{18+ COMPLETE} For the past three years, Bren Hadaway has been preparing to die.
When he was sixteen, he watched his dad murder his mom. And ever since, he's been counting down the days until it was his turn to be at the end of a gun. And Bren has...
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I'd honestly lost track of the number of days that had gone by since I last saw Bren.
And if that wasn't bad enough, I hated Western Civilizations. I hated it because the professor reminded me of that boyfriend I hadn't seen in weeks. But more to the point, I hated it because of Brodie. Brodie and his gang of stupid football players.
To avoid them this morning, I decided to leave for class early. All I wanted was to find a spot in the very back of the lecture hall. To hide. Not my proudest moment, but I woke up feeling particularly sad about Bren and stressed about school, and I was not in the mood to deal with assholes.
Dressed head to toe in black—leggings, sweatshirt, shoes, all of it—I walked to class alone. Nessa hadn't been ready yet, so she waved me on, telling me to leave and save her a seat.
The problem was that when I arrived in room 112 of McLaren Hall, Brodie was already there. Darting into the room with my head down, I hadn't even noticed him at first. Not until I turned to walk up the stairs for the auditorium-style seating and saw a mass of blue and gold in my peripheral vision.
He was in the front row. And his whole little pose was with him too.
I started to back out of the room, but it was too late. He'd already seen me. He'd already begun walking toward me, rolling his massive shoulders, malice in his smile. He'd already placed dread in my gut as he curled his fingers around my arm.
"Let go." I tried to jerk back and retreat toward the door, but he only pulled tighter. "God, what is your deal?" I hissed.
"We just wanna chat," Brodie said offhandedly. Like we were getting lattes at The Grounds. Like he wasn't digging his fingertips into my biceps. Like we were friends or some shit.
He pushed me back into the wall that lined the stairs, his grip moving to my shoulder so he could pin me there. The other players appeared behind him, but all of their faces were swimming, hazy and unfocused.
I couldn't focus on anything. Because I was trapped. And I'd been trapped before. And it ended with bright lights and hospital beds and a beeping—a beeping that had become the only assurance I was still alive.
But Brodie didn't know that. And Brodie didn't care. His eyes flashed as he said, "We wanna chat because besides being a bitch at that party, you also fucked everything up for us. You know that?"
I had started to sink and drown beneath his weighty gaze, but those words broke me through the surface again. Because fuck him. Fuck guys like this.
I used my forearm to knock his hand away. "What the hell are you talking about?"
He rocked back, letting his arm drop. But his gaze didn't. It held on, simmering with something I recognized. "We were all lined up to head to the playoffs before our fucking middle linebacker had a mental breakdown when his girlfriend left him. And we lost every single game after that."
