I charge out of our room, figuring I’ll catch Jaxon a few doors down. But the hallway is completely empty. Still, he couldn’t have gone far, so I take off toward the main staircase. Worst-case scenario, I know where his room is, even if a cleaning crew is currently in there.
I finally find him on the stairs, taking them three at a time. He’s not alone, though—Liam and Rafael are with him, and all three of them seem like they’re in a really big hurry.
I should probably let them go, but he’s the one who came to my room, not the other way around. Which means he wanted to see me.
It’s that thought that galvanizes me, that has me calling out his name as I move to the top landing.
He stops on a dime. All three of them do, and then they’re all staring at me out of the same blank eyes. I have a second to try to absorb the direct impact of all that male beauty and intensity—it’s a lot—before Jaxon is bounding back up the stairs.
Liam and Rafael watch for a second, their faces locked in that expressionless look I’m coming to hate. But then they both give me a little wave, plus Rafael adds a thumbs-up, before they turn away and bound down the stairs.
“What are you doing out here?” Jaxon demands, and just
that quickly, he’s in front of me. Only his face isn’t blank. It’s livid with a mixture of self-loathing and regret, his eyes an incandescent black that has shivers sliding through me for all the wrong reasons.
“Macy said you were looking for me.”
“I wasn’t looking for you. I came to make sure you were okay.”
“Oh.” I hold out my arms, do a little self-deprecating shrug. “Well, as you can see, I’m fine.”
He snorts. “Pretty sure that’s a matter of opinion.” “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means, you look like you’re going to fall down any second. I don’t know what you were thinking to come running down the halls after you nearly bled to death. Go back to bed.”
“I don’t want to go back to bed. I want to talk to you about what happened this afternoon.”
“Blank” doesn’t describe what happens to his face. It goes beyond blank, beyond empty, until there’s absolutely nothing there. No sign at all of the Jaxon I watched the meteor shower with. Definitely no sign of the boy who kissed me until my knees buckled and my heart nearly exploded.
He looks like a stranger. A cold, emotionless stranger, one who has every intention of ignoring me. But then he finally answers. “You got hurt. That’s what happened.”
“That’s not all that happened.” I reach for his arm—I want to touch him, feel him—but he steps out of reach before my fingers can so much as brush against his shirt.
“It’s the only thing that happened that matters.”
Ouch. My heart falls straight to my feet as I struggle with the fact that he’s grouping our kiss in with all the things he thinks don’t matter.
For long seconds, I don’t know what to say. But then I ask the one question that’s been burning inside my brain since I woke up. “Are you all right?”
“I’m not the one you need to worry about.”
“But I am worried about you.” It’s a lot to admit— especially when he’s working so hard to shut down everything between us—but that doesn’t make it any less true. “You look…”
His eyes meet mine. “What?”
“I don’t know.” I shrug. “Not okay.” He looks away. “I’m fine.”
“Okay.” It’s obvious he doesn’t want to talk to me right now, so I take a step back. “I guess I—”
“I’m sorry.” It sounds like the words are dragged out of him.
“For what?” The apology astounds me. “I didn’t protect you.”
“From an earthquake?”
His gaze swings back to mine, and for a second, just a second, I can see something in his eyes. Something powerful and terrible and all-consuming. But it’s gone as quickly as it came and then he’s back to showing nothing. “From a lot of things.”
“From what I understand, you saved my life.”
He snorts. “That’s the point. You don’t understand much. Which is why you should go back to your room and forget all about what happened earlier.”
“Forget about the earthquake?” I ask. “Or forget about you kissing me?” I don’t know where I got the guts to bring it up…except, truth is, it’s not bravery so much as desperation. I have to know what Jaxon’s thinking and why he’s thinking it.
“Forget about it all,” he answers.
“You know that’s not going to happen.” I reach for him once more, and this time he doesn’t jerk away. Instead, he just watches me as I rest my hand on his shoulder, hoping the contact will remind him of what it was like to touch me. Hoping it will break through the barriers he’s erected between us.
“Yeah, well, it needs to happen. You have no idea what we just did.”
“We kissed, Jaxon. That’s all we did.” It felt momentous, important—it still feels that way to me—but in the grand scheme of things, it really was just a kiss.
“I keep telling you that it doesn’t work like that here.” He shoves a frustrated hand through his hair. “Don’t you get that? You’ve been a pawn since you got here, a chess piece to move around the board to get the desired result. But now…now we’ve upped the stakes. This isn’t just a game anymore.”
He might mean his words as warnings, but they feel like body blows.
“I was a game to you?”
“You’re not listening.” His eyes glow incandescent with the effort of holding in emotions I can’t even begin to decipher
—no matter how much I wish I could. “From the moment I kissed you. From the moment you got hurt, everything
changed. You were in danger before, but now—”
He breaks off, jaw clenching, throat working. Then says, “Now I’ve all but put a bull’s eye in the middle of your back and dared someone to take a shot.”
“I don’t understand. You didn’t do anything.”
“I did everything.” He moves then, swift as one of those shooting stars from last night, until his face is right up in mine. “Listen to me. You need to stay away from me. I need to stay away from you.”
His words send a chill through me, make my mouth go dry and my palms sweat. And still I can’t just walk away. Not when he’s standing right here. “Jaxon, please. You’re not making any sense.”
“Only because you refuse to understand.” He backs away. “I have to go.”
The words hang in the air between us—dark and somber— but he doesn’t go. He doesn’t do anything but stand there, staring at me with tortured eyes.
So I do something. I step forward until our bodies are just
barely brushing against each other.
It’s not much, but it’s enough to have heat pooling in my stomach and electricity crackling just below my skin. “Jaxon.” I whisper his name because my vocal cords have forgotten how to work. He doesn’t answer me, but he doesn’t move away, either.
For one second, two, he just stands there, looking down at me, his gaze locked with mine. His body presses forward into mine.
I whisper his name again, and it’s almost enough. I can see him waver, feel him lean more heavily against me.
But then he snaps out of it, his voice cutting like broken glass as he tells me, “Stay away from me, Grace.” He turns away, takes the steps three at a time, and doesn’t stop until he’s on the landing ten feet below. Without turning around, he calls up to me. “It’s the only way you’re getting out of this school alive.”
“Is that a threat?” I ask, more shaken than I want to admit—to him or to myself.
“I don’t make threats.” The unspoken “I don’t have to” hangs in the air between us.
Before I can respond, he places his hands on the iron banister and vaults straight over it. I let out a strangled scream and rush to the edge of the staircase, half afraid I’ll see his mangled body down below. But not only is he not lying broken on the ground three stories below, he’s nowhere to be seen at all. He’s vanished into thin air.
