Page 36 of Sour Lollipops and Sweet Nightmares
“How about you go clean up?” They all looked like shit. “I’ll go find her.”
A new voice caused me to freeze before I could take a step. “And who exactly are you going to find, Issac?”
Fuck.
So much for ruining Georgia Pyne. It was too late for that now.
Purposeful and steady footsteps echoed behind me, making my fists ball. “I hope you weren’t talking about the same girl I saw run out of here.”
Levi shot me a look before I turned around to face my father. “Of course not.”
He knew I was lying. I could see it in his judgmental stare. The great Andrew Kratz knew everything. I got away with nothing as a kid and even less as an adult. It was annoying.
“Uh-huh.” His eyes rolled down me, then swung around the room at the others.
Everyone in the room was quiet. Well, almost everyone.
“She pepper-sprayed us,” Levi blurted out, causing my father to turn his attention to him.
“And you let her?”
Four words were all it took for my father to crush Levi’s oversized ego, and he didn’t stop there.
“The four of you let a little girl get the drop on you.” He shook his head and grumbled, “That’s disappointing.”
I puffed my chest out. “She didn’t get the drop on me.”
Everyone else was a mess, whereas I was fine.
My father looked me right in the eyes. “Didn’t she?”
My jaw clenched. It didn’t matter to my father that I didn’t get hit with Georgia’s weapon, because everyone else did, and I could’ve stopped it if she hadn’t caught me off guard. Georgia Pyne was going to pay for this.
“Meet me in the dean’s office in twenty minutes.” He spun on his heels and walked to the door, where he paused to look back at us. “And clean yourselves up, you look pathetic.”
Georgia
My legs worked hard, pounding my feet on the pavement, while every breath I sucked into my lungs burned through my chest. My body hated me, and the world rushed past me in a blur, but I kept going.
I pushed past the ache, tearing up my calves, and forced my legs to move faster. There was no stopping or slowing down. There was only running away from the fear chasing closely behind.
Paranoia raced through my veins, building with every stomp of my foot. I knew Issac wasn’t following. I couldn’t see anyonebehind me. Yet every turn I took, or walkway I dashed down, I heard him chasing me. My heart hammered against my ribs with one thought… Don’t get caught.
I ran so fast that I didn’t know what I was running from. The hands I could still feel burning a trail across my skin, or the possibility that it might happen again? In the recesses of my mind, there was the sound of something else.
A faint click or a whisper of warning I couldn’t make out. It felt like a shadow moving in on me. Even after I’d dashed into the safety of my small house and slammed the door, I couldn’t chase away the suffocating sense that was bearing down on me.
This incident wasn’t the first time my pulse fluttered uncontrollably. It had been years since I felt dread swirling in my gut. My social awkwardness turned into social anxiety all the time. It got so bad that Mom made me see a psychiatrist.
Over the years, I’d learned a few tricks to calm my nerves. Take deep breaths, close my eyes, and look at the situation rationally, which was what I was trying to do now.
Issac had his fun. He humiliated me. He got his revenge. There was no one following. No one was chasing me, because Issac accomplished what he set out to do.
For now.
Damnit. Okay, I needed to focus on something else.
I opened my eyes and looked around my modest kitchen.
