The Destiny of Violet & Luke (The Coincidence, #3)(56)

I clench my hands into fists as I fight the urge to shut my eyes and kiss her until she can barely breathe. I feel weak the moment I flip up that handle and start to pull the door open because I’m choosing to feel the vile, pathetic feelings of my past—how I did things I didn’t want to do, how my mother messed with my head, how I had no control over my life. I was a puppet. I was weak. I don’t want to be that person ever again.

I wait for Violet to move out of the way so I can get the door open, but she doesn’t budge and I’m the one who ends up stepping back, losing again. It’s an unsettling place I’ve arrived at and I don’t know what to do with it beside drink myself into a stupor and hammer my fist through anything that gets in my way. My body is actually shaking as my mind craves the burning, blissful taste of alcohol.

“So where are we going to get tacos?” She sidesteps around me and hops in the truck, tucking her skirt in as she brings her legs into the truck.

“You pick,” I say as I shut the door.

She smiles a plain, fake smile, not even giving me the benefit of a real one. “It doesn’t matter to me,” she says as I climb into the cab. Then she kicks her feet up on the dash and flops her head back against the seat, looking as calm as can be.

I have to wonder if she really means it. If nothing matters to her, and if she’s beginning to matter to me.





Chapter 9



Violet



We go get tacos, stop by a drugstore, go to the electronics store to pick up a new phone for him because apparently he lost his last night, then go back to his dorm. The conversation is as light as air, which makes it complicated, in my book. It’s too easy to be around him and it’s not supposed to be that way with anyone. Things are supposed to be hard so it makes it easier to keep up my wall and stay detached, so if and when he decides to exit my life, it’ll be like he was never really there at all.

But I can feel my wall collapsing, especially when he didn’t kiss me while we were by his truck. He could have and I could tell he wanted to. I probably would have let him, too, if only to taste the rush of adrenaline that was forming at the tip of my tongue the second he leaned into me. The way I was hyperaware of his body heat and my own was unfamiliar and it terrified me. All I wanted to do was silence the fear awakening inside me, but the closer he got to me, the quieter I got on the inside. He was my escape from my emotions, yet he was putting them in me at the same time. It was the strangest feeling and I had a difficult time deciding what to do. So I just stood there and let him decide and eventually he moved back and I was left relieved and disappointed.

I’m still analyzing why. The only conclusion I can come up with is that all the stress of being homeless and going to the police department tomorrow has caused my head to crack open and I’m not thinking clearly.

Only minutes after being in his dorm room, he leaves me alone in his room to take a shower. He has packed up hardly any of his stuff, which makes me wonder what he’s going to do when morning comes around.

I douse a cotton ball with peroxide and press it to my hand, feeling it sizzle against my dirty, scraped skin. I now have $7.56 less than I did, all because Luke didn’t want me to get an infection. I was fine with the risk, but he insisted it was unsafe. I almost laughed at him. If only he knew just how unsafe life can get for me.

I flop back on the bed that doesn’t have a sheet on it, just a mattress, the one that was Kayden’s I’m guessing, and stare up at the ceiling, rotating the cotton ball around on my hand. It burns and makes my palm ache, but I let it soak into me as I figure out my next step.

I’ve never had a friend before, if that’s even where Luke and I are moving toward. Preston and Kelley were the closest to friends I ever had, but they were more like my crazy babysitters/landlords than anything. There was no one actually caring enough about me to convince me to buy peroxide and Band-Aids, to clean some cut up and properly take care of myself. There was no one who would beat someone up simply because they were groping my breast. Luke had hammered his fist into Preston’s face without even so much as a second thought.

My heart starts to pump harder as I think about it, the way he did it without any hesitation, when the dorm door opens and Luke enters. He’s wearing a towel wrapped around his waist, his skin still a little damp from the shower. His lean muscles carve his stomach along with a massive welt he probably got from the fight. He’s got a serious set of tattoos. Most are sketched in dark ink and tribal shapes except for an inscription that’s too small for me to read from this far away.

I drape my arm over my head, unable to take my eyes off him. “I like your tats.”

He sets his dirty clothes down on the dresser and shuts the door with his foot, his brow curving upward. “Was that a compliment?”

“Perhaps.”

He sinks down on the made bed across from me and disappears out of my line of vision. “You have some of your own, on the back of your neck, right?”

“Yeah, two of them,” I say, returning my concentration to the ceiling, my hand balling around the drying-out cotton ball. “I have more, though.”

“Where?”

“It’s a secret.”

He pauses and the mattress squeaks. “So, do you want to just crash? I’m kind of tired.”

I shake my head, listening to my heart thud in my chest. Even though I’m tired, if I just crash then I’ll have to think about what happened and if I think about what happened I’ll have to feel how I feel about it and if I feel it, I’ll just want to get up and do something reckless. Then afterward, I’ll be content and get tired, wanting to crash, and the whole process will start over. It’s a vicious cycle. “I’m not tired at all.”