Page 83 of Where Your Scars Meet Mine
His shoulders square a little. Not dramatically. Just enough for me to notice that he’s deciding how to approach me now. There’s a pause before he speaks again, and when he does, the whole tone of the room changes.
“I looked you up.”
That stills something in me.
Not visibly, I hope, but enough that he sees he’s landed somewhere.
“After the party,” he says. “After everything that happened. After the way she looked every time you got near her. I didn’t know who you were, so I checked.”
He isn’t defensive about it. He says it like he believes he had every right.
Didn’t take much, his face says even before the words do.
“St. Augustine wasn’t hard to find,” he continues. “Court records weren’t hard to find either. Your father. The case. Enough to know you’ve got a lot more going on than some weird attitude problem.”
The fluorescent hum overhead seems to get louder. I don’t move. Neither does he.
He studies my face carefully now, no longer bothering with polite thanks or easy college-guy charm. “And I don’t think Octavia needs someone like that messing with her head.”
The sentence lands cleaner than if he’d tried to be cruel. He doesn’t sound disgusted. He sounds certain.
That certainty is what makes me step toward him.
It isn’t a big movement. Barely half a pace. But it changes the air in the room. His body goes still in response, and for the first time since he walked in, he looks at me like he understands there might actually be a line here he shouldn’t cross.
He still doesn’t back up.
“You should be careful,” I tell him.
The words come out low and steady, which is worse than if they’d come out angry. Anger can be dismissed. Control is harder to ignore.
His jaw tightens, but he keeps eye contact. “Why?”
Because I know what damage looks like from the inside. Because I know exactly how little it takes for my body to remember the wrong lessons. Because right now I can feel every old instinct in me waking up, stretching its shoulders, asking to be useful.
Instead, I tell him the version that matters.
“Because if you keep acting like you understand what she needs better than she does, I’m going to hurt you.”
That gets through.
He doesn’t flinch, but I see the reaction anyway in the way his breathing shifts and his eyes sharpen. He believes me. That much is clear. He just also believes something else.
“No,” he says after a beat. “You won’t.”
The certainty in it cuts deeper than mockery would have.
My mouth starts to open, but he steps into the silence before I can.
“You won’t,” he says again, quieter now, with an irritating kind of calm. “Because she would hate you.”
The words hit hard enough that for a second I don’t hear anything else.
He sees that too.
Of course he does.
That is the moment he really understands me, or at least enough of me to be dangerous.
