Waking the Fae [BOOK ONE]

Chapter 24

Unedited.

Enjoy!

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               When Rebecca finally reached the spot she'd spoken to Mikael earlier, he wasn't there. Unsure of what to do with herself, she glanced around warily. The walk had taken way too long, in her mind. People had stared at her the whole time. She'd felt them stare at her, judge her.

Or maybe it had just been her paranoia. She felt like she was doing something she shouldn't be. Since she never had her phone with her, she'd had to lie to her mother. She'd walked to the front of the school, leaned through the window and lied. Her mother thought she was waiting at school so she could get some help on an assignment. The fact that she'd bought the lie made Rebecca feel even worse that she thought she would.

All throughout her last two classes, she'd been thinking about everything Mikael had said. She'd imagined every scenario possible during English. They'd walk through the portal and into a world where everything was sparkles and glitter. The portal itself would be a giant mystical circle in the air, framed by sparkles. Looking into it, she'd see a whole new world.

That was only one of the scenarios she'd imagined.

Purely because she'd could, she's thought of some seriously out there ideas, which, even she knew, were completely ridiculous. White rabbits jumping around with top hats on. A giant statue of wings that turned into a real person. Talking animals. Magical oceans that stopped the aging process. Rainbows everywhere in the sky. The list went on and on.

"I didn't think you'd actually show."

Rebecca turned to face Mikael, shoving her hands in the pocket of her jeans. Once again, he was sauntering towards her, arrogance in his stride. Rebecca was jealous of his confidence. He didn't seem to care what people thought about him. Rebecca, on the other hand, took everything she heard about her to heart.

Shaking the thoughts away, she stared at his face, his eyes once again covered with dark glasses. "Uh, thank you," she said, the words sounding more like a question than a statement.

He raised an eyebrow. "Thank you? What sort of a response is that?"

Rebecca glanced away. "I don't know."

He frowned. "You've gone all shy on me."

"Sorry," she bit out. "I can't just walk around like I don't care what people think, because I do."

"If this is about the comment I made before, I'm sorry."

"It's not." Rebecca shook her head with a sigh. "Just forget everything I said."

The last thing she wanted to do was unload all her self-loathing onto him. He didn't care about the past abuse she'd faced as a child. She didn't want to tell him all her problems either.

He stared at her, before glancing at the brick wall. "Already forgotten."

As silence settled over them, Rebecca glanced around. She was expecting a teacher to walk out and tell them to leave. One look at Mikael and assumptions were made. He epitomised a 'bad boy' and automatically, that meant he fell into a number of categories—player, drug addict and juvenile delinquent among the few. Rebecca didn't even know what categories she fell into. She wasn't sure she wanted to know either.

Mikael cleared his throat. "We had a deal."

Rebecca blinked. "Oh, uh, I was hoping you forgot about that." Sadly, he hadn't. She couldn't say she was surprised.