Page 95 of Noxious Boys (Groveton College)

Chapter 40

FLYNN

Spring Break seems to tumble its way into my lap.

March hits me like a freight train and I laugh. The irony of that statement.

I can’t get the imagery out of my head, hers splattered all over the tracks.

Spinning side to side in my leather office chair, head thrown back. Curved, butterfly knife in my hands flicking open and closed as I stare up and up and up. It feels like time slows more and more, everyday at four. As I wait, and she doesn’t come, but at five, I mark her as attended all the same.

I follow her around campus with digital eyes, I wiped those fucking videos and pictures of her off of the internet again, just like I did before, but it felt redundant the second time. Everyone had already seen them. But I thought of her dad as I did it.

Briarmoor.

Somewhere I’ve looked further into and decided I don’t fucking like it. And if Poppy ever gets sent back there, I will go and get her the fuck back.

Whether she wants this separation from us or not,from me,I don’t. I don’t want it. I want her, and everyone is telling me to give her space, and I’ve been trying. I have beenfuckingtrying,but my brain just doesn’t work that way. Everytime King tells me it’s the right thing to do, I think about breaking my little brother’s nose.

I am unable to justletsomeone go.

Thoughts of her infect me, dreams of fucking into her, something I never got a chance to do. Marking her up with my knife, carving my name into her chest while I suck the blood from the wounds. I picture her tongue running up the flat of my blade, my cock buried so deep inside of her cunt she can feel me in the back of her fucking throat. I picture her taking the blade between her fingers and carving her name into me.

I groan hard, the heel of my hand grinding into my cock, hard and pulsing, weeping at the tip beneath the tight restriction of my pants. All of my thoughts are of her, her, her.

It feels like I’m suffocating.

I push to my feet, staring at the time, four-eleven, I shove my hands through my black curls, frizzing the ends, but I do it again, and again and I don’t stop. Checking the time, over and over.

It feels like when I was little, before Raiden was born, when Mom lived alone with me in our trailer and my biological father had left her when I was just a few days old. I’d never met him, but when I was four, he told Mom he wanted to meet me, take me to see a game.

I felt excited, lots of kids in my park didn’t have a dad to take them anywhere, but I was going to.

I paced the front room of our little trailer, always clean, always tidy, neat and smelling like my mom’s homemade lavender oils that she would spritz the drapes with, on pick up day. I waited hours for him to never arrive. I think I trod a hole through the carpet.

I finally met him, a lot later on in life.

I had Raiden’s dad then, he treats me like we’re blood and I treat him the same way. He’s my real dad, DNA or not.

My sperm donor was a piece of shit and I’ve never thought about him again.

Not until now.

Four-thirty-six.

I flick my blade closed, gripping it hard in the curling of my hand, feeling the warmed metal dig into my skin. I take in a deep breath, smooth out my shirt, grab my jacket from over the back of my chair and slip my arms through the sleeves. I lock up my office behind me as I make my way towards the quad, I know she likes to sit out there, regardless of the weather. Snow, rain, fucking lightning.

Stupid, reckless, addicting girl.

My dress shoes tap each step as I make my way down the stairs, hands in my pockets, knife clutched in my left. And I’m thinking of how I sort of want to strangle the life out of this girl, the way she’s doing exactly that to me with phantom fucking hands from what feels like a billion miles away.

Choking the life out of me with her fucking absence from it.

I’m on the second floor and I’m running now, gritting my fucking jaw so hard it makes my ears pop, jaw crack and I’m slamming into another body as I round the square cornered railings.

My hands fly out of my pockets on instinct, knife still clutched in the curl of my fingers, but I’m gripping warm upper arms, pinning the body into the wall, all before I realize who it is.

There’s a snarl on my upper lip, ready to fucking destroy whatever sorry-ass kid just got in my way when I’m stopped all at once by the color of her eyes.

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