Chapter 33: Chapter 33

"Do you have a second?"

It was a question. Yet as soon as he said the words to me, Kale's hand was already wrapped around my elbow, and he was pulling me with him as if I'd already answered with a yes. The foul look on my face and the way I clenched my fist in annoyance begged a differ.

No, Kale. I did not have a second.

I decided not to contest him though (even though I wanted to).

I swung my hand at my locker and shut it with a slam before I was out of range.  The fact that I had to do that, as well as try to match my pace with Kale to refrain from stumbling over, had me wanting to yank his light colored hair from his head. Though I assumed he was only in a hurry to avoid the cluster of students loitering the halls so that they wouldn't spot the two of us together.

We came to a stop when Kale reached a door. Once it was open, he released my arm to place a hand on my back, most likely to nudge me inside—but I saved him the trouble when I moved away from his touch and crossed the threshold of the door.

The door shut not even a second later, leaving me alone in a dark room with Kale, but not even another one later, the lights snapped on.

After one quick glance around, I realized we were standing in an empty classroom. Empty, I knew was because it was so early in the morning. I assumed chemistry was taught within the walls, though—judging by the beakers, the wide black tables, and the numerous amount of lab safety posters littering the area.

"I heard you were with Jesse the other day." I tore my eyes away from the room and turned on my heel to face Kale, who had moved away from the door and was leaning against a table beside it with crossed arms. "What happened?"

"Nothing," I answered in a dismissive tone. To be honest, the last thing I wanted to talk about was Jesse. After my encounter with Farrah the day before, all I'd been able to think about was how she hadn't given me a straight answer to my question. It had left me wondering if she had meant to give me a vague answer to spare me from knowing that something actually did happen between the two of them the night of Jesse's party. "Why do you want to know?"

"Well, you two skipped an entire day of school to hang out together," Kale said. "Can you blame me for wanting to know what happened?"

"We went to a movie. Played at an arcade. Ate at a diner. Maybe trolled a few people at Abercrombie. Nothing mind blowing."

"And he was the one who asked you out?"

"A little forcefully, but yes."

Kale nodded to himself as if he were processing it.

But he snapped his gaze back to me when I said, "Honestly though, I don't think he likes me anymore."

"What?"

"I told him that I was at his party—"

"What?"

"—and he lied about what happened. After he told me that, I started to think he was bored with me, but then, yesterday..." I trailed off and rubbed my hands together. "I just don't know anymore. I mean, a part of me wants to believe he doesn't like me—but why would he ask me out? And then I start to think, maybe he does like me—but why would he lie?"

Kale stared at me, and I rolled my eyes.

"It's just all over the place," I said. "I just can't tell with him anymore. I...maybe you picked the wrong girl, Kale."

"No, I didn't."

"What makes you say that?"

"He likes you."

With a reminder that left my throat clogging up, I remembered that Jesse had told me before that he liked me. "Probably not as much anymore," I muttered.

Kale ran a hand through his hair. After a long moment of silence, and after glancing around the room as he thought, he looked back to me and said, "Then we have to make him say it. We're going to have to. All in all, we're going to have to know how he feels before this is over."

I couldn't help the doubt flickering across my face. "He can say anything he wants to, Kale. That's the thing about being human: we can say anything we want and not mean it. I won't be convinced he really likes me until I trust him. And after all that's happened with Farrah, I have more trust in me living past a hundred a four than Jesse."

"Then we have to make him show it."

To my surprise, at those words, all I could picture in my mind was the image of Jesse kissing me. It hit me like a good punch to my face. I was suddenly torn between making a run for it or darting out the classroom door to see if another kiss with Jesse would show me how he felt about me.

But when Kale moved forward, all thoughts of kissing vanished from my mind.

His fingers slid under the thin scarf I had wrapped around my neck, and with one slight pull, it loosened so that it hung in an arc that lay parallel to the collar of my shirt. I flicked my eyes from his fingers back up to his face with a look of warning in my narrowed eyes.

Thoughts of flinging acid—I assumed there was some somewhere seeing as how I was standing in a chemistry class—at his face if he dared put his hands on any the other clothing I was wearing, however, flung out the window when Kale elaborated.

It wasn't a kiss Kale had in mind.

In fact, it was something that made my eyes widen. Something that had me a second away from throwing myself to the glass cabinets to go through with the acid plan, had it not been for Kale's hand latching onto my wrist.

We were out the door in five seconds. And then standing facing a certain gray eyed boy at the back of the school in ten minutes.

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If I'd been told what I'd be doing right now the moment I had seen Jesse stumble out of that janitor's closet so long ago, I would have fled the country.

Yet, here I was.

Not fleeing the country.

But becoming bait.

"Hi," I said as soon as Jesse's locker closed and he noticed me standing behind it.

As soon as his eyes turned to me, I instantly detected a trace of surprise in his eyes. The fact that he hadn't expected me made me want to do a fist pump in achievement. Because I didn't think it would be as hard as it was to sneak up to his locker and casually lean against the others beside it unnoticed—but I'd been wrong. Dead wrong.

Firstly, I had to put up with loitering around it until he arrived—all the while relentlessly praying that he wasn't elsewhere without any intention of visiting his locker at all. Secondly, I had to time myself; I had been given specific instructions to make my presence known when Jesse closed his locker, not before. And thirdly, it was kind of hard to keep up being stealthy when my shoes squeaked from my having stepped on wet tile regardless of the wet floor sign telling me not to.

That was a problem of its own though. I honestly hadn't seen the sign.

"Hey," Jesse let out once he recovered his composure. He twisted the combination lock in front of him and dropped his hand to his side. "What are you doing here?"

As if following a script, I produced a smirk that I hoped was convincing, and as relaxed as I could make the movement, I slid my back across the lockers I was still leaning against so that I put myself right in front of him. "To see you," was my answer.

"That so?" More to my surprise than anything else, Jesse didn't look at all baffled by my sudden change in attitude. My heart drummed a little louder in my chest when he lifted an arm, blocking off one side of me—as well as one of my escape routes—and placed his hand flat against the lockers so that his warm fingers brushed the side of my shoulder. "Is that the only reason?"

I don't know why I was beginning to panic. But I was. For that reason, all I could let out as a response was a quiet, "Maybe."

The casual demeanor in which I'd walked into this situation with shattered as soon as Jesse slowly leaned in toward me. The smirk that I had on my lips faltered into a line and my face became as still as stone the more distance he closed between the two of us. I was suddenly more aware of the lockers pressing against my back.

If I was only barely beginning to panic before, it was a wonder why I wasn't twitching on the ground now.

I hadn't anticipated learning Jesse's true intentions with me by putting myself in his line of fire, but a small part of me also hadn't anticipated him kissing me either, especially after he all but turned me down when we had ditched school the other day.

Yet, as our noses brushed, another part of me wondered—actually wondered if another kiss with Jesse would prove anything. And that if it would be different from the only other one we shared.

But as he continued to minimize the amount of space between us, I glanced up into his eyes and found hesitance.

And I would never find out if he would have kissed me or not.

Because the reason why I had wanted to throw acid in Kale's face appeared just down the hall.

"Carson?"

I straightened up at the sound of my name and shifted my head to the side to see the tall, light haired, dark grayed eyed boy I'd known to be Dalton. Kale and I had run into him at Jesse's party, and I remember from the brief encounter that there had been a kind of tension between him and Kale.

Earlier, before this escapade with Jesse, Kale and I had met with him again, and I was taken aback that Dalton had agreed to help Kale out and do this. The tension then had been almost as suffocating as the first time I saw them speak to each other.

Speaking of tension.

I felt Jesse's hand drop from beside me. Sparing him one short glance, I saw that his blue eyes were trained on Dalton, but after a few seconds, he turned to me, confusion eminent on his face. "You know him?"

Smooth and natural, Carson, I chastised myself. "Of course I know him," I answered, moving out from in front of Jesse and pushing away from the lockers. I'd allowed my eyes to rest on Dalton, but all the while I could feel Jesse's on me. I was in the middle of processing why I suddenly felt a wave of shivers race up the length of my arms when the first bell of the day rang loudly throughout the hall.

I had only made one step toward Dalton when I felt a hand tug on mine. "Our class is the other way, Carson."

"I know."

Jesse's eyes shifted between me and the guy waiting for me. "You're going to be late."

"It doesn't matter. I'm not going."

Something inside of me churned when Jesse's face twisted. Was it annoyance? Anger? Or had Kale been right in planning this and he was jealous? Was Jesse jealous? Could he be jealous? Was it even possible for him to be jealous? Of course, he'd been jealous once before, but was he now?

For a long moment, I kept my eyes on him, waiting for him to say something—anything—to stop me from leaving. One half of me was jumping for it, but the other, the darker side of me, was dreading it somehow.

When another second passed, Jesse's eyes met mine. I felt with rising distress when his hand loosened on mine.

I eyed the contact until he dropped his hold on me altogether. With a burning ache in my throat, I then turned back to look at Dalton. "I'll see you around, Jesse," I blurted out, pulling away from him and turning to walk down to the end of the hall. As soon as I reached Dalton, I latched a hand onto his forearm and pulled him along with me without even looking at him.

Thoughts of Jesse not contesting the idea of me skipping class with another guy was all that I could think about. So much so, that I hadn't spotted the shadow of a person lingering further down the hall spectating until it disappeared.

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The rest of the day went by me in a blur.

I had spent the first hour of the class, not hanging around with Dalton, but relaying the morning's events to Kale on the bleachers of the football field. He looked about as disappointed as I did when I told him how Jesse didn't keep me from leaving, but in contrast to me, he kept on insisiting that I must have read into Jesse's actions the wrong way.

A few hours later, I walked into P.E. dreading having to participate in what ever sport we were playing while Jesse was within seeing distance, but learned that both of our classes were being separated; the boys' side of the class was playing basketball in the back gym, while the girls' were playing volleyball in the main gym.

After that, I was so distracted by thoughts of Jesse that I didn't realize that Katrina was missing from class until Ms. Landon called her name for attendance and there was no response.

From that moment to when I was exiting through the front doors of the school to head home, I changed from thinking about Jesse to Katrina. Searching for my car keys in my bag, I made it a point to go by her house before I returned to mine.

But when I pulled the keys out and looked up to my car, I came to a stop when I spotted a lone figure leaning against my car.

Chestnut colored hair. Short stature. Wide brown eyes assessing the area.

I nearly killed myself in my haste to reach Katrina before she could disappear.

There were a million words at the tip of my tongue, but when I stopped a few feet away from her, they died in my throat when all that greeted me from her was a wary glance and radio silence. I took a short intake of breath before I said quietly, "Hey."

Katrina glanced around the empty parking lot, and for a long while I started to think she wasn't going to respond. But then she did. "I, uh..." She pushed away from my car, her arms crossed over her chest. It had probably been a natural instinct to do in the chilly weather, but to me the gesture looked like a barrier she was keeping in between us. "I'm sorry for avoiding you."

I sighed a shaky chuckle, as if her purposeful absence in my life hadn't had any negative effect on me (even though it most certainly did). "It's all right."

"Is it?" Those words, the way she said them and the way she looked at me wavered the ghost of the smile that had been forming along my lips. "Do you even know why I was doing it?"

"I—"

"I was on my way to your locker this morning to see you, but then I saw you with Jesse."

I gawked. "Wha—"

"And I just can't understand how you went from wanting him to leave you alone and drawing stick figures of him dying to leaving him for some random guy." There was nothing but judgment in my best friend's eyes.

"I had to." There was a desperate edge to my voice. I suddenly didn't care if I had to resort to telling her about Kale to get her to understand. "I had to do it."

"Well, then good job, Carson. I honestly couldn't tell who the player was."

That last bit seemed to hit me in the heart. "You don't understand," I said. "It—It wasn't what it looked like."

"I know. And that's why I'm here—to congratulate you. The look on Jesse's face when you left with that guy was priceless." I replayed Katrina's words in my head. Had Jesse reacted while I had been walking away? Had Kale been right? "I meant what I said before, Carson: put him in his place before he puts you in yours. And I'm for it—but I can't see you like this."

I flinched. "What?"

"I'm not going to stick around to see who you're going to be when this is over." Katrina ran a hand through her hair and began to walk around me, back toward the school. "You're going to play Jesse," she said. "But so far as playing you, he isn't the only one you should be worried about."