set, he climbs onto the motorbike, holding an arm out to help me on as the garage door opens in front of us.
I haven’t been on one for years.
I can’t think about my father and his love of dirt bikes right now. I can’t think about being six years old and sitting in front of him on one, my long dark hair whipping around us both as he drove around the tracks. I remember feeling as though we were going so fast when we were probably only going a few miles an hour.
There’s still a moment of déjà vu as I slide into the seat behind Gabe, hesitating for a second before wrapping my arms around his waist and pressing myself against his back as the engine roars to life underneath us. He kicks the stand up and away and then we’re off, flying out of the garage and down the paved driveway without a care for anyone around us.
Gabe drives like he’s ready to die and that’s something I can get behind.
Even after years of being on the run and doing everything I could to survive, there’s some deep and dark part of me who hears the call of messy vehicular death on the asphalt and desperately craves it. I wonder how badly my Bonds would hate me then, to know that I’d choose a grisly death over being forced to stick around the lot of them.
Imagining their reactions keeps me busy the entire ride back to the dorms.
Gabe kills the engine the second we pull up, but he doesn’t move from the seat as I swing off. I hand him the helmet and clear my throat a little, awkward as hell now that I have to acknowledge him helping me out.
He saves me from trying. “Ashlee is a fucking bitch but you should be prepared. Nox is going to bring someone every week and you can’t threaten them all. Crystal is a Flame and she’ll singe your eyebrows off the first second she can. Also, Yasmine is a living Voodoo Doll and she’ll stab herself without a second thought.”
I scoff and adjust my bag on my back. “Of course he fucks crazy, he seems like the type.”
Gabe shrugs and looks out over the street so he doesn’t have to look at me as he replies, “You can’t blame him, you’re the one who ran away and ruined everything.”
When my alarm wakes me the next morning, I feel a pooling of dread deep in my gut.
I lay there in the pokey bed to try to figure out why my entire body feels like lead, why the thought of climbing out of this bed fills me with the icy tendrils of fear, but there’s nothing, no reason for me to be dragging my ass today.
So I push the feeling away and get up.
The communal bathrooms are busy and as much as I hate being in there, I never actually got to shower after the mess that was the TT class yesterday and my legs are still covered in dirt, so it’s a nonnegotiable.
The longer I’m here on campus, the better I’m getting at blocking out the shit these petty girls have to say to me. Most of them have taken to pretending I don’t exist, like the crimes I committed by running away mean that I’m not worth a second of their time, so they’re all shunning me.
I can handle that.
It’s the four or five of them who are petty, mouthy assholes that make living here a nightmare. I scrub down as quickly as I can and dress in the stall. I’m not dumb enough to walk out in a towel because even with the campus-wide rules about appropriate gift usage, I wouldn’t trust any of them not to mess with me while I was vulnerable like that.
By the time Gabe arrives at my door to walk me down, I’m too busy fussing with my bag full of assignments to take much notice of him or the fact that he’s absolutely seething with