Borrowed Time Part 2

Chapter 251

It felt nice to be back at school, back under a semblance of normalcy after a weekend that was anything but, even if the boldness of Ethan and his mother the night prior had shaken her a little bit... She wasn't going to let him take this victory from her.  She was at school despite looking like a goddamn mess, ready to learn, and ready to return to the life that she'd felt was being taken from her at every goddamn turn.

Now, the normalcy really was just a sense of the feeling that she had been lucky enough to have for so many years, because she could feel people staring at her, she could hear their whispers, the stories they were making up about her that had no basis in fact.

Twenty different people had whispered about how she'd asked for Ethan to do this to her, that it was some kink thing or something, more than that had been whispering about how she'd been lying about being gay the whole time and that she had reported what he'd done as some kind of a cover... Very few were talking about the fact that while she was struggling to eat until the swelling went down, Ethan had walked away unscathed and started his own little media circus about the whole thing, painting her as some desperate fling that had gotten out of hand.

Never mind the bruises on her face.

Never mind the stitches... People just made the assumption that she must like it rough or something, it was fucking annoying.  But what was almost more annoying was the way that her friends were almost treating her like she was made out of glass - not Becky, Shelby, or Micheal, not anyone who'd seen her during the weekend and knew that she was fucking done with the coddling and trying to move past it, but Tate hadn't looked away from her for a second in history, he'd spend the whole hour writing in the corner of her notebook, asking what he could do, trying to help... It was exhausting.

Carly was doing the same thing, only she was just... Staring.  There was no subtlety to it, she was staring at her in the middle of their goddamn lecture on The Invisible Man, and she was doing it hard enough that people around her were starting to take notice.  Juliette sighed, setting her pen down to meet Carly's gaze, worried and soft behind her scratched up glasses.  She must've forgotten her contacts.

She raised an eyebrow, tapping her paper gently.

 "Hey." Carly's eyes seemed to focus and unfocus at once as she blinked, clearing her throat and leaning away from her, clearly so focused on what she had been doing that she hadn't even noticed that Juliette had moved her hand. That would have been fine if her focus was on the class they were in but having it on her was making her skin crawl, and she simply couldn't stand it anymore, she needed Carly to look elsewhere.

"Hm? What did I miss?" She asked, glancing around like she was half expecting for the classroom to be empty around her or something. Damn... Well, at least she was committed to what she did, right?

That was an admirable trait even if it was fucking annoying right now. Juliette grimaced, leaning back in her chair a bit as she crossed her arms across her chest, doing her best to keep her voice low enough that the teacher couldn't call her out for speaking.

"Stop staring at me like that." Carly's brows furrowed instantly, her lips turning downward a bit as she cocked her head to the side.

Don't try to act all innocent, you know what you've done. Stop doing it before I start biting ankles. Your ankles. And it'll hurt more because my teeth are jagged.

"Like what?" Seriously? Juliette rolled her eyes... Carly wasn't dumb enough to be acting like this; she had to know what she meant.

"Like I'm going to break if you look away from me." Carly looked away from her again, her furrow deepening. She hadn't expected to be caught clearly, but if she didn't want to be caught then she shouldn't have been staring so hard.