Page 13 of Possess Me! (I Want You To)

My heartbeat stuttered.

“Does he?” I asked, honestly terrified of the answer. I could barely take care of myself. Violet’s stolen granola sat like a rock in my belly. I didn’t want anyone in my family to see the reality of my situation. Not when they were so proud. Not when they still believed the lie I’d been breaking my back to keep up.

“He’s still set on Harvard.” She clucked her tongue with a laugh, though the silence grew oppressing as her words sunk talons into my already wounded heart. I don’t know what I’d been expecting. Maybe I’d hoped he’d changed his mind—maybe-maybe-maybe.

But no.

Sunrise follows even the darkest night.

What a fat fucking lie.

There was no sunrise for me, not now.

The stop light turned red, and I stepped out onto the street, blinking through the blurriness of my tears. I swallowed bile, trying to figure out what to say. Blank. I had no words that could explain how monumentally I’d fucked up.

I had to say something.

“Mom—” I opened my mouth, hopelessness crushing my heart as my feet hit the asphalt and my head began to spin.

I didn’t see the car speeding toward me until it was too late.

I froze.

My phone fell to the ground with a clatter, the screen no doubt cracking as I stared in horror at the vehicle careening toward me. It was clear whoever was driving was about to blast through the red light. There was nothing I could do—no amount of heart-attack-inducing terror that could get my feet to move.

I was a block of ice, stationary and static as my pulse thundered and my life flashed before my eyes. I was gonna die, and there was nothing I could do about it. I was gonna die with nothing to my name and no chance to explain how I’d lost everything in the first place. A giant disappointment. The big brother who promised too much. A failure.

Liar, liar, liar.

Tires screeched.

Something hard and cold wrapped around my wrist. Distantly, I recognized the sensation as fingers, but I was too far gone to understand what was happening as the breath jerked from my lungs and I was thrown halfway across the street. Hot asphalt scraped my knees, my baseball cap flapping to the ground, as the side of my face slammed hard enough stars burst behind my eyelids.

The car drove past with a loud honk.

Silence.

I lay motionless, numb. The pain hadn’t caught up to me yet as I blinked till the empty street came into focus. My wrist burned where the phantom fingers had jerked it, but when I turned to look for the person that had pulled me out of the way, I was shocked to find the street completely empty. I closed my eyes again, pressing my head to the hot ground as a broken gasp escaped my throat.

What. The. Fuck?

By the time I’d scraped myself off the pavement and gathered my shattered phone I was too shaky to do anything but head home. I walked back in a daze, my face numb, pain prickling like ants beneath my skin as I clambered up the front steps to our building. My hands burned as I pushed through the door to our apartment and collapsed with a groan onto the lumpy sofa.

I stared at my broken phone screen for far longer than was probably healthy.

It had been the first and only thing Hunter had ever bought me.

I’d only kept it because I hadn’t had the money to replace it six months ago when shit went down, even though looking at it at first had made me want to hurl. Maybe it would still work? I tried to turn it on but the shitty screen stayed black.

Yay.

“Fuck!” I threw my phone at the wall, pulling my hair till pain zinged from my scalp, only to realize belatedly—that my hat was missing—and in my rush to get home I’d left it behind. Great. Another thing I couldn’t afford to replace. “Being poor is so fucking expensive.”

Ice.

Ice?

Put ice on your face. It’s swollen as hell.

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