Page 98 of Bound By Fury

I wrap my arms around myself, suddenly feeling insecure, but when I look over my shoulder, he’s focused on his task.

When he returns, damp washcloth in his newly gloved hands, I furrow my brows.

“I get a lot of cuts and scrapes during practice,” he says, reading the question in my expression. “I have a stash of medical-grade gloves to help with the clean-up.”

He’s careful to keep his touch light against the tender, broken skin.

It stings, but the warmth feels good. I sigh. “Odds you’re gonna tell me ‘I told you so?’ ”

His hand stills. Silence spreads. “What?”

“You can say it. I know you want to.”

“Look at me.” He is barbed wire, all tangles and sharp edges.

I turn and face the boy determined to ruin and save me all at once. “You tried to warn me, and I didn’t listen. I’m not going to listen, because I know there’s something evil going on here, and I don’t care if you think I deserve everything that’s happened to me, I don’t care if you’re rotten on the inside, ’cause I am too. But I’m fixing it. If I can figure out what’s going on, if I can find Fiona, I can fix it. If I—”

I almost confess. To the powers, the dream, the whispers, the ghosts—but I bite my tongue.

He tucks a frizzy piece of dirt-streaked hair behind my ear, his fingers trailing down my jaw.

“You’re torturing me.” His voice is rough. “Every moment you spend here back in Earnest. With every memory of every summer, every piece of my past I’ve tried so hard to forget. You make me… You bring things out in me. Bad things. Evil things. Things I wish I could smother. You carved away a piece of me when you left last summer,” he laughs bitterly. “I wanted to blame you so bad. I wanted it to be all your fault.”

“What?” Is he talking about the accident?

He shakes his head, eyebrows nearly touching in the middle. “You were right, I was a coward. I was every bad thing you said about me.” His eyes meet mine, and the rest of the world falls away.

“You were right about me, and sometimes I think I’ve had this whole thing all wrong. Sometimes I think that…”

He trails off as his fingers leave a ribbon of shivers down my arm, his bottom lip getting caught between his teeth as he dabs at my cut with a cloth. I’m reminded of the day we met.

“Kai.” His name spills from my mouth like a benediction, and his lips part with a soft gasp as he glances up at me. “Sometimes you think what? What is it?”

We watch each other. We’re playing chicken. “Nothing. It’s nothing.” He loses. So do I.

I groan in frustration and grab his face, pulling it toward me until our foreheads touch. He shudders, his eyes fluttering closed. His jaw tensing between my palms. His fingers bunch the comforter in tight fists. He feels strange beneath me. Rough with stubble, square and angled, somehow so much older than the last time.

How different would it be to sketch him now?

Tears well in my eyes, the exhaustion finally getting the better of me. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“Nothing, Harper,” he says again, defeated, sounding just as tired as I am. “Turn around.”

We stare into each other’s eyes for another moment. A moment more. It’s clear neither of us will budge this time. So I do as he says, picking at my cuticles as we lapse into silence.

Done wiping the wounds clean, he opens a jar of ointment and begins to spread it over the tender skin.

Flashes from the maze come back to me while he works. The monster’s words twisting, mutating, echoing over and over. Despite the cloak and the voice distortion, there was something so disturbingly familiar about it.

However sinister I thought this campus was, it’s so much worse. Someone tried to kill me tonight. Or tried to evoke my powers? But why?

I sit, contemplating all of this, so lost in my thoughts that I don’t notice he’s finished until his shadow looms over me. He hands me face wipes and an extra toothbrush, angling his head toward his in-room water closet. Perks of having an accessible dorm, I guess. I didn’t realize how badly I had to use the bathroom until I’m already done. I don’t bother looking in the mirror, and I can’t bear to face myself quite yet.

When I return, his hand is outstretched, a black T-shirt dangling from his fingers. “Put this on.”

I grab the shirt and stand with my back to him.

“And lose the pants,” he says, voice rough. “They’re filthy.”