Page 78 of As the World Falls

Her eyes seem to soften as she looks back at me, and then she shakes her head, walking to a door down the hall on the fifth floor. I look from her door to the one across hers with matching orange floral wreaths hanging on them. “A friend?” I ask, looking back at her.

“That’s Lance’s apartment,” she mentions casually as she unlocks her door and heads inside.

I follow her inside and shut and lock the door behind me. “He lives across from you?”

“Yes, that’s what I meant when I said that’s his apartment,” she responds coyly.

Annoyance surges through me as I think about him being so close to her all the damn time, at work and home. I wasn’t sure if I could compete with someone so close to her, but I had a feeling I would have to. I saw how he looked at her and knew he had feelings for her. I just didn’t know what she felt for him. I knew how her body reacted to mine, but her feelings were a whole other ball game.

I look around her apartment, seeing traces of her everywhere and committing it to memory. She had a small shelf next to her bright yellow couch full of books that looked like those old vintage ones that people don’t buy anymore and have hearts carved into the wood. Her TV was one of those box ones that looked like it was from the nineties, and she had a lot of knick-knacks on every surface you could think of. It was all cutesy stuff like teddy bear figurines or figurines of regal women in big fancy dresses. Fancy colorful vases and candle sticks. It was like an organized thrift store in here.

“Nice place,” I mention, feeling extremely out of my comfort zone. My home here in Boston is cozier and more furnished than my city apartment, but it’s not as nearly lived in as hers.

“Seriously?” she squeaks incredulously. “You’re just going to saynice placelike you didn’t just kill someone?”

“What else do you want me to say?”

“I’m freaking out here, James,” she shouts, wrapping her arms around herself. “What is going to happen now? Are we going to go to prison for killing that guy?”

I move closer to her, wanting to comfort her. “No. I already have everything handled, so I don’t want you to worry.”

“How can I not worry? What happened tonight was not okay.”

I meet her gaze, steeling myself for a moment. “Do you hate me even more now after what I did tonight?”

She stares back at me quietly, blinking once as she looks to the floor. “No,” she whispers. “I think that’s what’s bothering me the most. I’m…I’m thankful you came to my rescue. His hands were all over me, like a snake that I couldn’t get off, and there was nothing I could do. I just kept thinking, stop, stop, stop, in my head over and over again, praying that you would find me. And you did,” she says, her eyes filling with tears. “And you made it stop.”

I swallow hard, my ice-cold heart feeling like it was melting at the fact she didn’t hate me or look at me in a worse way than before because it fucking mattered to me. She mattered to me—a lot.

“What were you doing with Hodge, Cecilia?” I finally asked, although I already knew the truth. I was just curious if she’d tell me.

“Nothing I should have been doing,” she answers.

I gently smile. “Were you conspiring against me?”

She looks up at me now. “Would you hate me even more if I was?”

“No, little owl,” I say, stepping closer to her, feeling my chest dip at the nearness. “I wouldn’t.”

Tension crackles between us as she looks at me; this time, it feels like it’s in a new light. It gives me this strange feeling of wanting to prove that I could be something different…something better for her. I reach for her hand, but a knocking at the door stops me, both our heads turning toward it.

She starts to walk to the door when I place an arm in front of her and go ahead of her. I doubted anyone followed us home, but I needed to make sure. I look through the peephole, seeing a shady-looking older man who didn’t look too well either. My hackles rise as I open the door, staring dead at him. “Who are you, and what do you want?”

“Uh… I’m looking for my daughter. Is she home?” the man asks breathlessly, and it’s then I feel Cecilia at my back and shoving me aggressively to the side.

“Dad,” she says warmly, pulling him into a hug. I don’t miss how her face drops as she embraces him, and her gaze roams over him when he releases her.

“What…what’s happened?” he asks, alarmed, spotting the blood splatters on both our clothes. I clench my jaw, using all my strength not to intervene, as she shoots me a glare and then looks back at her dad.

“It’s nothing. It’s paint…actually…if you can believe it. We got a little carried away with a…art project…I’m making for the library,” she lies, following it with an enthusiastic laugh. I’m alittle impressed and unnerved by the way she lies to him because she sucks at it with me. It makes me wonder if trying to prove she was fine to her family was normal for her.

“Oh,” her dad murmurs, seeming unsure but going with it anyway, which pissed me off because we so obviously weren’t painting. Especially in the clothes we were wearing. I felt like even he suspected that but didn’t care enough, which pissed me off even more. “Okay. Well, I was stopping by to check on you, and…I wanted to say sorry for the other day. I should have never?—”

“I appreciate that,” she says, cutting him off as he struggles to speak.

“I love you and your brother, and I’m…proud of who you’ve become. I’m going to be better for you both. I’m going to try. Right now, I just need something to get by.”

Her expression fell, and I watched from by the door as she went to her kitchen and pulled a fifty-dollar bill off her fridge from under a magnet. She strides back to the door, handing it to him with a warm smile—an obviously fake one. “Here you go. I’m sorry, I don’t have any extra groceries right now. Maybe you can use that to get some.”

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