Total pages in book: 124
Estimated words: 118125 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 591(@200wpm)___ 473(@250wpm)___ 394(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 118125 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 591(@200wpm)___ 473(@250wpm)___ 394(@300wpm)
Rian had a feeling he knew where this was going, and he smiled faintly, even if he felt like crying. “Chris put a stop to it, didn’t he?”
“Yeah,” Damon answered softly. “Even though it meant standing there while David beat the shit out of him. He didn’t fight back. He just took it. Got between David and the other freshmen every time, until David just...got sick of it. Walked away. When I found out, David was off the team—but Chris had already ended what needed to be ended.”
“And hurt himself to do it,” Rian murmured. “To protect other people. Noble to a fault.”
“That’s Chris.” Damon smiled bitterly. “So if he’s being bullied, there’s more to the story than that. But I’d bet if anyone’s trying to hurt him, he’d rather sit there and take it than swing a punch back.”
“That still means he’s protecting his bully.” Rian shook his head. “And I still don’t understand why.”
“Friendship. Loyalty. Not wanting to bother people, or get someone with no other safe harbor evicted from the school.”
“Oh.” That...that didn’t help. At all. And after a hesitant moment, Rian settled to lean against the wall next to Damon, not quite touching when after a week of silence he didn’t know where he stood with Damon, but now wasn’t the time to ask. Instead he just let his gaze drift across the hall, to the long rows of windows on the other side, the trees reaching in high clusters toward the sky outside. “So what do we do? How do we figure out who it is?”
“I don’t know.” Quiet, ragged, raw. “Because just passively watching ain’t enough.” Damon’s head turned toward him, those brown eyes falling over him. “But we don’t do half bad together. We put our heads together, we’ll think of something.”
Tilting his head, Rian looked up at Damon. Lines creased Damon’s face, his dusky brown skin seamed, as if his pain and helplessness had been written on his features in map lines.
And Rian didn’t know how to ease it, but...but...
Something inside him snapped.
It snapped hard, with a force that felt like something of fragile glass within him breaking, and with a rough sound he pushed away from the wall, gathering himself together and trying to find his resolve as he stalked away, down the hall.
Because he couldn’t just stand here and wait anymore.
Damon’s voice drifted after him in low question. “Falwell...?”
“I’m calling his parents,” Rian threw back; the words came out hard and harsh around the lump in his throat. “To hell with Walden and his tiptoeing around.”
“Hey.”
He braced himself for Damon to stop him—to cut him off, to snarl at him, to tell him to follow the rules, to not risk this.
So he didn’t expect to feel warm, rough-tipped fingers catching his.
Just barely; just Damon’s fingertips, slipping between Rian’s and lacing together. Yet despite the light touch, it was enough to pull Rian to a halt in his tracks, his heart swelling as thick and hard as the knotted thing blocking his throat. Breathing shallowly, he looked over his shoulder; Damon watched him with those dark brown eyes strange, unreadable, his brows drawn together in a worried line.
“C’mon,” Damon said, tossing his head, and gave their interlaced fingertips a light tug. “You can call them from my room. It’s private, at least.”
“...yeah,” Rian said numbly, because he couldn’t quite process anything else. “Sure.”
And he didn’t protest, as Damon wrapped his hand around Rian’s and drew him gently toward the stairs.
Because at least if he was going to do this, possibly even risk his job...
At least he wasn’t doing it alone.
* * *
Damon sat on the arm of his easy chair and watched as Rian tapped at Damon’s laptop; Rian sat primly on the very edge of the seat, his sandals kicked off and his legs crossed with his feet tucked under his knees and thighs when he could never seem to just sit in a chair the way it was meant to be used. The gray and purple accents of the school’s colors stood out against the stark white grids of the faculty intranet on-screen, and Rian’s fingers slipped in rapid sequence over the keyboard as he typed Northcote into the search function.
“There,” Rian said triumphantly, and shifted the laptop over to one thigh so he could retrieve his phone from—Damon didn’t know where, when neither his sapphire blue caftan nor his loose white linen pants seemed to have pockets; as he moved, his shoulder brushed against Damon’s thigh. “I’ve only got one contact, it looks like... Aurelia Northcote? His mother. Her cellphone. But there are email addresses for his mother and father both.”
“Try calling first,” Damon said. “Then we can send a follow-up email.”
“Okay.” But Rian hesitated, looking down at his phone, his thumb hovering over the dark screen—before he tilted his head back, his hair tumbling back over his shoulder in a sweep of shadow as he looked up at Damon uncertainly. “This...is the right thing to do, right?”