Page 92 of Break Away
I looked down the hall one more time at the door that used to be mine, then turned away. “I’ll go with Ryan.”
Cade nodded once, and he didn’t look relieved enough for me to resent. “My Rover’s out front. I’ll drive you both to Ryan’s, then I’m going to find Bliss before she tries to drag Aura home through sheer emotional violence.”
I laughed beneath my breath, but nothing about it was funny. “Right. My fault too, I guess.”
Cade’s face tightened. “I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to.”
My gaze moved down the hallway again, toward the room that used to be mine, and the laugh died before it had ever really lived.
The only place in my life besides the ice that Aura hadn’t touched was my apartment. KFU was full of her in ways that made no sense and every kind of sense at once—the stands in The Furnace, the Sin Bin, the path between the history building and the rink, the corner booth at the diner where she used to pretend she hadn’t saved me a seat, and the stoplight near campus where she always fixed her lip gloss in my passenger visor.
My truck. My phone. My stupid memory.
Everywhere.
Ryan clapped a hand against the back of my neck, firm and grounding, then shoved lightly. “Move before I make Briggs carry you.”
Briggs brightened slightly. “I could. I’ve been waiting for a practical use for goalie thighs.”
“Don’t touch me,” I said, but there was no heat left in it.
“See?” Briggs said. “Progress.”
I started down the stairs because staying in that hallway felt too much like standing inside a life I didn’t get to have anymore. I wasn’t better or done, and all of us knew it, but if I stayed in that house another minute, I would go looking for the girl whose face still had the power to undo me.
I had already warned Aura what I would become, but the part that scared me was realizing I had never really been warning her.
I had been warning myself.
8
Aura
By the time I got back to the apartment, I had convinced myself I was fine, which would’ve been more believable if I hadn’t slammed my keys into the ceramic dish hard enough to make it jump against the entry table.
“I’m completely fucking fine,” I said to the empty living room because apparently my survival instinct had decided repetition counted as evidence.
The Uber ride had been quiet. Too quiet. The driver had asked once if I was okay, and I’d said, “Perfect,” with mascara drying beneath my eyes and my hands clenched so tightly in my lap that my nails left crescents in my palms.
He hadn’t asked again.
Smart man. He probably had a healthy respect for women on the edge of a felony.
I kicked the door shut behind me, locked it, then stood in the entryway with my damp jacket clinging to my shoulders and my phone buzzing in my hand like it had an opinion I didn’t want.
Bliss called. Then Charm. Then Bliss again, followed immediately by Charm.
I declined every call, turned off my location, and walked straight to my bedroom.
The apartment was too still, too full of the girls who weren’t there and the fight still screaming in my ears. The couch where Bliss and I had eaten takeout from the carton. The counter where Charm had once organized my nail polish by mood and undertone like a sociopath with excellent taste. The hallway mirror where the three of us had taken a thousandpictures with our faces pressed together, proof the world had not gotten its hands on us yet.
Tonight, the world had gotten its hands on us, and I had looked around a crowded room for my girls only to feel alone.
That was the part that kept punching through the anger.
Not Easton’s rage, his voice, or the way he had looked at me like I had become every bad thing he had ever believed about love. I could survive Easton hating me. I had been surviving it for seven months.
