Page 48 of All Saints: Pledge

His eyes have blown wide. I take his point. If he gets off on watching me lose my temper, I’m giving him exactly the show he wants. And it puts the last few years in a dangerously different light. I have to put my world back in its own order. Kendall is clearly messing with me to get me to drop out. I know the facts. I just have to clear my head, and get back to normal. I flop down on my back as far as I can go, and cover my eyes with my hands and groan. He’s screwed with my brain so much I can’t really tell which way is up anymore. “You should just leave.”

“I don’t.” His voice is quiet. Resolute. He’s staring first at the wall, and then at me. “Don’t hate you,” he clarifies. He pauses. “Quite the opposite, in fact.”

I lift a hand to see if he’s joking. He’s staring steadily at my face now.

I want to smack him. My anger rises in a flash, despite my attempts to keep it under wraps. “I was there in high school.” I tick off my fingers. “You ruined my fundraiser for the animal shelter. You took down all my signs when I ran for Studentbody President, and put up photos of me in a swimming suit instead. You convinced the debate team to send Tommy Masters in as captain instead of me. You always one-upped my fundraising for Student Council because your Dad is rich. You made sure I wasn’t invited to parties.”

“Iwantedto keep someone else from having you.” The admission seems to cost him something from his core. “I’m not proud of it. But, I guess I assumed it was a means to the end, and that someday you’d forgive me for it.”

I’m not sure how to keep putting together the story I’ve told myself for so many years. Not after these confessions from him here in Oxford. I shake my head, trying to put my story back in place. It’s feeling more and more like a square peg and a round hole. “No. You…hated me. Ever since your friends played that stupid trick on you and you kissed me in that closet you?—”

“—realized that I never wanted to stop kissing you, and could not have you? Itpissed me off. Like in a real existential crisis way.”

I gape at him.

I blink a few times.

“I’m the son of an absentee father who arrived back in town in middle school to inform me that if I wanted a free college education, millions of dollars, and a life of luxury? I could never do anything more than kiss a girl. I could definitely not fall in love. I had to keep myself pure, that Iowedit to my lineage. It was my duty. My higher calling.”

“But you…Clara? You dated Clara. You didn’t eventalkto me after the closet thing.” I scrub my hands over my face because…he doesn’t—hecan’t—have actual feelings for me. He’smy nemesis, and a misogynistic bastard who claims ownership of me. Claims I tormentedhimin high school. Just by existing, his very own Bella Swan, to hear him tell it.

It’s hard to ignore the hunger in his gaze now. The wonder has he slowly pivots until he’s laying on his stomach, propped over me on an elbow. Gazing down at me as if seeing me for the first time. I could get away now if I wanted to. I can’t bring myself to move. I want answers, and his face says I’m about to get them.

“I dated Clara because I could keep myself in control at all times. I knew I could walk away from it, and that we’d both be okay. We’d get over each other. It was the quintessential high school romance, but one that doesn’t linger into college. I could keep myself sane and safe around her. That’s not how I felt about you. Never have. It’s never changed.”

I blink again, visions of our tryst in the library slamming into my brain. There wasn’t much control there, on either side. “I always thought you were horrified I wasn’t Clara in the closet. Embarrassed to have kissed someone so uncool.” I’m fourteen again, and re-living my moment of deepest shame. The moment he jumped away from me after realizing I wasn’t Clara. The way he bolted like he couldn’t get away from me fast enough.

“Iknewyou weren’t Clara the moment I smelled you.” He mimics his movements there in the closet, inching closer. “I kissed you automatically, assuming you were Clara but then…I could smell your shampoo. I knew exactly who you were.”

My heartbeat starts racing, as his face nears mine. He’s not menacing. I don’t even know if he’s aware he’s doing it. It’s like he’s re-living it too. “I’d had a crush on you foryears, Helena. You were one of the only people who was kind to me in my chubby kid days. You picked me in seventh grade science to be your partner when no one else would. I was always in awe of how you wanted to help people and animals, how pretty you were.How sweet and nice. I was going to ask you out in seventh grade, but after my Dad told me I couldn’t have a serious girlfriend if I wanted a future, I just figured it would be easier to stay away. It made it even harder on me…because then I thought about you all the time, knowing that my feelings for you were why I couldn’t ask you out casually. Even in seventh grade, I had this inkling that you were it for me. When I got in that closet, I just thought to myself…what could one kiss hurt? I half-convinced myself it would be terrible and that it would fix everything. Put me out of my misery. Free me from thinking about you all the time. But.”

I can’t breathe. I’m both that fourteen year old in a closet and this girl, laying on a bed in Oxford. Waiting with her heart in her throat. Mesmerized by the presence of this person. Because only Jaqueline knows that I had a huge crush on Kendall until that night. That I’d fantasized about kissing him. I went into that closet for Seven Minutes In Heaven, hoping that he would be the one chosen to join me. “But?” I ask it breathily, wanting him to finish.

“It didn’t fix anything, Helena.” He whispers my name, and brushes his lips over mine in the barest hint of a whisper of a kiss. Just the way he’d kissed me the very first time in the closet. I’m transfixed. I don’t know if I want him to kiss me, or leave. I have a roving, restless, relentless anxiety building in my core but I don’t know what to do with it.

“I screwed everything up that day, learning what it was like to kiss you. I’ve wanted to kiss you every single day since then. You don’t know how badly I want to kiss you right now, even knowing I shouldn’t.”

I open my mouth to tell him I need a minute to process but instead, I find myself staring at his lips, and wetting mine in anticipation.

His gaze sharpens. “Is that an invitation?Wecan’t. You know that.” But he doesn’t pull away. And instead of pushing himaway, my hands find my way back up to his arms, his chest, and then his neck, re-writing our history. Contemplating what it would be like to have lived in an alternate reality where Kendall had said these things to be in high school. Letting it sink into my skin like diamond dust. There’s no sound as I feel my way along his arms to his jaw. I’m a gazelle who has suddenly lain down with the lion, not entirely sure it isn’t on the dinner menu.

“I hated you for giving me that kiss.” I never thought in a million years I’d admit this to him. Much less while he’s in my dorm room bed, late at night.

His chest heaves like he’s run a marathon, but he lets me drift my fingertips along it. We’re wrapped in a moment, in a dream, and I’m loathe to let it go. Because there is no way Kendall actually loves me. He’s lusted after me. And if I’m being entirely honest, I’ve lusted after him. The library and that stone wall showjusthow much I’ve pent up my desire for him, how it’s mixed toxically with my anger and his arrogance to create a sort of chemical bomb neither of us are immune to.

“Do you still hate me?”

“That kiss ruined my high school years. You ruined me for boyfriends. You ruined Oxford for me. It’s the bar I’ve measured every kiss against.”

He groans and drops his forehead to mine.

“This is pheromones, and dopamine. Lust and pressure. We’ve built this up, that’s all it is.”

He grunts, it’s a noise that tells me he doesn’t agree with my analysis.

“No, I’m serious. The only reason it feels like this is we’ve made it forbidden. All we have to do is prove we’ve made a mountain out of a molehill.” But the way he feel pressed against me? God, does it feel like a mountain.

“Isthatan invitation?” His lips are a whisper from mine.

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