"Gracie, I'm so glad you decided to accept both positions, especially with your heavy course load this semester.  I'm honestly surprised you'll have enough time for both."

"Thank you, Mr. Rhodes.  I'm not taking an on-campus job this semester since my scholarship pays for my housing and my meals, so I'm just using my savings and my personal loan for any expenses this semester so I can really focus."

Mr. Rhodes adjusted his reading glasses atop his head before nodding once and striding to his desk at the front of the class just as the first few students trickled into the large auditorium style lecture hall. 

"Perfect.  Well, I'll just need you to use this answer key and grade these assignments on the online portal during class, and I've already emailed you the schedule and who to report to at the museum after you're done here."

It was by some stroke of pure luck that the museum had decided to accept my terms for my working hours of noon til closing time at seven on Tuesdays and Thursdays, especially considering my classes were the other three days a week and I wouldn't have time to work and Mr. Rhodes had me as his TA from seven in the morning until I had to leave for the museum.

Distraction was key.  It always had been in my life. 

Listening to his instructions, Mr. Rhodes logged me into his online portal and then the rest of the first class was spent in droning overtones, my mind latching onto some of the information I wouldn't be learning until my sophomore year, where I'd technically have the same amount of credits as a junior at that point. 

The goal was to graduate early, if everything lined up, and to continue on for either a Master's or a doctorate degree in history.

During the last class of the day, a familiar entity entered the lecture hall and my entire being seized up as his eyes locked with mine, and then it somehow got even worse. 

The majority of the basketball team walked in together into Mr. Rhodes class and like a magnet, the eyes of Kalen Rush fixated onto mine, like he owned the traveling gaze, like he commanded my attention above all else. 

Colby was an afterthought as he strode to his seat in the middle row, right at the very front. 

Where did Kalen sit, however?  As if he were trying to punish me for my attendance in his class, he chose a seat to the very left of the front row, his teammates and friends crowding around him like they would be lost without him. 

As he sat directly in my eye line, I held his stormy gaze as if rainclouds writhed within the depths of his grey eyes, his long form stretched out in front of him while he studied me harshly—like I was the cause of everything bad and evil that had happened to him in his life. 

I searched the length of his neck for that golden chain that had once been strung around my own neck for so many years, but couldn't see anything beneath the black of his t-shirt. 

Was he wearing my mother's necklace now, while he was staring me down in some kind of warped intimidation tactic?

A ball of paper hit me square in the face and as I turned to the perpetrator who had a smug, mocking grin on his face, I discreetly flipped off Colby before returning to the computer, starting on my fourth new assignment Mr. Rhodes had given me in between classes since the first three tasks he'd given to me were already finished in what he seemed to think was record time if his reaction to their completion was anything to go by.

"What, you don't have enough extra credit already, now you're sitting in on more classes?"

Rolling my eyes at Colby's whisper-yelled thinly veiled insult, I averted my eyes to the left as his new girlfriend came to sit beside him. 

"No, I'm the TA."

Colby wrapped his arm around his new girlfriend whose name I hadn't learned of yet, but before he could say anything more, Rhodes started the lesson.

As my fingers flew across the keyboard, correcting each historical point with the accurate answer given on the answer key, there was a sharp prick on my consciousness like someone was staring at me, but I refused to look up. 

Not even when his name flashed across the online portal, giving me access to his assignment and seeing what he was getting wrong on his questions did I give him the time of day.

Not even as wrong answer after wrong answer had my wrist cramping from grading his responses. 

It was only after each and every assignment had been graded and I was left with nothing to do with fifteen minutes left of the class that I found my traitorous eyes skipping over Colby and his new girlfriend with the beautiful dark hair and equally glowing dark skin that I was caught in Kalen's snare. 

The temperature of the lecture hall dipped ten degrees with his icy stare. 

His chiseled features were twisted into some kind of permanent sneer, and it was clear that he wasn't paying attention to the lecture as Mr. Rhodes droned on about the different dynasties in China throughout history.

I almost wanted to snap at him that his disinterest in the class and subject was why he was probably failing, but there was some survival instinct inside of me that only kicked in when my grades or academic success was in danger, and I kept my mouth closed. 

Barely. 

The moments stretched on until I finally broke eye contact, feeling a cord pulled too taut snapping as I did so, and I could finally breathe as I watched the clock tick down on the back wall slowly but surely.

"All finished?"

Eyes glazed over, I glanced up to find that Mr. Rhodes was standing above me with a placid smile on his face, leaning slightly over the desk to check on my progress.

"Yes, I finished a few minutes ago.  I'm sorry—could you tell me again the name of the other I'm to find when I get to the museum?"

"Nate Evans, he'll be a year above you actually.  I'll just go through and check your work later today and if you don't hear from me through your email I'll just catch you during class tomorrow."

"Perfect.  Thank you."

I didn't hear his response as I grabbed my bag and practically ran out of the lecture hall to make it on time to the museum while also making a beeline to the dining hall to catch lunch before the rush made me late on my first day. 

The entire hall had already cleared out by the time I made it out, but Colby was waiting nearby with his new girlfriend and I almost cringed but kept it contained and plastered on a nice smile for the girl who hadn't done anything wrong just by dating Colby. 

It wasn't her fault that I had feelings for her boyfriend. 

Had, in the past tense.  I definitely didn't still feel the same way that I used to, not at all.

Denial sure was bitter in the afternoons. 

"Gracie, hey, I wanted you to meet my girlfriend, Delia.  Delia, this is Gracie."

"Hey, so nice to meet you.  Colby's told me all about you!"

Her long black hair was coiled around her head in a braided crown, her warm autumn eyes raking over me like an old friend meeting again after too long apart. 

She was absolutely beautiful, plain and simple, and from her calming energy and presence, it was obvious why Colby would want to be with her. 

"Hey, yeah it's so great to meet you, too.  I'm—oh, sorry, one second."

Because of course my phone had chosen that moment to go off at the worst opportunity, shrieking at me the moment I'd decided to turn it back on after being in the classroom all morning. 

"Um, this is my dad actually, I have to take this.  It was really nice to meet you, Delia."

"Gracie, actually, um—"

I glanced up at Colby's face the moment I answered the phone, guilt clear and present on his face, like he'd done something I wasn't going to like, and from the angry shouting on the other end of my phone the moment I answered my dad, I had a pretty good guess on what he'd done.

"Oh, now you answer your phone?  Why the fuck would you go and see that woman again in person, after everything she's done?  Do you have any idea what that did to me, having to hear it from our next-door neighbors and not from my own damn daughter?"

My face paled as I cast a stricken glare at Colby. 

"You told my dad?   What the hell, Colby?"

There was no reasoning with my dad in that form, especially when it was clear he'd been drinking and was trying his damndest not to slur his words, and I tried to ignore Colby as I strode past him out into the warm sunshine of late summer, gasping in deep breaths as heavy footsteps ran out after me. 

"Gracie, wait.  I can explain—"

"No, that's okay.  I think you've done enough, actually."

The faces around me were blurring, the memories of my father too drunk to stand up on his own back home swimming around in my mind. 

The hospital bills, treatment centers, late night bar pick-ups, calls from angry bartenders deafening me as Colby tried to reason with me. 

"Gracie.  Please."

"No, Colby!  You know what he's like, what he does when he's upset.  There was a reason I told you not to call him!"

"I didn't call him, okay?  My mom or dad must've done it after I told them, I swear it wasn't me.  I wouldn't do that to you, not after everything."

"Whatever, it doesn't even matter now.  He's clearly gone off the rails.  I knew leaving home was too good to be true."

I tried stalking away but he grabbed my elbow, pulling me to a stop. 

Blinking away the sunlight, Colby's face swam in my periphery as I noticed we'd gained a crowd. 

"Do you want me to call my parents, see if they can dry him out for the weekend and get him back on track with his program?"

"Would they even bother, after what happened last time?  Every time they try to help him, he ruins it."

"Yeah, but we also don't need a repeat of last summer."

My blood froze as all the voices in the quad ceased to exist.  It was like the quiet had swallowed everything up and I was back in that hospital room with my dad, clutching onto his hand just hoping against hope that this time it wouldn't stick. 

That I'd get to keep at least half of him, because a piece of him was better than nothing. 

Better to have half a parent than none at all, right?

He woke up after what he'd attempted to do to himself, and he'd sworn to get better.  To get clean, for me. 

And it worked, for a time. 

It always worked for a little bit. 

"Yeah, ask them to check on him, I guess.  Thanks."

He was silent for a few moments as the world came back into focus and I noticed his girlfriend—Delia—was watching silently from a few feet away, a worried expression on her face. 

Great, and I'd just made the worst impression ever on her.  Could this day get any better?

Spotting someone else lurking on the edges, my anger sharpened, and I cut my eyes to Colby just as he finished saying something that I wasn't paying attention to. 

"I've gotta go, I start my internship with the museum today.  See you later."

He didn't get a chance to say anything else as I marched toward the parking lot, where a certain someone had been watching me talk to Colby from afar, much too far away to hear what we'd been saying, but lurking was apparently his specialty.

Kalen's eyes were already on me as I stalked toward him, his form tall enough that I had to crane my neck as I pointed my glare at him. 

"What the fuck is your problem?"

There was venom spewing out of me, but I was too incensed to care if he got poisoned from it or not. 

He quirked a lazy eyebrow, eyes burning but expression remaining cold and indifferent, as if my anger meant nothing to him. 

"What problem?  You're the one who seems to have the problem here, not me."

"You, being an asshole, lurking everywhere, acting like a dick when I've done nothing to you."

An exasperated chuckle fell from his mouth and he leaned back against one of the planted trees on the grass edge of the parking lot, eyeing me up like he was amused from my outburst. 

"Oh, really?  Is that what you think?  I've got a handprint on my cheek and a necklace that never belonged to you to prove differently, but go ahead.  Get it all out of your system about how I'm the bad guy here."

"Well you're the one who basically called me a pathetic slut the first time we met, then proceeded to attack me for my mother's necklace, so—"

"It wasn't your mother's fucking necklace, Gatlin.  It was mine."

He prowled closer to me, edging himself up off the tree to try and get me to back up but I held my ground, arching my neck to meet the swirl of danger coiling like smoke in his grey eyes so colorless up close they burned metallic and silver like melted steel.

"Yours?"

The word clanged around in my brain like it was short-circuiting. 

"Yes.  Mine.  My mother's necklace."

"But...no, that doesn't make any sense.  That would mean—"

"That my good-for-nothing father gave it to your home-wrecker of a mom?  Yeah.  That's exactly what it means."

So many different scenarios filled my head, each of them more creative in their ambition. 

There was the slapping option, he clearly still deserved that one.  Then there was the knee in the groin that most women tended to go for in the movies.  

Instead, I stayed silent.  So silent, his eyebrows quirked as confusion flitted across his face for a few short seconds until he schooled his expression again and still refused to speak either to fill the silence. 

Finally, the answer came to me. 

"No, you're lying."

"Really?  Am I?  Your mother is Jennifer Gatlin, and she got engaged to my dad the year she ran off on her family with him, the same year mine died from breast cancer.  The night she left you, he came to pick her up in his car, and he had my mother's necklace with him.  I never knew what he gave you that night, but I remember you running outside in your pajamas in the pouring rain, barefoot, clinging onto your mom's leg, begging her not to go."

"Stop."

"She was trying to shake you off, but you wouldn't budge.  You were crying about your dad, said he wasn't home."

"I said, stop it!"

My hand acted of its own accord, soaring through the air, but he caught it before it made contact with his cheek again. 

Instead, he clamped a hand around my wrist, gripping my waist with his other hand and turning us so quickly that I didn't even realize we'd switched positions until my back was pressed up against the rough bark of the tree behind me. 

His mouth was so close I was inhaling his spiced cologne and the oak from the tree he'd pressed me into. 

"My dad hopped out of the car, told me to stay, but I didn't.  I opened the door and tried to listen to what he was saying to you.  He gave you something, and now I know it was my mother's necklace.  My mother's favorite necklace.  I thought it was just some cheap jewelry to get you to shut up so we could leave, but it worked, anyway.  You let go of your mother.  She said she'd be back the next day."

My chest was heaving, rising up and falling as it scraped against the black of his shirt, his eyes swallowing me whole as he dipped closer and closer still, until his lips were brushing against my own with each word he spoke. 

His hands on my body were full of fire and a sinuous grip, dizzying my head with each and every second that passed with his touch as my shirt rode up on my hip and his bare skin pressed against me. 

"My dad patted you on the head the night your mother left you, and my father killed my mother the minute yours opened her fucking legs for him."

Something wet collected in the seam of my lips that brushed against his own, and he must've tasted the salt of them because he pulled away and freed one of his hands to thumb them off my cheeks. 

There was something so sweet and wrenching about the softness of the pads of his fingers as they gently wiped my tears from my face, something so twisted and backwards when compared to the fierce jabs of his words that ricocheted through my chest.

"So no, Gracie. I don't have a fucking problem."

His eyes flickered up and back down my trembling form as he sneered once more, releasing my wrist and gripping my chin so that my eyes were directly on his. 

"Not anymore, at least.  Thanks for the necklace back, though."

And with that he dropped my chin and strode away without looking back to watch as I crumpled to the ground with the weighted realization that I'd just met the man who's father had completely and utterly destroyed my life. 

***

Author's Note:

What do you think of this chapter?

What do you think will happen next?

What do you WANT to happen next?

Yes, I know, he's unlikable.  But trust me, that's the point!  

And I know Gracie's blaming the wrong people for her problems, but it'll all make sense in due time, when our girl grows and learns from her trauma instead of wallowing in or ignoring it!

Until next time my lovely readers,
Kristen :)