Page 49 of Obsessed with my Temptation

“Good.”

“Are you never going to tell me what that was about?”

I hadn’t wanted to talk about it that night. Scott and I hadn’t beenthereyet, at a point where sharing personal ugly stuff like this felt appropriate. I didn’t know if we were there now, but…I didn’t want to lie to him either.

“Did you know he didn’t go to the local high school?” I asked.

Scott nodded. “Ididgo, so I would have remembered him.”

“Well, he used to go tomyhigh school. You’ve probably heard that I might have been… a little problematic, back then.” It was my reputation, after all. Haunting me always.

Scott listened as I gave him some context anyway. About my fights and angry moods, about Coach helping me.

I also told him about my father, the reason of it all. My mother and him used to fight all the time because the fucker had anger issues and he liked to lash out at everyone and everything around him. Thankfully, he’d never been physically abusive or anything, but he had the passive-aggressive asshole routine down to a T, and I’d hated it.

It triggered my own anger issues. Ones that were thankfully all better now. My teenage hormones had settled or whatever, but the spiteful will to give him the finger still remained, strong as ever.

“Mark and I started hanging out in our senior year. He was one of the ‘cool kids’, a rarity—a straight A student that spent all day out and about.”

“A little difficult to believe,” Scott said carefully.

“Exactly.”

Coolness, influence, and a good surname took you everywhere, and Mark had learned quickly how to use all of that in his favor.

Especially to get the drugs to make the most out of his time in high school.

“I had nothing against him, it wasn’t my fucking problem after all. And as I said, we started hanging out. People were a little reluctant to approach me back then, but he thought approaching the wild beast that was me was fun or something, and we became friends of a sort. He never judged me and I didn’t judge him either. And…we were together. In a relationship.”

Scott’s eyes flared at that, but he kept quiet, listening. He was a good listener.

My relationship with Mark had been turbulent at best. We’d come to care for each other, but Mark…He had more than a few issues.

“One day, I found out he was trying to sell drugs to a junior guy who I knew had told him he didn’t want to do them anymore. They’d been ‘drug buddies’ or whatever shit they called themselves. Mark sometimes had a more vicious side butthiswas going too far, even for him.”

I knew he always had a lot of pressure from his father, who was trying to be a mayor already back then, to be one of the best. And because Mark didn’t want to give anything up, he was always pushing himself. But that pressure made him malicious, lashing out at people who least deserved it.

“I confronted him about it. He wasn’t happy. Mark tried to get me to fight him, to punch him, but I wasn’t going to. I had cleaned up my act and was trying hard enough to keep my shit together to fall for something like this, not even to indulge his masochistic streak.”

“In the end, it didn’t matter. He showed up the next day looking all banged up, like an extra from a cheap horror movie, and blamed it on me. I was almost evenarrestedbecause of it. Apparently, he got into a fight with some guys he got the drugs from, and he blamedmeso his father wouldn’t find out the truth. Too bad he hadn’t known that I hadn’t been there to even fake-beat him. I’d been helping my sister move, and I’d slept in her new apartment with her and her boyfriend present. My Coach also came in to vouch for me. Not even my parents had believed me when I said I hadn’t done it.”

And that was the sob story of how I learned to distrust popular good boys. Because people wouldalwaysbelieve them over me. And, no matter what I did, I would still be the same problematic guy with too many anger issues to count.

“That’s fucked up,” Scott said, face set hard, glaring out the windshield. “How…how did you even look at me after seeing me with him?” He turned his eyes toward me, full ofpainon my behalf. “Why did you even approach me when you could have thought I was just like him?”

“I knew you weren’t. I’d been watching you for a good while, remember?” I ran my fingers through his hair, trying to calm him down, to comfort him. A part of me liked that he felt so strongly about this, but the other only wanted to soothe him. “And you didn’t deserve it, Scott. You didn’t fucking deserve to be used by that douchebag, and I wasn’t going to let him get his hands on you,” I said, bunching my fingers and tugging a bit on his hair.

I wasn’t going to let Mark ruin Scott the way he had ruined me.

Scott shook his head—as much as he could, anyway, since I was holding on to him. “I just don’t know how anyone could have believed him.”

“Rough-looking guy? Intimidating, prone to fights?”

“Iknowthat, but…” Scott’s eyes searched mine. “I don’t see how anyone who knew you could believe it. I’m really sorry that happened to you, Travis.”

The earnest, genuine tone in his voice made my chest tighten and my throat thicken.

He exhaled roughly. “I guess high school is kind of fucked up.”

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