There were a few noticeable absentees at school that day. Nicole, Gabrielle and my brain were missing. I couldn’t concentrate on anything and scored detention from two different teachers.
I didn’t care that Nicole wasn’t there. Ethan’s stranglehold on her was making her unreliable. I’d resigned myself to the fact that as long as he was around she was unavailable.
Gabrielle’s absence did concern me. I tried hard not to find reason for it. Every scenario I came up with pointed back to me and how vile I was.
It was almost dark by the time I arrived home. Alex was angry, and made no secret of it.
“Where’s your phone?” he barked the second I walked in.
“I turned it off.”
“Why?” he demanded
I didn’t need him yelling at me. I deserved it, but I didn’t need it. The flood of tears I’d been holding back since that morning couldn’t be blinked away.
“Because I don’t want to talk to anyone,” I blubbered.
Alex stopped dead in his tracks. Two things he never coped well with were crazy or crying. I was doing both.
“Don’t cry. Please, don’t cry,” he pleaded. I put my hands up, motioning for him to stay put. I didn’t feel worthy of comfort. I’d earned every bit of the hurt I was feeling.
“It’s going to be okay, Charli,” he promised, ignoring me and wrapping his arms around me.
I think he was relieved when I went to bed early. Everything he said was wrong, and nothing I said made any sense. I flitted from insisting that letting Adam go was the best thing for both of us, to sobbing that I’d made a huge mistake.
Sleep came, but it didn’t last long. I woke shortly after midnight feeling nothing less than grief-stricken – and finally, I understood why. Adam was about to leave my life thinking I didn’t love him. And that was a tragedy.
Annihilating him was the only sure-fire way I knew to end it. If I smashed the road up, there could be no going back. I just wished I had been able to do it without destroying everything we’d shared in the process.
I was left with brilliant memories that a hundred years would never dim. Selfishly, I’d cut Adam loose so brutally that forgetting he’d ever met me was probably preferable to remembering anything.
Throwing back the covers, I jumped out of bed, reaching for my coat that was draped over the back of the chair. I slipped out into the cold night.
My car tried to start. Every time I turned the key it groaned, but wouldn’t fire up. After a minute or two, the porch light came on, and my heart sank. I put my seatbelt on, as if that was all it would take to stop Alex dragging me out of the car. I tried to gauge his mood, but the darkness made it impossible to see his face.
Absurdly, I nearly jumped out of my skin when he tapped on the window. It was like a poorly acted B-grade horror movie.
“You used to be so much better at sneaking out,” he said through the gap in the window.
I struggled to look at him. “No, you just used to be better at turning a blind eye.”
“Here,” Alex said, pushing his keys through the window. “Take the Ute.”
I finally looked his way. “No catch?”
“There’s always a catch, Charli. You jump and then I catch. That’s always been the rule.”