Misfits Like Us (Like Us #11)(98)

“Because you know it’s true.”

“I know I’m just as likely to meet bad shit as you are, but the two of us are the same.” He holds my hand strongly, lifting our fists up. “We don’t ever give up, even when it feels like we should. You wanna outrun a curse, that’s how. You’ve already been doing it, and you didn’t even know it.”

I take a soft breath. “How do we outrun this one if my foot is stuck?”

He smiles off mine. “I’m gonna get you outta here.” Digging his hands further in the hole, he gently tries to pry wood away from my ankle.

While he’s crouched, I hold on to his back, so I don’t keel over. Further out of the attic, I hear shrieks and screams in the distance.

“Kinney,” I murmur. The girls got scared, and I strain my ears and hear laughter that sounds a lot like Eliot and Tom. I’d know it from anywhere, and I picture them scaring the youngest girls in the secondary attic.

“Can you move it at all?” Donnelly asks.

I wiggle my foot a little, pain against my shin. “Not really. Let me try—” I try shifting in a weird direction at the same time that he plants another knee down, and the floor groans beneath our weight.

He wraps his arms around me as the floor caves under our bodies. My whole world rotates as Donnelly forces my weight on top of him.

We fall a short distance. His back thuds on squeaky springs of a butterfly-quilted bed, and I’m on his chest.

I wanted to stop floating and to crash-land. I just didn’t think it’d be a literal one. Through a ceiling.

I can’t catch my breath. “Donnelly?” My knees sink on either side of his waist, and I pat his chest, trying to peer into his eyes. Please be okay.

He grimaces a bit, pushes a pillow away from his face and then lifts his head, his fingers slip tenderly against my neck. “You alright?” He’s trying to see my bleeding ankle. Dust and wood splinters are in his hair.

I hear rushed footsteps.

“Is everyone okay in there?!” my dad calls out. My heart hammers violently.

Just as I turn my head, my dad has rolled to a dead stop in the doorway. And I’m on a mattress, straddling the bodyguard he hates.





26





PAUL DONNELLY





I’m done thinking that Loren Hale controls my universe. Even the bad parts, I’m not giving it to him or to anyone. It’s all me.

And some cosmic alignment.

I can’t figure out how else to explain me and Luna. Not just her being Illyana—but falling through a ceiling and managing to land on a fucking bed.

Under other circumstances, I’d laugh. I hate that I can’t even laugh with Luna about this, because 1.) She’s bleeding, and 2.) Her dad is growing a third horn between his angered eyes.

“Dad,” Luna says slowly.

“What the hell is going on?” Lo asks, his voice like knives.

“We fell,” I explain, and I want to check her ankle, but she’s already climbing off me.

“You fell,” Lo says dryly. “No, I thought you broke the ceiling with your fists.”

I look up at the gaping hole. “Well, that’d be pretty difficult to do.”

He glares. “Donnelly.”

“Loren,” I force back, hitting a breaking point with him.

Lily has entered the bedroom in a parental panic. “Luna.” She races to her daughter near an old dresser with butterfly knobs. “Lo, she’s bleeding.”

“I’m okay,” Luna says softly while Lily starts calling Farrow on the phone. “Mom, he’s already on his way.”

Lo assesses Luna with a softer gaze, but his anger reroutes back to me while I’m sitting up on the bed. “You were alone up there with her?”

“He was helping me find Kinney,” Luna tells her dad, but she’s still wearing my silver alien antenna headband. “We ended up in the wrong attic and then my foot got stuck.”

Lo is still staring me down.

I don’t give anything away.

There is truth in his fears. Even if this part was innocent, I did kiss his daughter tonight. I have gone down on her in the past. I did break his trust years ago and tattoo her when I told him I wouldn’t.

I’m not perfect.

I’ve made questionable choices, and I’ll probably keep making them.

And he’s going to keep hating me for it.

I’m just so frustrated. So irritated that he’s doing this to us. “I’m not the bad guy, Xander’s dad,” I tell him more tightly than usual.

“I don’t know that, Paul.”

I stay on the bed, my arm on my knee, but my muscles are more flexed and taut than I probably look. “You think I’m not good enough for her?” I say coarsely, just as Farrow slips into the room with a trauma bag.

I ignore my friend’s gaze while Lily speaks quietly to him.

Lo hasn’t moved an inch, except his jaw tics. “You don’t want to know what I think.”

“You think I’m shit,” I assume. “But I’m not shit. I’ll never be shit, and no one can make me feel like I am.”

His nose flares, and I can’t read him anymore than I think he can read me.

“You think I’m worthless,” I shrug. “A nobody. You’d be right in that where I come from, no one will remember me. I’ll die forgotten unlike you. But even on my worst day as a kid, I’d love this city. And this city would love me back, and no one and nothing could take Philly from me.”