Falling Away (Fall Away #3)(29)
Author: Penelope Douglas

Not that he’d done anything wrong. I should spend time with people. With a potentially nice guy, too. But last night—and nearly every night this week, actually—I’d opted to ignore Shane and texts from Nik and Tate and either take long, long walks or sit on a lawn chair in the backyard and zone out listening to the iPod. Alone but not really lonely.

How was that even possible?

Throughout high school and college, I was always lonely.

At parties. Lonely.

With Liam. Lonely.

Around my family. Lonely.

Standing in the middle of a group of friends. Completely lonely.

But it was weird. Now that I was alone more than I’d ever been in my life, the doubt and the anxiety were replaced with something else.

Time to think. Time to unwind. It unnerved me, but it also felt kind of good. I started putting my feet on the coffee table, drinking from the carton, and playing music every morning when I woke up. It was as though I was starting to meet myself.

I put my head down, feeling bad as I walked around him toward the door, but I just wasn’t up for being social. “Thanks. Maybe another time, Simon.”

As I walked into the hallway, turning right to head out the front doors, my phone rang from inside the bag.

Picking it out, I looked, only hoping to avoid calls from my mother, but I didn’t recognize this number.

I held it to my ear. “Hello?”

“Hey, Trouble,” a deep voice greeted me with humor.

Jared.

“Great,” I mumbled. “You’re teasing me, too? I seem to remember you getting arrested once.”

I heard his quiet laugh on the other end. Jax’s brother—also Tate’s boyfriend—and I were friendly but not particularly close. I hadn’t seen him in forever.

“It’s Tate’s fault, you know?” I explained. “She’s a bad influence.”

“Yeah, no shit.”

Tate was a ballbuster, and the whole town knew it. While she and Jared used to be childhood friends, he’d begun bullying her in high school for reasons I still didn’t know. When Tate started fighting back, she literally started fighting back. There was a broken nose, a knee in the balls, some slaps, and a whole lot of damage to Jared’s car.

Tate was awesome.

“So, how does everyone know?” I asked, remembering the principal’s now useless advice of keeping my trouble a secret. “Was there a press release or something?”

“Tate doesn’t keep things from me. You know that. And, yes,” he continued, “there was a sort of press release. Liam, your asswipe ex, posted it on Facebook.”

I halted in the middle of the parking lot.

“What?” I burst out, every muscle in my body tightening.

“Let it go.” He tried to calm me. “Damage is done, and he got what was coming to him. Jax put a nice, fat fist in his gut.”

Dropping my head back, I closed my eyes to the sky and felt my chest flood with emotions so strong my nerve endings felt like sparklers. Burning, sizzling, searing sparklers.

“Unbelievable.” I sighed. So that was why Jax had jumped Liam last week. It wasn’t about the incident between him and me at the party but about Liam humiliating me publicly on social media.

“Don’t get mad at Jax,” he scolded. “It would’ve been worse for Liam if Madoc and I had been there, too. Fuck,” he continued, “if Tate had been there? Yeah.”

Yeah. Tate would’ve done even worse to him.

I shook my head. People—hundreds of old classmates and Liam’s family members—were now laughing at me.

Now I wanted to put a fat fist in his gut. Was this how Tate felt when she’d finally had enough? I suddenly felt as if I were five and wanted to push people.

I heaved out sigh after sigh, remembering that Jared was still sitting on the phone. Jared. Tate’s boyfriend. A guy I’d kissed before they were together. Tate’s boyfriend. Yeah.

“Why are you calling me?” I asked finally, getting to the point.

He was silent for a few moments, and my other hand started tapping my leg. Jared never called me.

I heard him suck in a long breath. “Relax. Tate knows I’m calling. I just want to know”—he trailed off, hesitating—“how my brother is doing,” he finally finished.

Jax? Why would Jared be asking me that? And then I remembered Jared and Jax’s fight when Jax was in the nurse’s office.

“Um … ,” I drawled out, trying to find an innocent reply but thinking about the weight room and the Loop. “I’m not sure how to answer that, actually.”

“Does he look healthy?”

“Healthy?” I repeated. I thought of Jax’s muscles that had seemed to double in size in the last two years and the bright white smiles he wore on the field when I tried not staring at him out the window. “Yes. Very,” I said.

“What does he do with his days?”

“Jared, what’s going on?” I prodded.

Jared calling me. Weird. Jared asking me about Jax. Weird. Jared acting worried about anyone other than Tate or himself. Very weird.

“Sorry,” he offered, sounding unusually embarrassed. “It’s just that you’re right next door. I don’t think it’s escaped your notice how much weight he has to throw around, right? The changes at the house. The Loop. I just want to make sure he’s okay.”

“He’s your brother. Ask him.”

“I have,” he shot out. “And I have no reason to suspect he’s not okay. I’m just not there, and I … I …”

I raised my eyebrows, finding his stuttering amusing.

“I just hate not being there,” he finished. “I need to make sure he’s happy and taken care of, is all.”

Hmm … I started walking again, thinking about how worried Jared must be if he resorted to calling me. “Well, everything seems fine.” Not normal but fine.

“Fine.” He started laughing. “You really have no idea, do you?”

I rounded the parking lot and stepped onto the sidewalk, my heels digging into the concrete. “What are you talking about?”

He paused long enough to piss me off. “Kind of convenient how the state of Arizona let you come all the way back to your hometown to complete your community service, huh?”

I pinched my eyebrows together. “Well, why wouldn’t they?”

Yeah, why wouldn’t they?

“Mmm-hmm,” he teased. “And it’s pretty awesome that you’re sitting all comfy in your old high school tutoring a subject you love instead of cleaning up trash on the freeway, isn’t it?”