Here's another sneak peek of Blood Lies...
Stein’s notebook lay front and center, the dissecting
materials carelessly pushed to the side.
The blue was faded and creased in places from use and his fidgeting
fingers.
Always a fidgeter.
Demon Stein didn’t fidget.
I flipped it open, my fingers traveling over his
incredibly neat handwriting. Mine wasn’t
terrible, but his made it look like chicken scratch. Pages and pages of notes he’d taken during
class moved beneath my gaze, little doodles of video game nerd crap I didn’t
understand filling up the margins.
And then I flipped to a page I’d never seen before
with notes on cow eyes, but that wasn’t what caught my attention. It was the little doodles across the top and
bottom that held my heart in a death grip.
He’d written my name a few times, misshapen hearts
surrounding it. My name and his were
together in other place, little plus signs between them.
A lump the size of Mik’s fist lodged in my throat,
ripping away my ability to breathe. God,
how could I have missed this? He was
sitting right next to me drawing my name in hearts. How could I have not known he wanted to be
more than my friend?
Why didn’t he tell me?
Because he knew my heart belonged to someone
else. Stein sat there and listened to me
bitch and moan about my unrequited and confused feelings for Rex when he was
having the same for me, except he had no one to unload them on.
Everyone had known except me.
I was the self-absorbed idiot too cruel to notice when
the sweetest kid in the world was head over heels for me.
A deadly combination of guilt and anger flowed through
my chest, threatening to break my ribs to reach my heart. The room blurred and at first I thought it
was because I was going to start hallucinating.
Instead something warm flowed down my cheek and a quiet splat hit the
white notebook paper, smearing my name inside of a heart.
I was crying.
I was crying in class… in front of people.
I quickly wiped the tears off with my fingertips, my
gaze traveling the room to see if anyone had noticed the disaster unfurling
around me. Everyone’s eyes were cast
down on their dead fish as they cut into it, every set except for a pair of
pretty blue ones, staring wide-eyed in my direction.
Brett Baustic’s gaze was trained on me from across the
room as if he was witnessing a car accident and couldn’t look away.
This was a hundred times more unlikely than a car
accident.
I wanted to be angry at him. I wanted to flip him off or tell him to go screw
himself, but I couldn’t seem to find that hot fury he used to bring out in
me. Maybe it was because I felt guilty
for my part in Chanel’s death. Or maybe
it was the way those blue irises glinted with pain instead of the arrogance they
used to.
Jason elbowed Brett and began to turn his head to see
what had his friend so enraptured. I
glanced away before he too could discover my secret—that I could in fact cry.
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