Page 33 of Choosing Her
saylor
I wokeup to someone knocking on my door incessantly. I groaned as I stretched an arm out of the covers and grabbed my phone from the nightstand, then blinked at the screen at the time staring back at me.
10:37 a.m. That couldn’t be right.
I rubbed at my eyes, every muscle in my arm burning as I lifted it, then looked at the time again. It was now 10:38 a.m. Did I have the wrong day of the week? I was sure it was Monday today, but maybe it was actually Sunday. That was the only reason my alarms wouldn’t have gone off.
The knocking at my door started again and I groaned as my head started pounding in time with it. Couldn’t whoever it was at the door take a hint? If the person doesn’t respond after the first three minutes of knocking, they probably aren’t going to answer at all. Who would knock on my door, anyway? Poppy, Lilah, and Naomi would all just walk straight in if the door was unlocked—and one glance over at it told me that I’d forgotten to lock it when I came in last night. Come to think of it, I couldn’t remember much of yesterday after I’d come in from my time in town with Naomi. Had I just passed right out when I got back?
“Saylor!” A voice came from the other side of the door. It was too muffled to make out who it was. “Open up!”
I finally checked the calendar on my phone.Monday, October 20. I groaned. Okay, so I was definitely supposed to be in class right now. I’d already completely missed first period and second period was going to start any moment, so I needed to get up if I was planning to go.
Was the knocking some sort of divine intervention to get me out of bed?
I groaned again but threw off the covers. Immediately, I wanted to climb back into bed and hide under the covers for days, but there was no way I could relax with someone trying to knock down my door. So, I wrapped the blanket around my shoulders and stumbled over, yelling “I’m coming, I’m coming!” Who was so insistent that they needed to see me right this second? Maybe it was my dorm advisor, Julia, coming to ask me why I missed class. I was going to need to come up with a good excuse to stop me from getting detention for it. Maybe something about my parents calling me—as if—in the middle of the night because they were in another timezone, and I answered because I hardly ever got to speak to them. That had the possibility of landing me in the guidance counsellor’s office, but I could probably get out of there faster than detention.
I swung the door open, ready to pull out the fake tears, but stopped short when I saw that it wasn’t Julia on the other side of the door, like I’d expected. Instead it was… Crossy.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, frowning as I heard the rasp in my own voice. I cleared my throat, only now realizing how much it hurt. Once I got rid of Crossy, I’d find some water or something. Crossy frowned, then held up the cup in his hand—my iced coffee for the morning.
“You didn’t come to class,” he said. “I was worried.”
I stared at him, sure that I was somehow misunderstanding him. He wasworried?I guess in the time that we’d been sitting together, I hadn’t missed any classes, but that didn’t mean he needed to be worried about me not showing up once. I could have had an appointment with the guidance counsellor. I could have had a field trip. I could have just decided to skip class to sleep in on a Monday morning instead.
“This is for you,” Crossy said, shaking the iced coffee, making the ice rattle loudly. It looked a little melted, probably from him buying it before class, but I took it anyway and sipped. I frowned.
“No flavoring today?” I asked.
Crossy frowned back. “It has caramel in it. That’s your favorite, isn’t it?”
I took another sip to hide my surprise that he knew that was my favorite. I didn’t like to think of Caleb Cross as being someone who understood me at all. It was easier to keep up a wall between us if I could tell myself that we didn’t know each other better than I knew any of my sister’s other ex-boyfriends, none of whom I spoke to regularly. If that was true, then I could see him as nothing more as a random student I was tutoring, who also happened to be Bear’s roommate. But then he came in like this, buying me iced coffees every morning and knowing which ones I liked more than others, and I remembered that no, he wasn’t just any other student.
“Shouldn’t you be in class right now?” I asked. I hoped he would take that as the dismissal it was intended to be, but he stayed rooted in his spot.
“I thought checking on you was more important.”
“Why?” I asked, narrowing my eyes. He had to have some sort of ulterior motive here, right? Why would he risk getting in trouble by not going to his class, just to see what I was doing.“You could have just asked Poppy or Lilah where I was. You didn’t need to come all this way.”
“Neither of them knew,” he said immediately. I blinked. I hadn’t expected him to have actually talked to them.
“They both have my location on,” I said. “It wasn’t enough for them to tell you I was in my room?”
He shrugged. “Not when nobody had heard from you since yesterday.”
I leaned all my weight against my open door, suddenly feeling like all my energy had been depleted from my body. All I wanted to do was lie down again but there was no chance of me inviting Crossy into my room, so it would just have to wait.
“Well, you’ve seen me now,” I said flatly. “I’m alive. You can get to second period now—what class do you have anyway?”
There was only a handful of teachers that would let him get away with being this late to class without a note, and chances were, he didn’t have any of them. It would have been just as easy for him to have come by at lunch instead of between periods, and he wouldn’t have had the risk of detention if he had. I just really did not understand why he would come back like this when it didn’t benefit him at all.
Crossy grimaced and scratched the back of his head. “Well, what you need to understand…”
That sent warning bells through my head immediately. It was an extremely easy question to answer and there was no reason why he would need to explain anything to me about it.
“I just figured there was no chance of me being able to focus on math if I wasn?—”
It took all my willpower not to kick him in the shin as soon as the wordmathwas out of his mouth. Actually, I probably would have, if I wasn’t so dizzy that lifting one foot would probably send me toppling over backwards.
