Total pages in book: 215
Estimated words: 199344 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 997(@200wpm)___ 797(@250wpm)___ 664(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 199344 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 997(@200wpm)___ 797(@250wpm)___ 664(@300wpm)
She pulls back, her hand still knotting into my shirt. Her eyes are wary, as though she’s deep in thought, warring with herself about something. “It’s . . .” she says hesitantly, pausing as her lips press into a tight line, and then I see the exact moment she decides that she’s not ready to let me in, and it fucking destroys me more than the thought of her possibly being done with me. “I just . . . It’s been a shitty week. I haven’t been sleeping well, and on top of missing you, school’s been . . . hard.”
There’s a level of truth in her tone, and I don’t doubt anything that she’s saying. It’s clear from the exhaustion in her eyes that she hasn’t been sleeping, but whatever this is, it’s so much bigger than whatever is happening at school, but I’m not about to push her on that. All I can do is hope that when she’s ready, she’ll be able to let me in. “What’s happening at school?” I ask. “Is it Shannan?”
She nods, glancing down at her fingers in my shirt. “Yeah, she’s been . . . it’s bad.”
“What do you mean bad? I thought she was leaving you alone.” Zoey winces as though my comment physically pains her, and I realize that for the past few weeks, she’s been sugarcoating everything that’s been going down at school to avoid worrying me. “Fuck, Zo. What’s she doing?”
She glances away again, that same shame seeping into her gaze. “I think the better question is what isn’t she doing?”
I curse under my breath, my jaw clenching as my arms tighten around her. “Zo,” I prompt, my patience quickly wearing thin.
She lets out a heavy breath before reaching across the center console and grabbing her phone from her bag. She unlocks the screen before pulling up a picture and turning it around to show me. My blood instantly turns cold at the photoshopped image of Zoey taking up the screen. She’s on her hands and knees, ass high in the sky as she looks back over her shoulder while touching herself. “This is only the beginning of it,” she tells me. “It gets worse from there.”
“Worse?” I grunt. “How the fuck does it get worse than this?”
“She had someone hack my phone, or I don’t know, maybe they stole it from my locker and put it back before I realized. But they took screenshots of our messages—the ones that are . . . you know, more than just flirting.”
“Fucking hell, Zoey. Why didn’t you tell me any of this?”
“Because you’re in college now. You have so much more to be focusing on,” she argues. “You shouldn’t be spending every minute of the day trying to figure out how to save me when you should be focused on training and classes. Besides, what does that say about me? That I can’t handle this on my own and need my scary boyfriend to come and protect me every time someone even looks at me wrong?”
“Look at yourself, Zo. You’re fucking miserable,” I growl. “I don’t want you to live like this. If something happens, you need to tell me. You need to let me fix it.”
“Noah—”
“No,” I cut her off. “You’re my whole fucking world. You are the other half of my soul, Zo. If someone is fucking with you, they’re fucking with me.”
Zoey leans into me, her forehead dropping against mine. “Please, Noah. For me, just let this go. You’re not there every day to make sure she stays down. If you step in, it’s only going to make it worse in the long run. I’m not responding to her, and eventually, she’s going to get bored and move on to her next victim.”
I don’t respond, and she holds my stare. “Please, Noah. For me.”
I shake my head. The thought of letting this slide goes against everything I stand for, but how the hell can I tell her no when she’s the one who’s at that school every day dealing with the fallout? “I don’t like this, Zo.”
“You don’t have to,” she tells me. “You just have to accept that I know what I’m doing and be there to hold me when it all goes to hell.”
“It’s the going to hell part that’s fucking me up.”
“I know,” she murmurs, snuggling into my chest. “I’m sorry. If I knew I was going to have you doubting us, I would have tried harder. I never want you to feel like that because when it comes to you and me . . . there’s no question, Noah. I want to grow old with you and have a bunch of babies. These seventeen years haven’t been nearly enough. But for what it’s worth, having you here now with your arms around me makes me feel like everything is going to be alright, that all that shit at school doesn’t even matter because, at the end of the day, I have so much to look forward to with you.”