All Broke Down (Rusk University #2)(26)
Author: Cora Carmack

Needing to do something to fill the silence, I push the envelope toward him and say again, “Thank you for helping me and Matt. That was a really nice thing to do.”

“Nice,” he mutters and lifts his glass to his mouth again.

“Yes. It was very nice. As was getting your friends to give us a ride and inviting us over to your place.”

He clears his throat. “Trust me. My intentions were not nice at all.”

“You were nice to me.”

I see the first hint of a smile on his face since the moment he opened the door, and even though it’s small, it nearly knocks the breath from my lungs.

“Yeah, well. That’s the only kind of nice I know how to be.”

I blush. Because I hadn’t meant what he’d done to me, though that had been far more than nice.

“I mean . . . you were honest with me. You didn’t get angry when I decided to leave. You offered me a ride home even though you probably didn’t want to see my face again. You invited me inside today, and you didn’t have to. I think that qualifies as nice.”

He taps his fingers on the table and lifts those gorgeous eyes to mine. “I’m not sure my intentions are any nicer today than they were then.”

I swallow, but even with the water I’ve been sipping, my mouth is so dry that it takes longer than normal just to perform that simple task.

“Oh.”

He laughs. Actually laughs. And it reminds me just how different today’s Silas has been from the one I met the other night. I smile back at him. It feels really good to know that even for a few seconds I pulled him back from that. I spend most of my days trying to make a difference, and none of it has ever felt quite as satisfying as that laugh.

“How’s Matt?” he asks.

“Telling everyone that he met you and Carson. He won’t shut up about it, actually.”

“Well, I’m glad someone left that party happy.”

“I didn’t exactly leave unhappy, you know. A little confused, yes. Overwhelmed. But not unhappy.”

Then I wonder if he wasn’t talking about me, but himself, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. I won’t feel guilty for leaving on Friday. It was the right thing to do. And if he was so upset at how things didn’t turn out, he could have gone downstairs and found another girl. I’m sure he would have had no issue there.

Maybe he did do that.

He gets up to refill his glass of milk, and I drag in a few gulps of water because I suddenly don’t feel so well. I don’t want to think about what he did after I left. He sits back down and I say, “Tell me what’s wrong.”

He shakes his head, and all traces of that earlier laugh and smile are gone.

“Still trying to fix me?”

“I wasn’t trying to fix you that night, Silas. I just wanted to know more about you, wanted you to talk to me. Same as now.”

He scowls. He opens his mouth, but then pauses and looks at me, really looks at me. His eyes narrow slightly, and he purses his lips, thinking. It’s becoming even harder to swallow as I sit there wondering what it is he’s seeing when he looks at me. When I’ve waited as long as I can to ask the questions burning inside of me, he leans across the table and beats me to it.

“What if I wanted you to fix me after all?”

Chapter 11

Silas

I don’t know why I said that except that she seems like the kind of girl that might actually be able to do it. I look at a girl like that, who’s somehow wild and polished at the same time, and I feel like she has to have it all figured out. If anyone does, it’s her.

So, I keep going.

“What if there’s something wrong with me? And what if it’s slowly destroying the only things I care about? How do I fix something like that?”

She stares at me, unblinking, and I wish I could pluck all the thoughts from behind those blue eyes. I lower my gaze first¸ and I notice her hands are clutched tightly around the edge of the table.

“It appears I now know two ways to make you stop asking questions.”

That starts her up again.

“You don’t really think that, do you? That you’re broken?”

“It’s a working theory.”

“Silas, most broken people aren’t self-aware enough to realize that they need help. Just the fact that you’re asking means that you’re fine. Whatever it is . . . you’re dealing with it.”

I laugh, and it probably sounds dark and mocking, but I can’t help it. She’s so damn naive. I’ve known people all my life that were straight-up busted, and they knew it. They knew how f**ked they were, but that didn’t make them any better at getting control of it.

“No, I’m not. I’m not dealing with it at all. I’m f**king disintegrating, but I’m not dealing.”

“I think you’re just frustrated, and maybe it feels right now like—”

The thing I like about her . . . that air of sunshine that radiates off her . . . it’s the same damn thing that I can’t stand. So I skip the pep talk and cut straight to the point.

“I’ve been suspended from the football team.”

She stops, her mouth still open around the word she’d been about to say. Her eyes soften, and her head tilts to the side.

“H-How? What happened?”

“I got in a fight.”

“Another one?”

I drop my head down into my hands and grip my hair just hard enough to hurt.

“Yes, another one. And Coach knew about the first one, too.”

“Is fighting against the rules?”

“It’s kind of an unspoken rule not to deck your own teammate.”

She makes this humming noise behind her pursed lips, and I want to take the words back, reel them back in and lock them away. She somehow still has a decent opinion of me after the other night, even though she walked away, and if I don’t stop I’ll destroy that, too.

“Why?”

“Because he made me angry.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s a prick.”

She huffs. “I mean why did you get angry?”

“Because . . .” I press my hands down flat against the table and stand. I can’t sit here and talk about this with her like it’s normal. “Because I just did.”

“Nope. Not going to cut it. What made you mad?”

I push away from the table, walk to the fridge, turn, and walk back.

“He said I was going to end up like Levi.”