Page 25 of Evil King

I turned around and started to walk down the hallway back toward my locker when a quick glance over to my right stopped me in my tracks. I saw the classroom belonging to Miss Abrams, the teacher with whom Nathan had an affair. The door to her room was closed, despite the fact that classes were all done for the day, and all the students were roaming the halls, preparing to go home.

I glared over at Brayden. “Are you covering for him?”

“What?” Brayden asked in a high-pitched voice. “Oh, you know what? I forgot that I have to, um… See ya.” With that, Brayden turned and scurried away.

Rage boiled through my blood, and I stormed past the classroom, hearing it open just as I passed it by. I knew what I would see if I turned around, so I didn’t risk it, and instead, I just continued for my locker. As quickly as I could, I packed up all of my stuff, threw my backpack over my shoulder, and slammed my locker closed. Just as I was turning to head back toward the door, Nathan turned and walked down the hallway, headed straight for me.

“Hey, beautiful!” he greeted.

Part of me wanted to take a stand against him, but without having caught him in the act, I didn’t have much of a leg to stand on. Nathan reached out and pulled my backpack from around my shoulder, kissing me as he leaned forward, and then flung it over his shoulder and grabbed my hand. He pulled toward the door, and I relented, allowing him to pull me along.

“What do you think? Should we go get some dinner tonight?”

As much as I wanted to tell him to go fuck himself the second we turned the corner, we came face to face with Deon, hand-in-hand. He was standing next to Sicily, and they were both dressed in leather jackets, gray t-shirts under their jackets, black jeans, black combat boots, and a gray newsboy hat. I had to fight back a laugh at how silly they looked, given their insane difference in size and stature.

“Oh,” Nathan said, holding out a hand toward Deon. “Deon, right?”

Deon’s somewhat neutral expression turned sour as he took Deon’s hand and shook it. “Right.”

“Nice to meet you, man. I’m Nathan.” He dropped Deon’s hand and pulled me a little closer to him. “I think you’ve already met my beautiful girlfriend, Cherri.”

Deon looked at me, and the disappointment in his eyes was almost too much to bear. “I have.”

“Well, we have a date to get to, so have a nice night.” With that, Nathan pulled me past Deon. Deon stared after me sadly, until we were through the front doors and out of sight. “Well, where would you like to go?” Nathan asked.

Knowing that I wouldn’t be spending my night falling asleep with Deon on the phone was a hard pill to swallow. “I don’t care.”

11

Deon

All I could do was stare out the window at the collection of stars in the sky and lament the fact that after just a few days of talking to Cherri every night on the phone, not getting to speak with her that night left me unable to fall asleep. That quickly, I’d grown attached to her face being the last thing I saw and her voice being the last thing I heard. If I didn’t fall asleep so hard that I didn’t dream at all, my dreams would often bring me to her, where we could be together without restrictions or my dumbass brother getting in the way. Not only did I not get that tonight, but it was worse because she was out with Nathan, which made me sick to my stomach.

“Deon?” I looked over toward my door, and my mom was walking in, just getting home from her job, which was a night shift job. I hadn’t been staring at my phone, but if she was home, it was nearly three in the morning. “Why aren’t you asleep?”

My mom was an angel who intentionally took a job that didn’t start until six in the afternoon so that she could always be home when I got home from school and have dinner with me. Despite the fact that she wouldn’t get home until close to three in the morning, she would still set her alarm for six o’clock so that she could wake me up, have breakfast with me, and see me off to school, and then she would go back to sleep after that.

I sat up and kicked my legs over the edge of my bed. “Um, no real reason. Just can’t sleep. How was work?” She leaned against the doorframe, and I could see how exhausted she was in the bags under her eyes and the loose curls from the ponytail her red hair was in. “Sorry, Ma. You’re tired. Go to bed.”

“It’s okay, baby,” she said with a smile. “I lost four years getting to speak with you. I’m not gonna give up a second of it now because I’m a little sleepy. I’ll get my rest.”

Every time I had to face the fact that these past few years had weighed heavily on my mom, I hated myself all over again. It’d caused her so much pain, but I still couldn’t bring myself to regret the decision that I’d made. Who knows how things might have turned out if I hadn’t taken matters into my own hands? I did what I did for someone I loved. I just hated that I hurt someone else I loved so much with what I had to do.

“Well, give me the sixty-second update. I probably should at least be trying to sleep,” I said, and we exchanged tired smiles.

“Work is always just that—work. Never gets old cleaning up for people who have probably never cleaned a single day in their whole life,” she said. “Today, I actually had a woman ask me where we keep the bleach. She wanted to know wherewe, the housekeepers, keep the cleaning supplies in her home.”

I thought about Nathan and could pretty much conclude that he would have no idea where any cleaning supplies were in his house. “That sounds about right.”

“Nothing out of the ordinary tonight, though. The last few houses are always the worst because we’re cleaning these mansions, and the families sleep straight through it. They’re so far from the parts of the houses we’re cleaning that they can’t hear the vacuums, talking, any of it. Can you imagine?”

There was an awkward silence between us, likely born of the fact that I had spent a year living that way. I didn’t approach the topic, though, and neither did she.

“Anyway,” she continued, “it was work. I’m glad to be home.”

“Welcome home,” I said.

She smiled, walked into the room, and kissed me on my forehead, then turned around and walked out. The bathroom door clicked shut a few seconds later, and the sink started going, letting me know she was washing up for bed. I was just about to lean back in bed and actually make another attempt at falling asleep when my phone buzzed on my nightstand. I picked it up, and my heart jumped.

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