Stay with Me (Wait for You, #3)(104)

The house of lying cards had collapsed more quickly than I realized it could. Through what was said to Reece and his brother and what I then had to tell them, they now knew that my mom was most likely kicking around and she was embroiled in a ton of nasty crap that had spilled over into my life. The only thing that had not been up for discussion had been the fire, but that was the least of things to know about me at this point.

So, yeah, I knew why I was sitting on the edge of Jax’s bed, unable to go downstairs and face my friends. I was going to stay up here, surrounded by the scent of Jax’s cologne and the images of all the naughty things we’d done in here, on the bed, the floor . . . the bathroom.

Yep, I was just going to stay up here forever. Sounded like a decent, legit plan. Maybe I could talk Jax into bringing me food at least twice a day. If so, this plan was totally getting better.

“Calla?”

Lifting my head, I twisted toward the open door. My back straightened. Teresa stood in the doorway. She wasn’t alone, either. Avery was with her.

“Jax told us we could come up here,” Avery explained as Teresa nudged the door farther open with her hip. “So we totally just didn’t roam up here.”

Figured that Jax had done that. God knows I’d been up here for a while. “Sorry,” I said, focusing my attention to my toes. “Time got away from me.”

“It’s understandable. You’ve had a crazy night,” Avery said softly.

Teresa walked in and plopped down on the bed beside me. “Apparently, you’ve had a crazy life.”

I winced.

Avery sent Teresa a look that pretty much flew right over her head. “You’re hiding up here,” Teresa said.

My lips twitched, and the movement kind of hurt. When I looked in the mirror earlier, a faint bruise was forming on my jaw, and my lower lip was cut near the right corner. “Is it that obvious?”

She shrugged. “Kind of.”

I drew in a deep breath. Since I wasn’t going to be able to hide up here, I needed to woman up. Doing so sucked. “I’m sorry, guys. I know I’ve lied to you all, and I really don’t have a good reason for doing so.”

Teresa cocked her head to the side as Avery hovered by the edge of the bed, her slim fingers fiddling with the bracelet along her left wrist. “So . . . you’re not from around Shepherdstown, are you?”

Mortified, I shook my head. I hadn’t felt this way since I was six years old and had thrown bubble gum in the hair of a girl who was about to go onstage before me. I hadn’t meant to toss it in the mass of brown curls, but Mom had been standing by the front of the stage and when she’d realized I still had gum in my mouth, she had gotten a crazy stage mom look on her face and I’d panicked.

“I’d been at Shepherd since I was eighteen, and to be honest, it does feel like my only home,” I said, glancing at Teresa. She was watching me closely. “I know that doesn’t justify lying, but I just . . . I never thought of here as home, at least for a long time.”

Teresa nodded slowly. “But what about when you said you went to visit family for break? From what I gathered earlier, you haven’t been back here in years.”

“I didn’t go home.” My cheeks heated. “I’d checked into a hotel that time.”

Her brows pinched.

Avery’s eyes widened with sympathy. “Oh, Calla . . .”

“I know it sounds stupid. I honestly only did it because I wanted to get away for a little bit, and it was really the only option. It was kind of cool, really. And I know what I said about my mom being dead is freaking terrible and you guys probably think I’m a horrible person.”

“Actually, no, we don’t.” Teresa twisted toward me as she straightened out the leg that had been injured first by dancing and then again when her roommate’s boyfriend had pushed her, effectively ending Teresa’s dreams of dancing professionally for an elite ballet school. “Calla, I don’t know all your reasons for not telling us about your mom and your life here, but from what we’ve learned the last couple of hours, I get why you didn’t want to.”

“We totally get it,” Avery agreed, and I felt a tiny bit of hope flare in my chest.

Teresa nudged my knee with hers. “But I hope you know that whatever your background is or whatever, we aren’t going to judge you. You can be up front with us.”

“Trust us on that,” Avery added. “We are the last people to judge you.”

My gaze bounced between the two, and they were giving each other a look I didn’t fully understand. Then Avery moved to sit on the other side of me. Nervously, she tucked a strand of red hair back behind her ear.

Then she took a deep breath I could hear, looked at Teresa one more time, and then her gaze settled on me. Muscles in my stomach clenched, and I knew she was about to tell me something major. It was written all over her somewhat pale face. “When I was younger, I’d gone to a party that an older guy at school was throwing at his house. He was cute and I flirted with him, but things got out of hand. It really was bad.”

Oh God no. Part of me already knew where this was heading, and I reached over, wrapping my hand around hers, and squeezed.

She pressed her lips together, and I could tell what she was about to say was hard—harder than anything I’d ever had to admit to. “He raped me,” Avery said quietly, so softly I could barely hear it, but I did, and in response, my chest squeezed. “I did the right thing. At first. I told my parents and I told the police, but his parents and mine were country club buddies, and they offered my parents a whole lot of money if I kept quiet. Plus there had been a picture of me earlier that night sitting in his lap and I had drank. My parents had been more worried about what people would say about me instead of what was done to me, so I agreed. I took the money and it ate at me, Calla. I felt like shit for it.”