Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 67355 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 337(@200wpm)___ 269(@250wpm)___ 225(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 67355 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 337(@200wpm)___ 269(@250wpm)___ 225(@300wpm)
Blood gushes from Keith’s nose and I’m certain from the sound it made when Jackson’s fist connected, it was broken.
What the hell was going on? Keith and I had no business being in Jackson’s room but this was a gross overreaction.
“I fucking warned you!” Jackson growled, rearing his fist back to assault poor Keith again.
I grab Jackson’s arm to stop him. “Stop you asshole! You broke his nose you dick!” I scream at him.
Jackson glances down at me. His aqua eyes are now the color of a stormy sea.
I flinch, but don’t release his arm.
His nostrils flare and for a second, I think he’s going to hit me too. But instead, he returns his angry gaze on Keith and releases him. “Get the fuck out of my house.”
Holding his nose, Keith races out of the room without a backward glance toward me.
Wow.
I head for the door as well but Jackson beats me to it.
To my surprise and horror, he not only closes the door, but locks it.
His eyes are still stormy, and I instinctively cover my nose. I’ve never been called a great beauty by anyone besides my dad, but I like my face just fine and want to keep it intact.
While Jackson has spent the last few years tormenting me, I’ve never seen him get violent until tonight.
“Look, I’m sorry for being up here. I’ll leave okay.”
He continues to stand in front of the door but says nothing as his breathing grows shallow. He’s really starting to scare me. But for the sin of trespassing, I don’t think I deserve whatever horrible thing he has in mind for me.
“I said, I’m sorry, now move.” I attempt to push him aside but he’s a granite wall, cold and unyielding.
Suddenly, he clasps the lower half of my face in his muscular hand and squeezes.
“You’re not going any fucking where.”
3
ZORA
To say this was my nightmare come true is an understatement. My expectations for how much I’d enjoy this party was already subzero, but I never expected to find myself in literal hell.
Jackson Champion is many things but I have never known him to be a woman beater but the pure rage in his eyes made me wonder if he would actually hit me.
I attempt to pull out of his grasp but his hand tightens on my face. “Let me go Jackson.”
“Did you think you could come to my goddam house and hook up with the first boy to smile at you like some desperate slut?”
Out of the many things I expected him to say to me, this wasn’t one of them. I had never been kissed up until a few minutes ago, let alone done anything to remotely get myself labeled as a slut.
Again I try to push him away but he doesn’t budge. “Did you like it when he kissed you?” he demands as if he has a right to question anything about my personal life.
I narrow my eyes as my fear slowly morphs into anger. I think about the last four years of high school and how he’s gone out of his way to make every day as unpleasant for me as possible with his taunts and the way he allowed his friends to wage psychological warfare on me.
I’m not even sure how it started, which is kind of weird because the first week of freshmen year, we were on friendly terms. He sat behind me in homeroom and then it was like a switch had been flipped and he’d gone from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde.
He made it his missions to point out my shortcomings, from the clothes I wore, the way I walked, talked and my hair. There was a time when I loved the natural state of my textured hair and proudly wore it in the biggest afro puff because that was how my mom used to wear her hair before she lost it during her chemo treatments.
But because Jackson made an offhand comment about my hair, it became open season for the rest of the class to attack it. Being one of the handful of black people in a predominantly white school where I was already an insecure teenager, I gave in to peer pressure and bought myself a home relaxer.
Biggest mistake of my life. I ended up giving myself chemical burns and losing so much hair, I had bald spots all over my scalp. I didn’t go to school for nearly a week. It was only after my dad took me to a hairdresser to salvage the little hair I had left was I able to show up at school again. But that led to another round of teasing with kids calling me bald.
I place the blame at Jackson’s feet and yet here he is insulting me over a harmless kiss. With strength I didn’t realize I had, I push with all my might and he stumbles backward.