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I follow its path to the bank, where a small figure lies passed out in the shallows.

I swear my heart stops beating.

Dread shoots up my spine like a bullet, my feet breaking out into a sprint beneath me. She's far enough away for me to jump to a hundred conclusions as I run.

She's dead.

She drowned.

A red mist sinks in around me, swirling around the rows of dumbbells behind us. I don't even remember pushing him, taken over by a violent fury. The glass mirror makes an audible crack behind Shawn's head. My fists clench his ugly top by the collar, as I glare down at him. "My what?"

"I tell you what, next time I take her out on a date, it'll be a fucking great job she isn't your sister. Reckon Ophelia is as quiet in bed as she is outside of it?"

My blood smolders in my veins. I shove him back. "She's not even quiet, you dick, you just don't shut up."

"Whoa, there. Better keep a check on those emotions, Green. Wouldn't want to turn into your psycho mother, would you?"

He must be completely devoid of hearing, because he cats on. "She's frigid to a new degree, man. Was she like that with you?"

I'm going to kill him.

I can't kill him. His father is on the board.

I'm going to kill him.

His father is on the motherfucking board.

"Well?"

"If you were talking about one of my sisters like that, I'd crack your skull, Miller."

"Was she uptight with you?"

I can almost see my reflection in his overly gelled hair. I'd club him around the head if the sheer amount of product wouldn't shatter the club.

Seconds pass, and he's still in front of me. Breathe in. Breathe out. In. Out. "Would she want you to be asking that?"

In the trees with Ophelia a few weeks ago. That was a break. A moment when my mind was in Sorrowsong and Sorrowsong alone. I thought of little else that day. She felt perfect against me; soft and strong all at once.

I should've kissed her.

"Love?"
I snort. Love is so far at the back of my priorities at the moment.

"She's not that sort of girl. She wouldn't want me to love her. We don't speak anymore. Why are we even discussing her?"

"We're discussing her because you need a break from your home life. You need to give yourself a break from your home life."

I've never been so perplexed by someone. She's fucking miserable, yet she makes me feel alive. She stains the corners of my gray cloud orange, but I have a feeling I make her bright colors gray. She never really smiles around me. I've always been like that to people. "She's interested in someone else. And I'm not interested, anyway."

I cope with the stress of life by clinging to one thing all the time. It was drinking, then it was smoking, then it was running, drawing, working. Now, I think it might be her.

Watching her with Shawn Miller was easier before I realized her tights were stockings.

Life was easier before I realized her tights were stockings.

"I'm frustrated at everything."

My jaw tenses watching a second year's gaze follow her a little too closely. She doesn't notice anyone admiring her; in her own world all the time, stuck in a mindless loop of her own thoughts. I know, because I'm in a similar torture of my own.

She's impossible to get close to, though. She's like that dumb Jenga game. You think you're getting somewhere, and then the tiniest move in the wrong direction and every little bit of progress I had made with her is gone again.

I guess she shuts people out because it's easier than getting hurt. I get it, but it still irritates me. I think we would be good together, but she doesn't agree.

And that sucks.

I don't even bother trying to look away. I drink in every minute detail like I'm dying and she's the cure. Somewhere in the last few days, I've ventured so far into denial that I'm out the other side.

I shift in my seat and bring my body back under control. I want her.

Christ, she's beautiful. Her hair whips around her face like threads of burning copper, spun into soft waves by the wind. Her brown miniskirt sits high on her muscular thighs, covered by thick, black tights. She's swamped her athletic frame in a brown trench coat that would probably fit Vincenzo and a scarf that has seen better days.

"See you around, sugar."

I hate the nickname, but my pulse flutters. The way he says it, i sounds sinful and not sweet. Dark and twisted.

He says it like a promise. Like he'll be looking for me.

I turn away grinning into my scarf as his phone's ringing stops and starts back up again. "Later, muffin."

"I guess we have no reason to see each other anymore," he says as pulls his phone back out of his pocket and frowns. I wonder if everything is okay at home.

Then I wonder why I care.

"I guess we don't."

"At last."

"At last," I repeat firmly. I've been counting down to this date for weeks.

So why am I not ecstatic?

I shove him out of the way, feeling my cheeks flame. "Not sugar. Honey? No. Not honey. Muffin? No."

He looks exasperated with me. "Jesus Christ. What's next? Eggs? Preheat oven to two fifty? Baking soda, I'm home!"

I smother my laugh in my mittens. He's right. I have no ides how a relationship works. "Shut up."

"I don't know... What do men call their girlfriends? Sugar?"

I regret it the second I say it, but Alex raises an eyebrow before I can retract my statement. "Sugar. You want to be called sugar."

"No, not sugar. Something else, like..." I scratch my head. I have no idea.

He presses his lips together. "Sugar."

None of this is happening.

I'm not really here.

I'm not really trapped.

I'm not really growing fonder of him.

We stop on the top step, staring at each other like two astronauts that have bumped into each other on a faraway planet. "I understand," he says, his voice buttery soft.

I'm too close to doing something I'll regret. Something I cannot do. "I need to go to the gym. I need to train my shoulders," I blurt out.

"Okay, are you asking my permission, or...?"

"Why all the crosswords?"

"Just to occupy my mind."

"So you're like me."

"In what way?"

"Worried about where your mind will go if left unoccupied."

Ten words. Ten words that I've been trying to articulate for years. Ten words that make me think I've had it all wrong about Alex Corbeau-Green.

Ten words that make me feel less alone.

"Yeah," I whisper. "They're a cage for my thoughts."

His voice is strained, like he knows that but asked it anyway. For a second, I think he's going to do it. The quiet voice at the back of my head is on its knees, pleading for more. My lower abdomen clenches. "Put me out of my goddamn misery, Ophelia."

"Yes," I whisper. It's a lie, but the gap between us cools as he pulls away a fraction.

The frosty curtain closes over his eyes again. "So you really like him, huh?"

His lips hover over mine, forehead to forehead. And beneath the panic, the horror, the knowledge that this is wrong, a tiny part of me is just grateful to be close to someone, grateful to be wanted.

"Did he kiss you?"

"You have no right to know that."

I'm a monster. Just like Cain Green. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. A family for a family. He burnt away my kindness, my compassion. The ash he left behind is bitter and calamitous.

Somehow, we've ended up closer, my hands against his chest to keep a precious gap between us. "Then look away."

He looks at me like I've asked him to pluck the moon from the sky and bottle it for me. "Can't."

"You don't know me at all." You don't know what I came here to do. What I still might do.

You don't know what I might do to your family.

To your mother.

"Whatever secret reason you're here for, tell me Shawn Miller is all part of it."

My hand wraps around his forearm, and I don't know if it's to touch him or to stop him getting any closer. "It wouldn't matter if he wasn't."

"You're too good a woman for a man like him."

"And you'd be better?"

A dark chuckle vibrates in his throat. "Ophelia, love, I'd be significantly worse. But I can't watch you with him."

He's so close I can almost taste him. Taste my own weakness, my confusion.

I feel like I can hear the drumming of his heart, feel it against my chest in time with my own.

But I must be wrong, because I've never believed he has one.

The atmosphere is so heavy, so thick with desire that it feels like sticky syrup around us, dripping down the neck of my hoodie. His eyes are on my mouth when he finally speaks.

"The passenger seat of my car, the couch in Carmichael's office, my fucking bedsheets. You're everywhere."

He grasps my face in his left hand, firm but gentle, forcing me to look at him. It's too hot, too humid, too dense beneath the trees. "Because everything smells like you." He leans in closer. Close enough for me to see the cut and bruise on his face from his rugby match. Close enough for me to see the usual storm in his eyes has been replaced by something else entirely.

His palms land on either side of my head, and then his thick forearms.

"Don't." Don't touch me. Don't kiss me. Just don't.

"Bold of you to assume I want to."

But he does want to. I see it in his body language because I see it in my own.

I never wanted to meet Alex. Never wanted to see him, touch him, want him. None of this is right.

I'm adrift at sea; so far off course, I don't know what I'm doing anymore.

The chatter and pounding feet of a small group of runners travel up the path, and Alex drags us into the bushes.

My back hits the trunk of a small ash tree, chest rising and falling faster.

The cigarette hisses as he puts it out against the bark just a hair's breadth away from my ear. The light is lower, casting soft shadows over the contours of his face.