Paper Airplanes (18 page)

He pulled away from me then and swam over to the steps. I watched as he walked out of the pool and went to retrieve the towel he’d left on the lounge chair along with his t-shirt. As I watched him gathering up his stuff, I realized he was leaving.

“You’re not
going, are you?”

He turned to face me, a pained look on his face. “You want me to stay?”
he asked, not sure he believed that could be true.

“Of course,” I said, swimming over to the steps.

I walked out of the pool and went to stand in front of him. He got a dazed look in his eyes before he thrust his towel at me.

“You need to cover up,” he said, as he wrapped it around me.

“Why?” I asked.

“Cassie, come on,” he groaned. “You know why. You’re gorgeous, and you just had your legs wrapped around me, and then I see you practically naked. There’s only so much a guy can take.”

“I’m not telling you to walk away. You’re doing that on your own.”

He let his head fall back as he looked up at the night sky. A few seconds later he raised his head and looked at me. “I want this. I want you, but not yet. Okay?”

“I understand. But just because you rejected me doesn’t mean I want you to go home either. Stay. Let’s watch a movie – as friends if it has to be that way. But just so you know I’ll be thinking about how much I want to kiss you the whole time.”

He sighed and shook his head, giving me a look that said he wasn’t sure what to do with me.

“I didn’t reject you,” he clarified. “I’m just postponing all the things you offered me tonight. Trust me. The last thing I want to do is reject you, but I need to talk to Scott. I need him to be okay with this. He’s like my brother.”

“I know,” I sa
id, wrapping the towel around myself so I didn’t torture him any further. The pained look on his face was enough to tell me how hard this was for him. “I get it. But stay. Seriously. I don’t want to be alone, and I want to hang out with you, just us.”

“You promise you won’t try to make out with me?” he asked, and I laughed.

“I’ll keep my hands to myself,” I said, raising them in the air and wiggling my fingers, fighting the urge to run them over the smooth planes of his hard chest.

I did let my eyes rake over it, though, taking in his
glistening, tanned skin one inch at a time. But I stopped short when I got to a scar on his side. I remembered what he’d told me about being in the hospital and almost dying. I wondered if this was a scar from the ‘accident’ he’d mentioned.

“Stop looking at me like I’m a piece of meat,” he teased, but the laughter died out of his voice when I
looked up at him in question.

I reached ou
t to touch the odd looking scar. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” he said quickly, moving my hand as he tugged his t-shirt over his head.

I shook my head. “That’s not nothing. It looks like a bullet wound,” I said, thinking out loud more than anything else.

Reese
had a similar scar where he’d been shot in the chest. Seeing it brought back too many uncomfortable memories that I didn’t want to think about. Had Jared been shot? Was that why he’d been in the hospital?

He sighed. “Let’s get changed, and I’ll tell you all about it, okay?”

I nodded. “Sure. Okay.”

I wasn’t sure what he was about to tell me, but I got chills from the look on his face. I knew it wasn’t good.

Chapter
Thirteen

Jared

“You have to promise you won’t be mad at me,” I told Cassie as we settled onto
one of the couches in her media room upstairs.

She narrowed her eye
s at me as she tucked her legs underneath her. Damn, I was going to have a hard time concentrating with the images of her wet, dripping, half-naked body burned into my brain. I’d about lost all sense of self-control when she’d been standing in front of me on the pool deck, not to mention when she’d been wrapped around me, begging me to kiss her.

All that kept me from devouring her mouth was the lifelong friendship I had with Scott. I wasn’t doing anything with Cassie until I cleared it with him. He’d kill me if I did, and I wouldn’t hurt him like that. But she knew how much I wanted her. Even if I hadn’t told her, my erection that she had to have felt when she wrapped her legs around me told her everything she needed to know. I wanted her so bad.

“Why would I be mad at you?” she questioned, eyeing me warily.

She looked so beautiful with her blond curls piled on top of her head and a few tendrils falling around her face. I desperately wanted to pull her to me, wrap her up in my arms and just hold her. I didn’t want to tell her this story. She was going to be so pissed at me for keeping it from her.

I sighed. “I got this scar from a bullet,” I said, just blurting it out because there wasn’t any other way to tell her that.

“A b-bullet,” she stuttered
, but the look on her face told me she’d suspected that was what it was from.

I nodded. “Yes.”

“So you
were
shot?”

I nodded again.

“When? Where?”

I sighed. This was the hard part. “In January
, I was visiting my brother at Coleman,” I said, and she sucked in a breath. She knew exactly what I was going to say. “I was in the dining hall that night. I was at a table near where the gunman’s roommate was sitting, apparently, and I got shot in the side.”

I bit my lip and waited for her to lash out at me for not telling her sooner
, for keeping something so huge a secret.

She just blinked a few times as
she stared at me, slowly processing what I’d told her. “Oh, my God,” she whispered as her voice cracked. “You were there too?”

I nodded
, afraid she was going to start crying. She looked like she was on the verge of losing it, and that just made me want to pull her into my arms even more.

“Yes.
I was there.”

“Did you know
when we met that I was there? That I got shot too?” she squeaked out, her voice sounding so different than it normally did.

I nodded. “Yeah. I saw it on the news after it happened
when they read off the names of the victims. I knew who you were, but I don’t remember seeing you that night. Of course everything from that night is kind of a blur. I lost a lot of blood, and I almost died. It wasn’t good.”

“I got shot in the head,” she said
softly, reaching up to touch the side of her scalp.

“I’m sorry,” I told her, because I didn’t know what else to say.
I truly wasn’t sure if I was apologizing for her getting shot or because I’d kept something so huge from her all this time.

She sunk back into the corner of the couch then, and I just wanted to
hold her. I wanted her to know she wasn’t alone and that I was sorry, so sorry for not telling her sooner. But she was looking at me in such bewilderment and shock that I didn’t dare move. I had a feeling she didn’t want me touching her in that moment despite what had transpired just ten minutes earlier.

“I have no recollection of what happened that day,” she said as tears
suddenly filled her eyes.

What?

“You don’t?”

I hadn’t known that. I thought she
’d remembered like I did. I could see everything that happened so clearly until the time I’d started to lose consciousness. Everything from the very real realization that someone was shooting up the dining hall, that I’d been shot, I was losing a lot of blood, but I wasn’t dead. My biggest fear was that the gunman would realize I was still alive and come back and finish me off. But because I was conscious throughout most of it, I’d seen more than I ever wanted to remember, including two people die within a foot of me.

I shuddered in remembrance as Cassie
shook her head. “No, I can’t remember anything.”

Then she started to cry, so I
finally gave in and pulled her into my arms, whether she wanted me to or not. The last thing I was going to let her do was sit there and cry alone. For almost five minutes, she sobbed against my shoulder, soaking my t-shirt with her tears and clinging to me. I just held her, stroking her back and doing what I could to make her feel safe, hoping it was helping, just like she’d done for me a few weeks earlier.

I hadn’t cried in years, and
I couldn’t believe that the one moment where I realized I’d hit my breaking point and couldn’t hold the pain in any longer happened in front of the girl I liked. It was mortifying, and I was pissed at myself for not keeping my shit together, but it was like the crack that had always been there had finally given way, and the floodgates opened. I couldn’t have controlled it if I’d tried.

But it was almost like Cassie knew how I was feeling. She knew what it was like to try
with everything in you to be strong, because it was what felt normal when you just wanted to scream and throw things and rage against the pain, because you were so pissed and hurt and confused, but you also knew the outside world would never understand. No one understood what it was like for me to be discarded by the people who should have loved me. And although Cassie couldn’t relate to that piece of my life, she didn’t judge me for it either.

She had her own demons that kept her up at night, and that was the one thing that linked us together. Apart we were broken, but together, we made each other whole. I couldn’t explain it, but it had been like that since I’d met her, even when I’d fought against it. Something drew me to her, and I felt like when she was there, I could breathe easier or something. It didn’t make any sense, but it also made all the sense in the world. She’d brought me out of the darkness, and I wanted to do the same for her.

When she stopped crying, she pulled away from me, but she didn’t move back to her side of the couch. She stayed curled up on my lap and let me continue to hold her. I never wanted to let her go.

“I lost two people that day,” she said softly
, fingering the charm she wore around her neck.

“You did?”

She nodded. “Yeah. My boyfriend was killed, and so was my best friend’s boyfriend. They were fraternity brothers.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said, as I hugged her closer.

I couldn’t even imagine what that had been like for her. I’d never been so grateful that Evan had been outside. I don’t know what I would have done if something had happened to him.

“Sometimes it seems so surreal to me
that they’re gone. It’s almost like I’m home for break, and at the end of the summer I’ll go back to school, and we’ll all hang out like we always did. I actually have to remind myself sometimes that they’re dead, that I was shot, and that I went through this traumatic event, because I have no memory whatsoever. It was like one day they were there and the next they weren’t.”

She looked up at me then and met my gaze
that had been fixed on her as she talked through what it felt like to know you’d been through something so horrifying but not remember any of it. I wasn’t sure that wasn’t a blessing in disguise. The memories I carried around weren’t good ones.

“
Did you know I was in a coma?” she asked.

I
nodded. “Yes, there were news reports on it.”

She nodded. “
I hate that I was a headline. I hate how things like this are glorified and that everyone knows the intimate details of what happened to me. I hate it.”

I nodded. “Yeah, me too.”

Even though very little air time was given to me since I’d lived. Cassie could have possibly been victim number fifteen, so the news stayed close to her story in case she didn’t make it. It still didn’t make it right that they’d turned her into a spectacle.

“I lost
three weeks of my life,” she said as if she still couldn’t believe it. “When I woke up, everything was different, and I had to learn from my parents and Marley what had happened. Do you know what that’s like? What it’s like to wake up and have it be weeks later? And not remember anything? And then to learn that you’ll never see two people you love ever again? I didn’t even get to go to their funerals. I didn’t get to say goodbye.”

“I’m sorry.”

Again, I was apologizing for a myriad of things. I should have told her that I knew. I shouldn’t have kept it a secret, but more than that, I was sorry that she’d lost two people she loved. That was the worst part.

She looked up and met my gaze. “You
and Scott are pretty much the only people who’ve treated me normally since the shooting. Did you know that?”

I shook my head. “No, I didn’t.”

She sighed. “I thought it’s because you guys didn’t know what had happened.” She shook her head. “Scott knows too?”

“Yes, he does.”

I hugged her tighter, feeling like if I didn’t, she might pull away from me. “I’m sorry,” I said again, hoping she didn’t all of a sudden demand that I leave. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

I wasn’t sure I could leave her alone knowing how she was feeling in that moment. In truth, I never wanted to leave her. I wanted to hold her in my arms forever if it would take away some of the pain she was feeling.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Becaus
e I don’t like to talk about it,” I told her honestly. “I talk to my therapist about it but only because I have to. I don’t like to relive that day any more than is absolutely necessary.”

“I don’t like to talk about it either,” she said softly.

I hugged her tighter, and she rested her head on my shoulder. “Then we won’t talk about it.”

She nodded. “Okay.”

I breathed a giant sigh of relief when she said that. I knew that probably wasn’t healthy, but I wasn’t going to push her. It wasn’t like I wanted to suddenly open up about how much that day had changed me.

“
Just so you know,” I offered. “If you want to talk about what happened, if you ever want to talk about your friend or your boyfriend, I’m here.”

She looked up at me. “You
’d do that for me? You’d listen to me talk about my boyfriend and how much I miss him?”

I nodded
, even though it didn’t feel great to hear her say that. She’d just told me she liked me, but it was obvious she still had feelings for someone else, and dead or alive, I wasn’t sure I wanted to start anything with her when I knew she couldn’t be completely mine. I didn’t take relationships lightly, and until she was ready, I didn’t think it was a good idea for us to pursue anything. But I could still be her friend if she needed someone to talk to.

“Of course. I would
do just about anything for you,” I told her, realizing how true that statement was. But I wasn’t sure if I should have said it. I didn’t want to lead her on any more than I already had. In a second, things had changed for us.

“Don’t leav
e,” she said, hugging me closer to her, almost as if she knew that a shift had occurred, and she was making it impossible for me to walk away.

She was showing me a
side of her that was completely vulnerable and exposed, and it completely endeared me to her. She’d never let me see that part of her before. The closest she’d come had been the first day she’d worked at Dawson’s, when she’d lost it on me in the bathroom, but that was nothing compared to this.

“I won’t leave,” I told her
, knowing I’d probably regret it later.

“You promise?”

I nodded. “I promise.”

I couldn’t leave her alone when she sounded so desperate for me to stay. I was too nice of a guy to do that, so I put her feelings before my own, knowing I’d be kicking myself later.

“Okay. Good. Thank you.” Then she looked up at me with watery eyes. “Can we watch a movie?”

I smiled. “Anything you want.”

“Can we watch
Elf
?”

“
Elf
?” I questioned, and she nodded.

“It’s the happiest movie I c
an think of, and I just want to be happy right now.”

I wanted to tell her that I was happy. With her in my arms, I was happier than I’d ever been, but it wasn’t the right time.
She needed to get past her ex-boyfriend, and that might take months, hell it might take years. I had no idea how long they’d been together. Maybe they’d talked about marriage. Maybe she’d been so in love with him that she’d never be able to love anyone else. And until I knew more, I couldn’t expose myself to getting my heart broken. Brooke had already done that to me, and I wasn’t a big fan of how it felt. Cassie was already sucking me in way too deep. I had to back away before I got stuck.