“Do you fucking hear me, Clint?” I slammed my fist into the damaged locker door.
“Fuck! Yes! I hear you!” he screamed back.
“You hear me, Klosav?” I turned and snapped at Mika. “Is it perfectly fucking clear to you, too?”
“I got it,” he said quietly, his eyes wide.
“Make sure everyone fucking gets it!” I turned on my heel and stormed off.
I was only five minutes late to class, and the teacher was going over Hamlet. I ignored her glare as I walked to the back of the room and dropped down in my seat. I rubbed my bruised knuckles against my aching side. I couldn’t concentrate on the teacher’s flowing words. Inside my head, there was nothing but violence.
It scared me.
News about Clint spread pretty fast, maybe a little too fast. The first half of the day, I walked Nicole to all her classes, and everything went well. I had calmed down. No one was bugging Rumple. I had my arm around her, and by third bell, she was relaxing and not hiding behind her hair so much.
Lunch was a little different.
I was waiting for her outside of her calc class, but instead of walking over to me slowly and sliding up next to me as she had done during her previous classes, she stomped right past me with fire in her eyes. I turned and followed her, ignoring a couple of snickers behind me. She went straight into the lunchroom and stood in line. She didn’t even turn back to look at me.
She was obviously pissed.
And it was just cute as hell.
“Something wrong, Rumple?”
“Don’t call me that!” she snapped. She grabbed one of the orange plastic trays and slammed it down on the silver steel rails.
“Why do you always say that when you’re pissed about something?” I asked. I moved up close behind her—not quite touching her but knowing she could feel my presence. “You don’t usually mind me calling you that.”
“I don’t really want to speak to you at all right now, Thomas.”
“Well, I haven’t seen you for the last hour, and everything was good up until that point,” I said. “Want to tell me what’s gone wrong since then?”
“What did you do to Clint Oliver?”
“I shoved him in a locker and padlocked it,” I said.
“And you hit him?”
“A couple times.” I shrugged. “Not really hard or anything. It was mostly to shut him up. I did more damage to the locker.”
She turned to me with a look of complete disbelief.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Nicole used that sort of whisper-yell thing that only girls seem to be capable of doing. “You beat him up and locked him in a locker? Why would you do that?”
“I didn’t like the shit spewing from his mouth,” I replied. “He was disrespectful. I reminded him to show me some respect.”
“Christ, Thomas!” Nicole looked down at the banana on her lunch tray as she shook her head. “You beat a guy up!”
“He deserved it,” I told her.
“Did you beat up Frankie Ronald and Mika Klosav, too?”
Oh shit. Forgot about them.
“Um…Frankie, yeah,” I admitted. “Mika—not really.”
“Not really?”