Fearless The King Series Book One - By Tawdra Kandle Page 0,13
really okay… get the nurse… Images from Michael’s thoughts flashed into my throbbing head. I screwed up my eyes and dropped my forehead down on my knees, trying to dull the pain. I needed to separate what he was thinking from my own mind, but at the same time, I didn’t want to do it. I wanted to pull him in closer and savor the connection.
Going to get help…
“No, don’t go!” I burst out before I could stop myself. “Don’t leave me here.”
Michael frowned down at me. “I didn’t move.” He released my arm and brushed my hair away from my face. “But I think we should get you to the nurse. You’re shaking.”
“I’ll be all right in a minute. I’ll go call my mom.” I pushed up to my feet, and Michael took a step back. His thoughts were whirling suspiciously, and I couldn’t meet his eyes.
“Can you make it to the office?”
I nodded, still staring at the ground. “I think so.”
“See you at lunch?”
I ventured a glance up. “Are you sure you still want me to eat with you?”
He didn’t answer me right away. I couldn’t read his expression, and his thoughts were so jumbled that it was hard to get a fix on them, either.
Then he reached out and touched my cheek with the very tip of his finger. With the vaguest ghost of a smile, he answered, “Of course. I’ll see you then.”
By the time my mom arrived at the school with a dry pair of jeans and a fresh shirt—and not a few questions about how I had ended up wet—Chemistry was over and English had begun. I tried to slip unobtrusively into the classroom, but it was not to be. Mrs. Cook stopped lecturing when I opened the door; I meekly handed her the pass that excused my tardiness and sat in the first empty desk I spied.
As she resumed teaching, I scribbled some notes that I hoped would eventually make sense. When the bell rang, Mrs. Cook called me to her desk.
“You’ll need to copy the notes you missed from someone,” she said, her eyes roving over the last students in the classroom. “Ah, Amber! Could you come here, please? Can you lend Tasmyn your notebook?”
She addressed a girl who had been sitting diagonally across the aisle from me. I hadn’t really noticed her before this; Amber was the kind of girl who blended into the background easily. Her hair was brown, a little darker and straighter than mine. She was pretty in a very low-key way, wore no makeup that I could see and kept her hair in a simple ponytail low down her back. She wore jeans and a pale pink t-shirt and was not a little flustered to have been singled out by Mrs. Cook.
Amber ducked her head and nodded in response to the teacher. She flipped her notebook open to the needed page and handed it to me. I caught her eye and smiled.
“Thanks. I really appreciate this.” Amber stared at me for a moment, then nodded again.
“I can copy the notes over lunch and get them back to you before the end of the day, if you’d like,” I added.
“No rush,” she mumbled. “You can just bring the notebook to class tomorrow. I won’t need it until then.”
“Okay,” I replied. “Thanks again.” I watched as she left the classroom, looking like she was in a hurry. I thanked the teacher and headed toward the cafeteria.
As much as I had been looking forward to lunch earlier, I was kind of worried about it now. With some time to think about what had happened this morning, would Michael have figured out anything? Would he think I was crazy or some kind of freak?
All the way from my locker to the lunchroom, I prepared myself to be cool and collected, as self-assured and blasé as Nell was. No matter what Michael had to say, I would deal with it. I might even be able to play off this morning’s events. After all, I hadn’t told him anything. I could explain away nearly all of it. My parents would expect me to do that. It would be so much easier to simply deny everything, to play dumb.
Yet… I was surprised to realize how much I wanted to share it all, every detail, with Michael. The urge was amazingly strong. I wanted to tell him all the stories that had lived only in my mind for so long, all my memories, things I