Page 58 of Forbidden Lessons

He takes another swallow from his mug, his brown eyes sparkling as they catch the firelight. A cool breeze comes in from somewhere, and I draw my feet under me before I realize what I’m doing. As I try to drop them down again, Bastian holds out a hand to stop me.

“Please,” he says. “I’m a guy. Really think I’m going to care if you put your feet on the couch?”

I grin, shrugging a shoulder as I draw my feet under me again. Bastian takes another sip and then leans over, dragging the fur blanket over my legs.

“Better?”

I nod, my cheeks warming when he doesn’t look away. I angle toward the fire, squirming my toes under the blanket as my body slowly starts warming up.

This is intoxicating as fuck, and I’m not sure it’s the bourbon to blame. I mean, I’ve had a few sips of beer. Some wine coolers. I even tasted some of my dad’s vodka once, because I wondered why he handled something that looked like water as if it was a precious commodity.

I was six, so I didn’t know water actually was precious, or that vodka was toxic.

Kai explained both to me.

He taught me a lot about the world. Some of it was bullshit.

You don’t know what you don’t know.

When kids think they know something, even a little, suddenly, they’re wise.

He was the dreamer, Kai. He’d concoct the biggest load of nonsense as we played. I tried to get him to listen to reason, to ground him, but I guess at some stage even my five-year-old self realized he was trying to escape reality.

Me, on the other hand? I was trying to make sense of a world where the rules kept changing. Out there, in the woods, was the only place where we always stuck to the rules…even if they were silly and based entirely on Kai’s imagination.

“Look, I’m just going to come out and say it, Haven. And you can hate me if you want, but I’d be a pathetic human being if I just pretended I didn’t know.”

Bastian’s terse words make me flinch.

He’s staring at me with a mix of annoyance and frustration, and something else. Not quite pity—I’m hypersensitive to that by now—but maybe sympathy?

I take a nervous sip of my cocoa. “What are you talk?—“

“Jesus Christ,” he mutters, turning to the fire, shaking his head. Then he snaps his head back to look at me. “Who are you protecting? Dad? Mom? Friend? Foe?”

He leans closer, cradling his coffee cup in both hands. “I want all my students to be safe. It’s obvious you’re not. Whatever you’re dealing with, I can help.”

He’s gentle with his cup, I’m not. I throttle it like I want the ceramic to shatter and slice my palms into ribbons.

Sure, Professor, let me break it down for you.

I fought tooth and nail to get a grant to AHC, because my life was a shit show and I was about two steps away from jumping off a cliff.

Literally.

Like,literally, literally.

But my ex-best friend has decided to hate me so much for leaving town when I was sixteen that he’s making my new life as hellish as the old one. He wants me out, but I refuse to back down, because my entire life changed when I was awarded that grant.

Now I finally have hope. I finally have a purpose. My misery suddenly feels like a precursor to something great. Not a portent to an awful life.

“Telling you won’t change a fucking thing,” I mutter, dropping my head to glare into my mug.

Where are my fucking marshmallows?

This fucker lures me in here with false promises, and all I get is awful tasting cocoa and someone prying into my private life.

“Haven…” He says it in that tired voice people use when they’re trying to talk sense into someone young, dumb, and full of?—

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