Page 24 of Make Me, Break Me

Not a damn thing changed on his face as one tear fell after another. Not a single thing. It was like he was made of concrete. A brick wall.

“Okay.” He rolled his lips inward and nodded. “Why don’t you stop the car, and come in? We can have something to eat.”

“I’m not eating with you, Dex, and I’m not coming inside,” I forced the words out through clenched teeth.

“Alright. A walk?” His eyes hooded, his whole body stilled.

I wondered if this was what he was like right before a fight when he shut down everything that mattered and only left the necessary bits running.

“Please get out.” I kept my tone polite by some miracle. “I need to go home and just be?—”

“Be what?” His voice came out harsh, showing emotion for the first time.

“Justbe, Dex. Me. You're suffocating me.”

If the hurt that rippled over his face before sank my stomach, it was nothing to what I saw on his face now. The man who moved before me might as well never have had cracked ribs, and if the ones in his body offered any residual pain at all he ignored it right now, sliding out of my car and slamming the door.

Before I exhaled my next breath he was gone, striding into his dorm building. That door slammed behind him, too. I fumbled my phone, my fingers dancing over the keys on a single sentence that I deleted six times before I finally sent anything at all.

ZINZI:See you next Friday.

I waited for a long moment, too long a moment before the three dots appeared as he read the words that hadn’t been my first choice but turned out to be the only choice I could send to him.

Then the dots disappeared and were replaced by his message that I didn’t want to read at all.

DEX:Don’t worry about it.

I fumbled to open my calendar, but by the time I found the app, every Friday night block that had Dex’s name on it right through to graduation and beyond was cleared.

Damnit, I should have just gone withI’m sorry.

But I hadn’t, and so I drove home with eyes full of tears, realizing that I hadn’t asked about the new ink etched along his arm beneath the cast I’d spotted when the doctor took it off that shouldn't have been able to be there at all.

CHAPTER TEN

ZINZI

Dex wasn’t coming, just like he promised.

At least, not with me.

I waited at home on my Friday night for over two hours, pining until Margot called in what should have been the middle of my fuck fest, her usual self completely okay with being ignored while I got Dex out of my system right up until I bawled all over her through the phone instead.

Less than an hour later she had me topped up with tequila, primped and primed with an amount of makeup I’d have to chisel from my face come tomorrow morning, and dressed in a little red beaded number that barely covered my butt cheeks and shimmered to purple whenever I moved.

“I never even got to wear it,” Margot mourned, sipping her oversized espresso vodka from a Rippton U branded tumbler. Then her expression brightened. “But fuck him. Let's make you the wet dream of every student on campus.”

With that goal in mind, I let her drag me from each sorority party to the next dorm, and finally to the Kingsman’s house. Their current branding still stood proud against the architraves.I swore, in my tipsy state, that I would fix that listing lion with its frazzled mane before the end of semester, or bust.

The night passed me in a blur for a period until I found myself leaning against one wall of the house, inside the frat party trying not to think of what might have been done against said wall in the past and attempted to blend in.

Spoilers: I failed.

Horrifyingly.

Not only did Inotmanage to blend in, but I blended so poorly that after my roomie tried to drag me out onto the impromptu and alcohol fueled dance floor, knocking back three approaches from frat boys and one girl who wandered up to us both with a kissy face—kudos to Margot; the dressworked—I found myself nose-to-nose with the Lord of the All.

AKA Nelson Milton, complete with a private boy’s school blazer that he didn’t attend and a sporting powder blue bowtie. Combined with shiny black patent shoes, tan slacks ironed within an inch of their lives and a pompadour hairstyle that might have gone out of style sometime in the last century—not the nineteen hundreds—he managed to pull it all off in a sexy,I’ll never hurt you, Lass,type of way.

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