Complete Nothing (True Love #2)(58)

Maybe she’d never given a crap about me.

“Dude, you cool?”

I glanced up to find Gavin hovering near my shoulder. He was looking at Traylor like he would have done the pounding for me, if I’d asked. I stared as hard as I could, as if I could somehow make what I was seeing different. Change the fact that her fingers were digging into his sleeves, that his hand was touching her face, that their bodies were pressed so close together you couldn’t have slid a playing card between them.

“Yeah, man,” I said through clenched teeth. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

We turned around and walked away, headed back for the field where Gavin had parked his car. I clutched my card from the scout in one hand, my duffel in the other, and decided right then and there that it was time to move on. For real this time.

“I need to do something, man,” I said to Gavin. “I need to get out of here.”

“The city thing’s still on. You wanna go?” Gavin asked. “Tiquan said he’d drive.”

“Yeah,” I said, feeling a rush of freedom. A rush of rebellion. Screw Claudia. She didn’t give a crap about me, then I didn’t give a crap about her. “Let’s do it.”

I took out my phone and brought up Josie’s number.

“What’re you doing?”

“Texting Josie to see if she and her friends want to come,” I said, pissed off that my fingers were trembling.

“Wow, when you rebel, you rebel big,” Gavin said.

“Go big or go home,” I recited.

And from what Claudia was doing back there, it was pretty damn clear, there was no going home.





CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE


True


“Well. That happened,” Lauren said wryly as Peter stormed past us.

“He’s clearly jealous, so that part’s working,” I replied.

Lauren rolled her eyes at me, then flounced off to break up Claudia and Keegan’s lip-lock. It was too bad the guy was such a jerk. The two of them made a stunning couple.

“Things aren’t going so well for you today, are they?” Hephaestus said, his tone sympathetic. He dexterously pushed his chair through the grass, and Wallace and I walked alongside him, Wallace checking his phone for whatever might have changed in his world in the last ten seconds, me trying not to spontaneously combust.

“I’ll figure it out.”

I lifted my chin as we passed by Claudia, Lauren, and Keegan and rounded the corner to the front of the school. What I needed to do was talk to Peter. I had to find out what he wanted. Why he’d really broken up with Claudia. He was half this equation, and I’d largely ignored him until now. That was my new plan for the afternoon. Track down Peter and convince him to fight for Claudia. I was certain that if he made some grand gesture for her love, Claudia would forget about this temporary attraction to Keegan and true love would be born.

“Everything’s going to be fine,” I said.

And I believed it for half a second, until I practically tripped over Orion and Darla Shayne, who were latched together by their lips. Flashes of bits of their bodies assaulted me like harsh slaps to the face. His fingers in her hair, her hand on his ass, their pelvises smashed together. I staggered backward, my vision going gray at the edges.

“No. Wrong. No. Wrong.”

I had no control over my tongue. Words were spilling out of me at will. My brain seemed to be spinning a kaleidoscope of horrifying images over and over in front of my face. A flash of tongue, a half smile behind pressed lips, and groping fingers. Groping, needing, wanting fingers. I shook my head and closed my eyes.

“Can’t. Don’t. Can’t. Wrong.”

“True? Are you okay?” Wallace asked.

“Wow. Things aren’t going so well on an Olympian scale,” Hephaestus deadpanned.

Orion was not supposed to be with Darla. He was supposed to be liking me. Wanting to kiss me. Hephaestus had even said so. He’d bet on us getting together. What had gone wrong? What had I done wrong? I tripped backward over a rock or a curb and my arms flailed out. Wallace caught me before I could break my ass on the ground and make this moment even more horrifying than it already was.

“True?” Wallace’s face loomed over mine. His grip was tight on my arms. “True? Are you having a psychotic break?”

Jealousy.

The word reverberated inside my mind, and I did the only thing I could think to do. I grabbed Wallace’s head with both hands and kissed him. I kissed him deeply, with tongue, hoping that Orion would see and miraculously recall how much he loved me.

“Um, True? They’re gone.”

I yanked my mouth away from Wallace’s, a string of saliva connecting us for two seconds more before it snapped. Wallace wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as I watched Orion and Darla walk off toward the parking lot, each with a hand inside the back pocket of the other’s jeans.

“Um . . . True? I’m sorry, but . . . I don’t like you that way,” Wallace said, turning ten shades of purple. “I like Mia. Remember?”

I pressed the back of my hand into my lips, shaking with horror and disgust, with jealousy and anger and sorrow.

“You’re right. I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what got into me.”

“Psychotic break?” he offered in a gentlemanly way.