Beautifully Yours: A High School Bully Romance (Voclain Academy Book Three) Read online

  I swallow hard as my stomach bottoms out somewhere near my feet.

  “Now,” Mr. Collins continues loudly over the whispers of my classmates, “for those of you who are surprised, don’t blame your lab partner. Assurances of automatic failure followed closely my instructions for today if your other half contaminated the pool of test subjects.”

  Okay, so now I’m staring at Ian. Since when did he ever care about automatic failure? Hint: never. Professors, the administration, the donors, all of them are merely a bothersome necessity he puts up with, but Ian is still playing the game of ignoring my existence, so I don’t even get so much in return as a raised eyebrow.

  Thunder sounds outside, and I glance out the windows at the sky, coal black and ominous as though the skyline follows the mood of our classroom.

  “Your partner will show you something on their laptop,” Mr. Collins offers in an obtuse explanation. “Your heart rate and oxygen levels will be monitored at all times along with your blood pressure, which will also be recorded.”

  All right, what the heck is…

  I don’t have time to finish my thought because Ian unearths his laptop from his bag and places it on the table. Mr. Collins disappears into the back room and begins to wheel out medical equipment I never thought would have a place at Voclain. Maybe a hospital, yeah, but not my high school.

  Row by row, Mr. Collins delivers equipment to each lab team, and when my turn comes, he places a pulse-oxygen monitor over my index finger and wraps the blood pressure cuff around my arm. I let him do it—I don’t want to fail—but seriously… All I can think about is why Ian didn’t me tell what was going on because before we broke up, he would’ve told me. Now, we are strangers, unfamiliar people, and the thought brings tears that prick at my eyes.

  Thunder sounds outside again, and lightning flashes on the horizon, creating a burst of light in the classroom.

  The machine whirs as it takes my blood pressure, the cuff tightening and tightening until my fingers start to go numb. On a sheet of paper I can’t quite read, Ian writes down something. Finally, he looks up at me and raises an eyebrow, the most of an expression he’s given me all day. His words are as flat as his stare.

  “Calm down,” he says, “or you’ll fuck up the data.”

  All that does is make my blood pressure shoot for the moon along with my heart rate. Ian rolls his eyes and clucks his tongue just once in a nearly silent reprimand.

  “What is going on?” I ask as he clicks open a PowerPoint presentation before he locks the screen again.

  He doesn’t answer. He just stares straight ahead at Mr. Collins, waiting for his approval to continue.

  “Does everyone have their lab partner’s initial measurements?” Mr. Collins asks.

  Murmurs of agreement follow.

  “Good, now open your presentations and begin. Record your subject’s response precisely for each slide.” He sits down at his desk at the front of the room to observe us. “If at any point you are worried about your partner, discontinue the assignment immediately per the Board of Supervisors.”

  Ian wordlessly slides his laptop over to me and unlocks the screen.

  A giant, brown spider stares up at me, and I nearly fall off the stool. Beep, beep, beep goes the monitor at my side as the blood pressure machine whirs and works to read my response. My heart pounds, and I don’t need the machine to know that.

  The guy at the desk in front of me goes, “Oh, gross, Annabelle!”

  Shrieks, yelps, and laughs sound from around the room. Ian jots down my measurements.

  The screen at the table of the guy in front of me changes to a clown, and the guy visibly shudders in response as his heart-rate monitor goes wild.

  I get it now.

  Fear.

  The body’s biological response to fear.

  Only I’m the test subject, and the one person in the entire world who knows everything about me is at my side.

  Shit.

  I squeeze my eyes shut as Ian reaches over to click the laptop button and change slides again.

  “Open your eyes, Harlow,” he says gruffly, and I can’t see him, but I know from his tone he just said the words with an eye roll.

  I’m going to fail if I don’t do it, but from the incessant beeping at my side, I know my blood pressure is already through the roof at the thought of continuing this lab.

  One second, I think with a breath.

  Two.

  Three.

  I pop my eyes open and find myself staring down at the very edge of a long, dark cavern that disappears into an abyss. The image combines two of my fears, heights and caves. I breathe in sharply, a quick inhale as Ian writes on his notepad again. I feel a little sick and out of breath and cold all at the same time.

  A girl at the front of the room screams and nearly falls off her stool.

  Ian snaps a finger in front of my face. My vision goes blurry before it zeroes in on him. He frowns at me in annoyance. “Snap out of it, Weathersby. We’ve got eighteen more slides of this.”

  I close my eyes again and count backward from five. It’s not real. It’s just a bunch of photographs. None of it is real.

  My eyes pop open to find a pitch-black screen of absolutely nothing.

  Darkness.

  I don’t nearly fall off my stool this time at least.

  Maybe this isn’t so bad after all.

  Ian switches slides.

  Nope! It’s bad! I stare at the back of a girl who looks a lot like me. She’s inside a psych ward, her arms strapped behind her back for her own protection.

  I let out a long, slow breath as I try to calm. Ian switches slides again.

  Fuck. It’s a needle and what looks like heroin. That entire night flashes in my mind, one devastating memory detonating and triggering another.

  William lying there, his lips already tinged blue, the syringe still in his arm.

  Me, screaming for help, and Everly, obliviously high, looking over at me at first like she just couldn’t figure it out.

  My brother dead and gone, yet his eyes still open like in his last moments he was searching for something else and still looking ahead, to an eradicated future.

  I drag in a long, wet sob as my vision latches on the screen and stays there. Ian jots down the statistics and switches slides.

  An autopsy bag, black and shiny and zipped shut. It closes in around me, and I can’t breathe.

  I can’t breathe!

  I can’t fucking breathe.

  I stand, knocking the stool to the floor with a clang, and rip off the pulse-ox monitor and the Velcro of the blood pressure cuff.

  I suck in a ragged breath as the girl across the aisle squeals at something she’s just seen.

  I can’t be here. This room is too small. This building is too small. This entire campus is probably too small.

  I grab my backpack and dart out of the classroom, past Mr. Collins at his desk as I slam the door open. Thunder crackles outside, and the lights flicker on and off in the building. I skid down the hall, my feet sliding on tiled floor.

  I run outside. It’s raining, big, cold drops pelting my face and stinging my eyes. I don’t make it more than a few feet outside before I stop, my hand braced against the stone side of the building as I try to breathe.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” someone says behind me as I try to push down the panic threatening to surface. The darkness waves an inky hand out of the abyss in my brain.

  Ian steps into my line of sight as I stand there, heaving for breath, each inhale a tight, raspy wheeze.

  Raindrops pelt us both as the storm clouds roll overhead, blocking out almost all light. It hurts, but it’s also grounding at the same time, to feel something real and unpredictable bring me crashing back down to earth.

  “You don’t get to do this, Harlow,” he says to me, his upper lip curling with his lethal words. “You don’t get to be like this. You don’t get to be the one who’s broken.”

  “I can be broken!” I s
hout back at him, a sob ripping through me with my retort. “I am broken!”

  He blinks at me, unmoving as drops of water run from his inky hair and down his face to slide off his jaw.

  One drop.

  Two drops.

  Three.

  His white dress shirt is soaked, and I am sure mine is too, clinging to my body like I’m a canvas and it’s my paint. I am hot in this cool rain as he stares at me, fury sparking in his irises and in his sneer that never quite surfaces. We stand together, my back pressed against the stone wall of the building as the storm rages overhead, daring the other to blink first.

  18

  Harlow

  Ian and I are in a standoff, standing there as the wind whips around us, sending the rain pelting sideways into our faces and against our exposed skin. Lightning sparks across the skyline behind him, illuminating his dark vision like an angry god arriving to Earth in a storm of hellfire and fury.

  Rain hammers the ground, plump drops slamming against the earth and drenching us both. His shirt is soaked like mine, hugging the hard outline of his pectorals and the build of his biceps like a second skin. It’s not even white anymore but nearly see-through, his summer tan showing beneath the fabric.

  Yet he doesn’t even blink as we stand there, droplets stinging our eyes as the storm rages. He just pins me with his stare, the one I can’t read where he’s shuttered everything from me, starting with his astute gaze and ending with his heart. He peers at me like he’s trying to figure me out and hasn’t quite cracked the code yet. The look is dead, emotionless, and straight from the ether like he walked out of the Book of Revelation only to find me in his domain.

  Still, my reaction is visceral and uncontrolled. I burn beneath his hellfire, his gaze charring me to ash where I stand. He promises to be both my worst nightmare and my best dream.

  A drop falls from the slice of his jaw down to his shirt. Another curves over his bottom lip and hangs there until it finally gives way. Fog swirls in the air, settling at our feet, as if we are in our own ethereal world. He cants his head to side and studies me a moment further before he takes one long step forward, closing the distance between us, and then another and another until I have to crane my neck to look up at the six feet four inches of him.

  “You don’t get to be broken,” he snarls, the words slicing across his teeth with another crash of lightning behind him. “You don’t get to be anything unless I say so.”

  A laugh bubbles out of me at his words. He’s so serious when he says them, so absolutely certain of the invulnerability of his reign.

  “You don’t get to decide that for me, Ian,” I say. “I’m allowed to hurt too. And that shit you pulled inside!” I point back around the corner of the building toward the exterior double doors. “That was fucked up.”

  He doesn’t deny it. He doesn’t apologize. He just shakes his head, one time and quick, like his decision is already made and it’s final.

  “I’ll do whatever I want to, Weathersby, and decide whatever I want to, especially when it comes to you.” He moves so fast, and I don’t know what’s happening until his hands box me in, one palm flat on either side of my head, pressed tight against the brick. “You lost the right to a vote when you ended us.”

  “And what do you decide then?” I snap, angry at myself for putting us in this situation, angry at him for not seeing through all the bullshit, angry at the world for leaving me with no choice. “What am I allowed to feel, my king?”

  A wicked grin crests his lips, but there’s nothing pleasant about the expression. It’s downright violent. “You will feel whatever I want you to feel, Harlow.”

  “And what is that?” I bite back, pushing him to admit it, to admit that he still wants me to feel for him, that he still cares for me. “Last time I checked, we aren’t talking in riddles, Ian. Say what you mean.”

  His eyes narrow as he studies me, the dam shutters, closing again. “Careful now, Weathersby,” he warns, “or I’ll eat you alive before this is all over.”

  “I’ll be the sweetest poison you ever had.”

  His gaze drifts to my lips and then lower to lick across the column of my throat and down further across the swell of my breasts, where my heart pounds to his drum. “I don’t doubt it.”

  I fight the smile that threatens to break through the surface as he sucks all the air from the space around us. I am breathless, feverish, and achy, my heartbeat ratcheting even higher as we stand there beneath the storm. I taste trouble on my tongue, and everything in me, every cell and fiber of my being, wants him to kiss me and let me devour his devastation.

  He leans in, crowding me. I am still, too afraid to move because maybe if I move, I’ll scare him away, and I’d give nearly anything to have him this close again.

  I hold my breath as his fans hot across the side of my face before he leans in further. His teeth skate across the top of my earlobe, and I feel the sharp slice against my flesh all the way to the pulse that knocks low in my belly, beating just for him.

  Kiss me, I think. Just kiss me and end this torment!

  “This is a bad idea,” he murmurs, his words reverence and damnation. “You already burned me.”

  I look up at him, desperate to lose myself in the pools of silver and stone in his irises. I run the flat of my palm across the swath of his jaw.

  I need this.

  We need this.

  “I’ll bandage you up when it’s all over,” I promise softly.

  He freezes for a moment, and I see it there, the disbelief, the questions, the wanting to demand what I mean, but now’s not the time—and I don’t have answers I can give anyway—so I seal my lips to his and force him to hold his questions.

  He lets out an oof as our lips meet. He doesn’t rock back on his heels though. He is stone, and I am the wind, changing for him. His hands wrap around me, his fingers shoving into my hair while his other hand kneads my ass and pins me against him, so I can feel the length of him hard and heavy against my leg.

  I need him inside me.

  I need him to fuck it all away.

  He bites my bottom lip, sucking it in between his teeth, and growls against me. The sound reverberates in the hollow of his chest.

  We are two stars colliding in the dark. It’s a one-in-a-million collision that shouldn’t occur except that we are inexplicably drawn together, pulled in by each other’s gravity. The result when it’s over? Beautiful, bright, and utterly catastrophic.

  I run my hands through his hair, trapping his face between my fingers.

  “Fuck!” He shoves away from me suddenly, breaking the contact. I am alone. “I can’t do this. I hate you.”

  I reach out and grab him by his shirt to drag him closer. “Well, I love you.”

  We collide again. This kiss is brutal and bruising and too short, leaving me hollow and cold in the rain. He shoves away from me again.

  “Don’t,” he says, the word tortured and ragged like it went through Hell just to leave his mouth.

  But I need you, I want to say. Maybe it’s a temporary Band-Aid, and maybe it won’t last and I’ll be bleeding all over again when it’s over, but I have to try.

  The end is supposed to come when the seas turn to blood and the moon crashes into the earth. Yet the moon is still upright, I guess, and although I’m nowhere near the ocean, I’m pretty sure hellfire and brimstone have not befallen us all. My apocalypse is utterly singular in its existence.

  How I threw it all away for the sake of love.

  I yank him forward against me, hard, his mouth slamming into mine without pretense. He groans as his tongue darts inside my mouth and tangles with mine, sweeping and controlling and possessive. This is where we are supposed to be. This is us, and for a moment, too brief, it is perfect as the rain pelts us both, but then he pushes me away again. This time, my back hits the wall hard enough to knock my breath away. The world toddles on its legs and prepares to fall.

  “I can’t even look at you!” he hisses. “You fuckin
g destroyed me.”

  “Then don’t look at me,” I say.

  When we meet, it’s in the middle. His lips flatten against mine, the hit violent. He feeds me a suffering growl straight into my mouth, and I swallow it whole. His shoulders go tight, the line of his spine straight and unbreakable before his control splinters and snaps.

  Everything collides.

  His chest flattens against mine.

  His tongue fights for dominance and wins.

  His legs pin me to the brick wall.

  Rain continues to pour from the sky as thunder churns on the horizon behind him. He tastes like a rainy day at the ocean, clean and slightly salty. His body presses against mine and feels like coming home.

  He breaks away for a moment, and my heart freezes mid-beat. Not again. Never again.

  He breathes hot breath into the space between us as tiny rivulets of water run down his face and fall from his nose. His mouth is parted as he pins me with his stare.

  Lightning splinters across the dark skyline overhead when he reaches out with both hands and tears open my shirt with a violent rip. The opalescent buttons fly into the air, and I don’t see where they land. Water pelts my exposed chest, my thin, cotton bra doing little to protect me. Humidity clings to my skin, and I am both cold and feverish at the same time as we stand there, his steely gaze still locked on me.

  I lean forward off the wall, and he meets me on the way up, the collision knocking all the way down to my pounding heart.

  “When I fuck you here,” he growls against my mouth, his hand running up the exposed side of my rib cage, “it means nothing. When you milk my cock like the traitorous whore you are, it means nothing. When you scream my goddamn name, it means nothing.”

  I don’t reply, but in my head I think, No, it means everything because when this is all over and I tell you why I did what I did, then we will be back together and that empty part of me won’t be empty any longer. I will be whole. We will both be whole.