“God. Just my luck,” she went on, rubbing the skin around her wrist and eyeing me with more than just a hint of distrust. “Why do all the hot ones have to be such freaking D-bags?” She pushed up to her feet. Her eyes met mine as she stepped to the side, pressing against the wall. “What do you want?”
Seth, what do you want? Those words from the past were accompanied by angry, whiskey-colored brown eyes. I drew back so fast I was surprised I hadn’t given myself whiplash.
“You know what? I don’t want to know. It’s probably a good thing that I don’t. I’m just going to get my bag and keep on going. Okay? All right, sounds good to me.” She edged down the wall. “This is me leaving.”
An odd sense of déjà vu washed over me as she pushed past me—literally knocked her shoulder into mine—and snatched up her bag.
“Crazy asses,” she muttered under her breath. “I am a weirdo magnet.”
I turned as she hurried down the steps, away from me like I was the maniac people didn’t want to meet in a dark alley. And well, that wouldn’t be too far from the truth. Some would probably prefer to come face to face with a harpy instead of me.
At a set of doors, she stopped to look over her shoulder, and again, I was struck by the familiarity of those deep, dark-blue eyes, of the curve of a stubborn jaw and chin, and bow-shaped, pouty lips. From my vantage point, I could really see her now. If that oversized sweater weren’t hiding her ass, I bet it would match her heart-shaped face.
It was like taking two people I knew and mixing them together to form a brand-new person, and that was entirely unnerving.
Then she was gone, slipping out the doors, and I was left standing on the landing like a dickhead.
Seth, what do you want?
Everything and anything and nothing at all?
Yeah, that sounded about right. My hands tightened into fists. Closing my eyes, I tried to center myself, but I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d been here before, but with someone else.
A crack of loud thunder from outside reverberated through the stairwell and echoed inside my skull. A storm was brewing, matching the warring emotions inside me.
What do you want?
My eyes flew open and the stairwell was tinted in amber. No, fuck no. I staggered back against the wall. It didn’t make sense, but godsdammit I had been here before.
Dammit.
I was going to commit god-slaughter on Apollo.
Too freaked out from the run-in with the kind of scary, yet extraordinarily hot, guy in the stairwell, I didn’t end up calling my granny before the start of Statistics. I shouldn’t have even bothered going to class, because when the fifty minutes had passed, it felt like I’d only just sat down and cracked open my notebook.
I’d taken about two sentences worth of notes and somehow ended up with a doodle of something that looked like a zombie in the margin of my page. Real effective note-taking skills right there.
Once outside the class, feeling like I’d somehow just gotten dumber rather than smarter, I checked in with my grandparents. Like I’d expected, they were totally aware of Mom’s feelings and were watching her closely. Granny told me not to worry, and while that was easier said than done, it did ease some of the stress. Mom had support. She wasn’t alone.
As I walked to my dorm, my thoughts coasted back to the stairwell in Russell Hall. Who was that guy, and why in the world had he asked what I was? Like there was some other option besides human? That had be the oddest question I’d ever been asked, and I’d been asked some peculiar crap.
God, I really knew how to attract some weirdos.
I had an elaborate history of them, starting with Bob. I’d never known his last name, which was probably a good thing, considering the whole weirdo magnet thing. But when I was a little girl, he’d been my world for one summer.
I’d spent most of my days at the lake that was hidden by the sad willows and the bright-yellow oak trees that butted up to my grandparents’ property. At that age, the lake had appeared the size of an ocean. And it was there that I’d met Bob.
He’d shown up while I’d been playing by the dirt-and-pebble shore one afternoon—an important afternoon to me. One of the girls at school had had a huge slumber party that night in celebration of school ending and the beginning of summer. I hadn’t been invited—I’d never been invited to any of those things— and I’d been sad and confused, because all I’d ever wanted was for the other kids to like me. And the boys didn’t like me until high school, but then they’d done so for all the wrong reasons.
When I’d first seen Bob, I’d been scared out of my mind, frozen in place when he stepped out from among the trees. Dark-haired and with eyes the color of the sky, he’d been as big as the superheroes in the stash of comics that my grandfather had in his office that I’d been warned away from ever touching.
I’d touched them a lot.
Bob had claimed to live further down the lake, and I hadn’t thought to question him, because the world was too big then for me to know that there were no cabins or houses there, other than my grandparents’. The first time we’d met, he’d talked about the catfish in the lake and the bigger fish he’d seen in the oceans, telling me stories that had fascinated me. I’d liked him and had been happy when he’d returned the following week, on the same day at the same time, bearing candies. A once-a-week ritual had started, and being relatively friendless with the exception of the random new kid in town who’d either never stayed around long or stayed nice, Bob had become my best friend over the course of a summer.
And the baby dolls that he’d brought me had helped.
Even to my young eyes, they had appeared rare and expensive—as if he’d gathered them around the world—because the pretty, painted faces had come from many cultures I’d never heard of.
Looking back, I totally saw how creepy all of that was, but then, I’d been so starved for friendship, I probably would’ve warmed up to the Grim Reaper if he’d wiggled his bony fingers at me.
Truth.
The friendship had ended when my grandfather had stumbled upon us one afternoon. Bob had been sitting cross-legged by me, showing me how to fold grass between my fingers and turn it into a whistle. Needless to say, Pappy freaked and I’d been carted away from the lake. They’d found the dolls, and all of them had gone into the trash. Mom had cried for some reason, and then I was sat down and taught all about the whole stranger-danger thing.