Fairytales

Chapter 7

I tapped my foot, impatient.

Where is he? I thought, listening to the toe of my pretty wedges—the ones I was really beginning to wish I hadn't bothered putting back on—slap against the cement under my feet.

Chase never took this long. Usually he was waiting for me, right here under the metal awning that covered the back doors where we always met. He was a guy after all. No makeup or long hair to deal with.

Everyone else on the team had already left, pushing through the big wrought iron gates just a feet away from me towards the main road. A few of them, the guys mostly, shot me curious, and yet strangely cautious, looks as they passed. All except Travis Bryson, the big mouthed 500 meter runner with the inflated ego, who'd glared at me through what looked like the beginnings of a black eye as he passed.

I wondered what the story behind that was.

"You need to be more careful." Chase's words echoed in my head, adding fire to the anger I hadn't thought to feel until I was already halfway in the shower. Who did he think he was, giving me such a cryptic message and then disappearing into the locker room?

I do not enjoy cryptic warnings, or cryptic anything for that matter. I'd worked myself into a nasty frenzy about it the entire time I'd been in the locker room, washing my hair about three or four times because my distracted thoughts couldn't keep track of whether or not I'd done so already.

And after that little hallucination I'd had on the track, and in chemistry...

Frustrated, I dropped my over-stuffed gym bag at my feet and rubbed my arms, first lightly and then hard enough to match my increasing anger at the world. It was when that motion started to hurt, more than it should anyway, that I realized that I ached all over, not horribly, but like I'd done a full body work out some time in between first and second period. I stopped moving all together.

This wasn't from practice. That ache was a different pain all together, mostly centered around my calves. Exhaustion. That's what it felt like.

Despite my efforts against it, the creeping sensation of an oncoming nap had my eye lids drooping, right there in front of the school.

To distract myself, I glanced at my phone. It was already close to five thirty. If Chase didn't hurry up, I was going to be late for work. Not that my boss—Aunt Rita—was too strict about arrival times, but that was beside the point.

I leaned against the cool brick at my back, a welcome relief from the Texas sun.

Maybe if I closed my eyes, just for a second...

"Ready to go?"

Chase stared at me expectantly from the bottom of the steps, one hand stuck in the pocket of the same jeans he'd worn earlier in the day. His hair, which was usually pretty dark anyway, was even darker wet, and stuck against his forehead in uncombed clumps, as if he'd literally just stepped out of the shower and walked outside.

So what had taken him so damn long?

"Finally." I snapped, getting over that little bout of weakness and hoping down the steps and into the hot afternoon sun. "Now you can tell me what the heck you were—"

I trailed off, taken off guard by the darkness in his stare when he looked at me. He hadn't looked that way since...

"What happened?" It was a knee jerk reaction, spurring from surprise more than anything. Something bad must have happened, something catastrophic for him to communicate so much in one look. Chase was a master of hiding his emotions.