Devils' Day Party: A High School Bully Romance - C.M. Stunich Page 0,175

ask, and he smiles at me. Not a smirk or a sneer, just a smile.

“To draw the sunrise,” he says, and my heart skips a beat, remembering my mother’s words about seeing the sunrise and painting it. Even though my limbs are heavy, my body sated and lazy, I scramble to my feet, throwing on Calix’s velvet coat and my discarded panties. It’s all I have the energy for, but it doesn’t matter. It’s good enough.

Barron helps me down from the emergency exit, taking my hand like a true gentleman and leading me to the edge of the junkyard, where a hole sits in the chain-link fence. We slip through it and find ourselves a place to sit, facing out toward Devil Springs lake. Just beyond the trees, the orange face of the sun peeks out, banishing the dark cobwebs of the Devils’ Day party, and the lurid pleasure I found in the naked, sweaty arms of my bullies-turned-lovers.

“This should do it,” Barron says, opening his sketchbook and penciling in the tree line. It’s amazing, how he creates such beautiful landscapes with only one pencil. I lean my head against his shoulder, watching the sun come up and wondering if today might actually be the day. If this could be my tomorrow.

I glance at my phone, looking through my texts from Luke. The last one she sent was in response to my questions about Pearl. And there’s still nothing about the sex tape either.

Did I just do it? Did I just live the perfect day? I wonder, barely daring to breathe.

Nobody died.

Nobody fucking died.

I swallow the lump in my throat and close my eyes against the morning sunshine, listening to the birds in the trees, and the gentle lap of the water against the shore.

“Let’s go for a swim,” Barron says, putting the notebook aside.

“Now?” I ask, shivering slightly in the cool morning air. The sun might be shining, but it’s still fall, and it’s early as fuck.

Barron gives me a dark look and a smile, standing up and shedding his clothes.

After a moment, I take his hand and let him pull me to my feet, his warm fingers reaching for the button on my coat, his hand sweeping my tangled hair back from my face.

“You’ve never looked as beautiful to me as you do right now,” he says, leaning down to capture my lips one, last time before he turns and strips off his pants. He dives into the water completely nude, and I’m reminded of Raz and me at the spring, swimming naked together for hours.

I shuck my clothes as fast as I can and stumble over the rocky shore to join him, cringing at the ice-cold water, but jumping in anyway. When I come up, I swipe my hair back and look around for Barron. But I don’t see him.

At first, I figure he’s pranking me the way Raz did, that I’ll feel his strong arms band around my waist, his lips against the back of my neck as he surprises me. Only … that never happens. I wait there, treading water for what feels like an obscene amount of time.

Barron does not come up.

That’s when I panic, scrambling out of the water and throwing the coat over my shoulders. I run as fast as I can back to the junkyard, barefoot and dripping. My feet are bleeding by the time I get there.

“I can’t find Barron,” I choke out as I climb through the door to the bus, the panic in my voice startling both Raz and Calix awake. “He went under the water, and he isn’t coming up.”

The two boys are on their feet in seconds.

“Show me,” Calix says, yanking on boxers as Raz wraps a blanket around his waist. There’s no time to get dressed; it doesn’t matter. Instead, we race back to the eerily still surface of the lake. The three of us dive in, dipping our heads beneath the water, searching for Barron.

Raz is the one that finds him, an old rope tangled around his ankle, holding him under. It’s wrapped up in other debris from the junkyard, and it’s too heavy to move. Instead, Calix stays under the water for as long as he can, unwrapping the stupid fucking thing, and then helping Raz get Barron to shore.

As I stand there, shivering, teeth chattering, feeling helpless as fuck, the two of them perform CPR, and I dial 911.

It takes the ambulance too long to get all the way out here.

Barron does