Broken and Screwed 2 (BS #2)(78)

A wrangled cry escaped my throat. I couldn’t stop it and I couldn’t stop the tears that started falling. This was it then. He couldn’t know my secret and not tell me his. I needed to know. It was about Ethan. I had a right to know, but I didn’t ask again. He wasn’t going to tell me. So instead, I cut out, “I’ll pack.”

His head snapped around. “What? No.”

“I can’t be here if you won’t tell me. Ethan was my brother.”

“He was mine too,” he growled. His hands jerked into fists at his side. “He was my f**king brother too. Don’t start rewriting history.”

I flinched. There was the old Jesse again, the one that lashed out. But I swallowed over a lump in my throat and started grabbing my clothes. The tears had withered up at his anger, but my eyes were stinging. They wanted the release, but I wouldn’t allow it. My heart was pounding against my chest as I threw my clothes into a bag and then started for my books.

He watched me as I moved around his room. I was blind as I rushed to get my stuff and get out. I was grabbing at things, not thinking. I could only feel his gaze on my back. It was burning into me, drilling a hole.

“Stop, Alex.”

“No.”

“Stop.” He reached for my bag.

I twisted away to keep it. “NO!”

He wouldn’t let go and instead, he used the bag to pull me into his arms. Lowering his forehead to mine, he said urgently, “Please don’t do this.”

I shoved him away. “You can stop me.”

“How?” But he knew. It was clawing at him. I saw the guilt flaring up again in his depths before he looked away.

“Tell me about Ethan. What did they do to him?”

“I can’t.” His eyes closed tight. “I wish I could. I do. I really do, but I can’t.”

It was done. No matter what I did, he wasn’t going to tell me and I couldn’t stay there knowing there was something about Ethan I should’ve known. A bitter laugh wrung from me. “This is f**king poetic.”

“What is?”

“You and me. Ethan wanted us apart when he was living and now he’s dead, and it’s working. Guess he won.”

“Alex, no.” Jesse dropped to the bed and caught his head in his hands. His elbows went back to his knees and his fingers grabbed hold of his hair. He started to rock back and forth. “Don’t say that. It’s not like that. If I could tell you, I would. I promise I would. There isn’t anything I haven’t told you—”

“Except this!”

He visibly flinched.

I swallowed back more tears. They were there, ready to spill. I couldn’t, not then. But I would. I promised myself, as soon as I got into the car, I could let them spill all they wanted. My voice wobbled, “Jesse, please just tell me.”

“I can’t,” he whispered back. His eyes were filled with misery.

“This is really what you’re doing? You really can’t tell me? I’m going, Jesse. This can’t keep happening, not if you don’t tell me.”

I felt Ethan again. He was in the room with us, haunting us so much. Would he have been happy by this? I’d never know.

“I can’t tell you, but I’m going to try and make it up to you.” Jesse grabbed my arm and hauled me in his lap. He wrapped both arms around me and buried his head into my shoulder. I felt his lips against my skin. “I’ll make it right. I promise.”

“You can make it right by just telling me.”

His arms tightened. He didn’t say the words, but I heard them spoken in silence. He couldn’t. It was all he’d been saying from the beginning and now I understood why this moment hadn’t happened how it should’ve been. My secret was out. Jesse’s should be out. He knew I would leave. It’s why he had kept it hidden for so long.

My heart splintered in half as I turned and pressed my lips to his forehead. Then I slipped from his hold. I didn’t say goodbye. I just left, but it was the same as the last time I left him. A part of me stayed in that room with him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

When I returned to my dorm room, I knocked. I wasn’t sure what was going on inside and I’d been glad I did. Hannah opened the door. Her jaw dropped, but then a guy rushed from her bed and out the door. She’d only had enough time to yell at him about a Kari girl before he was gone. The alarms went off in the next minute. Guess he’d gone through the backdoor. After that, everyone had woken up and we were called into a mandatory dorm meeting. Kara had been surprised to see me, as I was with her. I thought she had spent the night with Derek, but I never explained myself. Hannah figured out what happened by all my bags and so had Kara. I wasn’t sure what Jesse said to the guys, but I never asked either.

Cord was the one that answered that when he saw me in class the next week. Jesse hadn’t said a word to anyone. No one would’ve even known I had left if it hadn’t been for Kara. I wasn’t sure if I was happy to hear that or hurt even more. And then class with him and Jaime had taken another turn. The girls on my dorm spread the word about the break-up, if that was what it had actually been, so the girls in our class started to throw insults my way. At first, it was just a word I caught in their conversation, like whore, or skank. It was loser most of the times. They were outright calling me pathetic by the end of the week. Jamie was the first to rip into them. He chewed them out, followed by a quick appraisal of how they fit into those descriptions based from his first-hand knowledge. Then he followed that by one phrase, “Back off, bitches.”