The Rebel of Raleigh High (Raleigh Rebels #1) - Callie Hart Page 0,70

blessing. Do whatever you want. I'll give you a blow by blow account of what went down that night. But I'm not as brave as you, Alex. I don't think I can get through it if I have to say it out loud. I'll write it down, but you have to swear you'll burn it once you've read it. You have to fucking promise me, Alex. And you can't treat me any differently afterward.”

Mr. Elliot, my old therapist, would have balked at this deal. He would have said it would be better for her to say it out loud, that there would be some sort of catharsis to be had that way, but shit. Who am I to argue with her? If this is the way it's gotta be, then this is the way it's gotta be. I give her a three-fingered salute. “Scout's honor. I love a good fire. You have my word.”

21

SILVER

We spend the rest of the day watching movies and talking. We pretend like Alex didn’t tell me the story of his mother’s botched suicide, and I haven’t agreed to write a fucked up essay on that one time when I got sexually assaulted. He tells me more about his brother, about how he and Ben were placed in a couple of homes together in the beginning, but that they kept getting separated over and over again when Alex began to act out and made life difficult for their foster parents. He’s angry when he tells me about the woman who’s looking after Ben now—a legal secretary over in Bellingham called Jackie. She makes it hard for him to see his brother, switching up his visitation days, snooping into his business, reporting him to C.P.S. whenever he puts a foot wrong.

“That woman’s tried to have me incarcerated more times than I can count,” he says. We’re sitting on the couch. My legs are over his, covered by a blanket, and he’s running his fingers up and down the soles of my bare feet, smirking every time he hits a ticklish spot and I twitch. “I deserved it back in the beginning. I was an asshole. I did plenty of shit to warrant the ten million phone calls she put in with the cops.” He lets his head fall back against the sofa cushions. “I set her trash cans on fire once. I also stole her cat.”

“You stole her cat?”

“Ben’s allergic. His eyes were all itchy and red every time I saw him. He’d be covered in hives, and Jackie didn’t seem to give a shit. For years, she and I were locked in this shitty war of attrition, neither of us backing down, neither of us giving any ground, and then I realized…I was the problem. I had to make some changes. Since then, Mother Theresa wouldn’t have had shit on me, but Jackie’s still trying to shut me out. It’s been two years since I started playing nice, and Jackie’d still have me banished to fucking Alaska if she could.”

I want to touch him. It's becoming more and more normal to reach out for him. We've spent the day trading casual, fleeting moments of physical contact, but I'm still nervous as hell when I slide my hand under the blanket and find his arm. His skin is smooth and hot to the touch. My fingertips buzz as I trail them up, over his bicep, slipping beneath the sleeve of his t-shirt until I hit the top of his shoulder. We're both vibrating with this frenetic kind of electricity. Alex looks like he's forgotten all about Jackie; he's staring down at his shoulder, at the point where my fingers are drawing small circles into his skin, and he's as tense as can be. Slowly, with heavy, hazy eyes, he looks up at me, and suddenly all I want to do is slide over, straddle him and rip off the shirt I'm wearing.

He has a hungry predator’s eyes. Dark eyes that make promises and cut down to the quick. He’s unflinching. When Alex Moretti looks at you, you feel your soul laid bare, and it’s the most disturbing, thrilling thing I’ve ever experienced. Right now, he’s looking at me like he wants to eat me.

I draw my hand out from underneath the blankets, face heated, fire singing in my veins. It’s unspoken between us: after everything that happened, I can’t be rushed into anything. I’m shocked by how easy this is with him, though. How much I want