Bullet

Chapter 17 - Late Night Secrets

Chapter 17
Late Night Secrets

The night after visiting Clay, all I could do was toss and turn. The constant rewind of his eyes hard and cold on mine was keeping me awake and making me curse myself for turning out the lights fully before coming back into bed. I wrapped myself tight into my covers, almost squeezing the life out of my middle with the tightness. Nothing was helping me overcome this. 

Huffing, I threw the covers off of me and raked my hands through the hairs fraying out of my messy bun. My room was just too quiet, silent enough for me to be able to replay the scenes of today over and over in my mind. 

A normal teenage girl would be going over the events of one of the best kisses of her life that happened just earlier today. If I was able to function like a proper girl, I’d be squealing and feeling little butterflies in my stomach as I thought about the way Grayson’s lips moved against mine, the way he held me so close to him like I’d run if he didn’t. Instead of going over the nightmare time and time again, I should have been thinking about Grayson. 

But no matter how hard I tried to think about something…anything other than Clay’s words and his eyes on me, it was becoming futile. Not only was Clay insisting on making me cower beneath him when he was in the same room as me, but also when he was across the bridge and almost thirty miles away. I couldn’t catch a break, barely even a breath if I tried. 

After realizing that sleeping tonight wouldn’t be an option, I wrapped a sheet around my body and proceeded to slink out of my room and downstairs to get myself a drink of water. Every step I made seemed to creak even louder the longer I walked. Right before I reached the stairs, a movement in the mirror on the wall beside the banister made me pause. It was only me, tired and sick looking as always. 

With one hand still securing the sheet around me, I reached up with the other and pulled at the bags beneath my eyes. I hadn’t gotten more than an hour of sleep each night, and that was only right before the sun rose and beamed in through my bedroom window. If I wasn’t having nightmares about Clay’s actions during the day of the shooting, it was his eyes on me and the way he watched me like he knew the littlest things that would make me crack. 

Clay was supposed to know those things about me. He was programmed to know the smaller things that made me tick and how I handled frustrating and awkward situations. He would know better than anyone how I was when I was angry and what would set me off. I shouldn’t have been surprised when he looked at me like he could see within me and not just at me. 

The feeling that seemed to be eating away at me whenever I thought about us in the room together was that he did know the things that made me tick. He watched me like he could read me like an open book, on display for everyone to read. I hated that he could easily see right through me. It disgusted me that I was even related to such a vulgar monster, one who felt like the world owed him a favor now that he killed the one person who pretended like the world didn’t. 

The thought alone was making me sick to my stomach once more. I bit my lip as I watched my face disappear from the mirror and glide down the stairs. So much was changing that I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t sleep at night. Walking around school was hard enough with the constant stares and whispers, now only amplified by random Nathan’s speech in the auditorium. My parents were such polar opposites on the subject of Clay and his prison sentence that it was sometimes so hard to even talk to them about it if I really wanted to. 

Nothing was going the way I wanted it to, simply because my brother made the wrong decision. 

Wincing as I stepped on another loose floorboard at the bottom of the stairs, I paced to the kitchen quickly afterwards and grabbed myself a bottle of water from the fridge. The kitchen windows were open and a slight cool breeze was blowing in, whipping lightly at my hair. I decided it was nice enough out to spend my sleepless night on the front porch instead of tip-toeing around my house.