Heartbreak Lover (Broken Hearts Academy #2) - C.R. Jane Page 0,6

everywhere I went nowadays, Jackson…and Caiden.

Caiden waking up should have been freeing, the weight of my guilt lessened by his miraculous recovery.

I hadn’t anticipated the nightmares it would bring to have him once again walking among the living. I thought I’d come to peace with the horror of that night, that I’d successfully pushed it away into a little box that I no longer thought about.

But hearing that he woke up brought it all back.

“You made me do this. This is your fault. You knew I wouldn’t let you break up with me. You knew it.”

The venom in his voice, the strength in his fist, the madness of the moment…it echoed around me on repeat.

It felt a little bit like I was going mad.

“Hey, sweetheart.” Landry smiled as he sidled up next to me and put his arm around my waist.

That was another thing that had changed since I’d finally broken it off with Jackson. Landry and I were dating.

If you asked Landry, he would probably tell you that we were getting serious.

I wasn’t sure what I would say if asked that question.

As a boyfriend, Landry was the stuff dreams were made of. He was kind and patient, always wanted to see me, complimented me constantly, was gorgeous, and he could make me laugh.

I should have been over the moon to be dating someone like him.

He went out of his way to make me happy.

I should have been happy.

But the sickness Jackson had given me, the heartbreak that wouldn’t let me go…it was an infection that didn’t go away.

As he brushed a kiss against my face, I tried not to cringe. “How was class?”

I plastered a smile on my face and looked up at him. He was beautiful, there was no getting around it. His emerald eyes combined with that russet colored hair and a killer smile were hard to beat. I should have been proud to walk on his arm around campus.

I noticed Lane frowning as she looked at me. She’d just recently put bright pink streaks in her hair as part of a “self-enlightenment” stage she claimed to be going through, and I was digging it. Not everyone could pull off walking around with rainbow colored hair on a campus as conservative and uptight as this one, but she rocked it. Lane also rocked at seeing right through me.

I hadn’t told her the details of what happened that last night in the library with Jackson. And she didn’t know that the fact that Caiden Parker had woken up was making me wake up in a cold sweat every night.

She would comment on the circles under my eyes, but I would blame them on Melanie, who was in fact contributing to my lack of sleep.

Melanie was a demon, to be blunt. The kind that made you sleep with one eye open. I’d gone to administration to request a room change, but they’d told me that there were none available. What they should have said was that there were none available for a scholarship student because, that would have been far closer to the truth.

Things frequently disappeared from my room. I’d had to start storing things in Lane’s room, which I hated to do since she was low on space to begin with, but it was necessary. Melanie had “accidently” poured soda all over me the other day while I was sitting doing my homework, and she’d stolen my clothes from inside my shower stall. She always denied that all the little things that happened were because of her, but come on, I’d literally watched her paint her nails the same color blue as the hand that had reached into the stall right in front of me.

Melanie’s actions seemed to be escalating, and I didn’t know why. I’d come to no rational answer for why she did the things that she did. I still hadn’t found out who had performed all those nasty tricks on me those first couple of months, but now that Jackson and I weren’t speaking and hadn’t seen each other, nothing major had happened.

I tried to convince myself it couldn’t possibly have been Jackson. I really did.

Needless to say, most of my life was not going well.

“Does that sound good, babe?” Landry asked as he stroked the skin in between my jeans and my shirt that had pulled up while I was walking. I counted to three in my head before shifting so he had to move his arm, hoping that the extra time made it