Strong For Too Long Trilogy ✔️

20. Don't Kiss and Tell

CHAPTER 20: Don't Kiss and Tell

I had known the fantastic structures of darkness long ago. The shadows it emitted in order to grow fiercer and defeat a light that threatened its potential. There will always be light and there will always be darkness. I, Candidate Eleven, got to see the beauty and the torture in darkness alone.

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

The pathetic alarm clock beside a bed that felt too ordinary, too close in comforting me in the harsh oblivion of my trampled, swerving reality that I had to face with the London UAU uniform hanging on the silver hook behind the silver door to my dormitory room was the closest and first thing my eyes peel open to at seven in the morning. Classes started in an hour and after a school tour with Alice Henderson and her preppy, pompous peers...I was left alone for two days to settle in school. In the suppressed age of eighteen, my fake ID and clothes, belongings that weren't truly mine sat at the bottom of the isolated mattress. An en-suite and a desk. A set of drawers and a cabinet. As well as a mini fridge and a kettle station on top.

I sit up under the useless covers. A dreaded feeling of returning to school should have fluttered against my slim, narrow abdomen-but it didn't. I've breathed dread before, felt it on the tip of my fingers like ice cold winter, felt it drip down me like riveted Ruby red blood.

I study the halls in my uniform and simplistic Business textbook. Knowing I had know eager need to join Alice Henderson's so-called clique of understated heirs to small multinational corporations that deem their businesses both in the public eye and not. An undercover agent in the field and given no choice but to search this place from top to bottom before first period arrives like the old-fashioned slap of a ruler against my already scarred and moonlit pale skin. I was washed and proper, professional to the bone...I felt like utter shit right now, no matter how I supposedly looked on the outside.

The school looked as though a routine was snapped into place at every corner. Only seeing cliques in a real high school was detrimentally cliche, not too mention the fact no one recognisable was around for miles...at least that's what it felt like when I printed the blueprints of the place in the main library, before headed to Business first.

Two days. No messages. A dozen or so sheets and six files of the Candidates I could take account of when I stole those files from dead Lucinda's scrawny and probably police-infested office...only I could be wrong.

When I used the supplied phone from the institution, I looked online for any murders in New York City and ironically, there was nothing of Lucinda Varsity. Or Lucinda Swanson as she may go by. I narrow my eyes at a change in perfume, or rather it was more of a cologne in the air when I turn to look over my shoulder and catch a closed classroom door to be the second main attraction.

The first was Alice Henderson sitting at a piano, with Vice Principal and music teacher, Professor Benson seated in the window sill beside her and watching her closely as she plays. A violin pushed aside and no other heat signatures in the room, no class or student out yet.

It's slow when I see the glances between the two of them. Him in his mid thirties and her being an heir to Henderson industries. Not that they were grand and powerful people, it was Henderson Industries who owned and ran a few supposedly sophisticated restaurants. Father being a chef and Mother a business women, she had it wealthy and good.

That wasn't what I was interested in though.

It was the fact Alice Henderson is engaged to that snazzy football player, Alton Dawson, who consequently doesn't know about Alice's latest affair with the conspicuous teacher in front of her, who slides in behind her, and softly moves her fingers with his head on the side of her brunette curls. He shows her a few cords, but I could see her face in the reflection and smell the sexual tension in there cutting sharper than most knives. It was a choke-worthy experience as I turn away when they both hitch their breaths.