With Every Heartbeat

“Yeah.” I nodded vaguely, unable to look him in the eye as I sank into the chair next to him. “Cora showed me where the number was kept.” And then she threatened me to stay away from you and keep secrets from you.

When I dared to meet his gaze, he was watching me strangely, as if he knew something was wrong. I offered him a tight smile, but my chest was constricted with fear and worry. “He said he could get to it tomorrow.”

Quinn nodded and then opened his mouth to say something, but thank goodness Caroline and Reese interrupted, calling out to me and asking for my opinion on shades of fingernail polish. They were both excited about the concert that evening, so for the rest of the hour, I whisper-gossiped with them and made a point to ignore Quinn completely, even though it hurt to turn my back to him.

He tried to talk to me as soon as class let out, but I sent the group a big, fake smile and waved goodbye before hightailing it out of there.

My nerves were jittery and strung out; I was already on edge when I entered my writing class later on. And that’s when I learned we were having open critique.

Something was up with Zoey.

Despite the lack of sleep, I’d actually felt rejuvenated when I’d woken this morning.

Last night had gone so well. If ever a guy were to fall prey to temptation, it would’ve been when he was stuck alone in close quarters and half-dressed with the girl who made his thoughts stray. But I hadn’t done one inappropriate thing with Zoey. It felt as if I’d passed some kind of test.

Knowing I could one hundred percent behave myself around Cora’s roommate, I felt good and refreshed, and ready to befriend her without any reservations.

I’d sought her out in the library a couple times before, but every time I’d actually seen her sitting at a table studying, I’d been too much of a coward to approach, worried about anything and everything happening. But now that I knew nothing would happen, I wanted to see her. Something had definitely been bothering her in art class, and I had to make sure she was okay.

As luck would have it, I caught sight of her entering the library when I was still a few buildings away. Her back was to me as she skipped up the steps. She looked like she was in a hurry, so I picked up my pace to catch her. But when I entered, she was nowhere in sight.

I checked out a couple of the tables I’d seen her sitting at in the past, but they were all occupied by others. She had to be somewhere in the building, but the library was a big place with lots of private nooks and crannies for secluded studying.

I had an entire hour to kill, so I just kept looking. When I came to an area that was rarely inhabited, I turned down a row of bookshelves and saw her sitting on the floor at the end, against the wall with her knees drawn up to her chest and her head bowed, her hair covering her face.

There was something “wounded animal”-like about the way she was sitting. Charging forward with concern seemed like a bad idea. So...as I crept closer, I whispered. “Zoey?”

Her head flew up, and she stared at me from wide, tearstained eyes.

My heart cracked. I’d never seen her cry before, and she looked so lost and alone. I wanted to yank her into my arms and cradle her close just as much as I wanted to hunt down whoever had hurt her and pulverize them.

“What’s wrong?” I eased to my knees next to her.

“Nothing.” She eyed me warily but didn’t skitter away.

I arched an eyebrow, letting her know it was definitely not nothing.

She blew out a breath and stared forward, wiping frantically at her cheeks. “It’s really...nothing,” she repeated. “It’s stupid.”

Situating myself so I was sitting beside her on the floor with my knees bent up and the shadows covering us in our little nook, I waited until she stopped trying to pat her face back into order before I said, “It’s not stupid to you.”

She glanced at me. “But it’s probably stupid to you.”

“I still want to hear about it.”

After shaking her head, she hugged her knees tighter and went back to staring straight ahead as if I wasn’t beside her.

Knowing she wasn’t going to instigate our talk, I cleared my throat. “When I was little, I hated it when my mom drank. She was nicer when she was sober, hit me less, treated me as an actual human being. It was when she had alcohol in her that everything went bad. So I went to the library and did all kinds of research about how to stop drinking. I came up with a, I don’t know, a kind of step-by-step program to help her quit. I drew up a bunch of posters and graphs and spent nearly a month to create this little presentation to help her, because everything I read said alcoholism was a disease. I thought she’d thank me if she saw how much work I’d gone through to help save her.”