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It wasn’t a lie.
Now that Ace and I were spending so much alone time together, my mom was complaining about how little she saw me and made me promise to eat dinner with the family at least three times a week.
Ace followed behind me as I walked to the foyer to grab my shoes. “Doe, what’s wrong? Why are you mad?”
“I’m not mad,” I replied as I slipped on one of my white sneakers and started to lace it up.
Ace gave me a blank stare that told me he knew I was lying.
I rolled my eyes. “Why do you think I’m mad?” I figured I might as well have him tell me since he seemed to know what I was thinking all the time.
“I think it has something to do with what I was going to say about my father being gone. Which is ridiculous because you didn’t even give me a chance to respond.”
I didn’t look at him as I angrily tied my other shoe. “That’s because I already knew what you were going to say.”
“And what exactly do you think I was going to say?”
I sighed. “You were going to give me some vague, confusing response that made no sense. You were going to lie to me.
“And then, when I kept asking questions you didn’t want to answer, you were going to distract me by kissing me or sucking on my neck.”
Ace’s eyes were becoming darker with every passing second. “You don’t know that.
I wasn’t going to—”
“Oh, yeah?” I stood to face him, pinning him with an angry glare.
“Fine, then tell me why your father has been out of the country. Why haven’t I seen him in months even though I’m at your house nearly twenty-four seven now?”
When Ace hesitated, I quickly continued.
“Or better yet, why don’t you answer any of the questions you’ve given me vague responses to over the last few weeks?
“Why did you leave school in the middle of the day to go to Canada of all places?
How did you meet Clara? What did you and Madoc do to Ben that was so bad that he still hasn’t returned to class?
“Why do you have a skeleton key to our school? Why did my dad get so mad when he saw that you bit me? Why did you bite me?”
“And what the heck did you do to that huge wolf we saw in your backyard, and why did you come back covered in blood?”
Ace blinked, his lips parting a bit. I had finally floored him.
“You…you remember that?” he asked.
What? ?“Remember what?”
“When I bit you in my car. And the wolf, and the blood,” Ace stated. “You remember all of that.”
“Do I remember when you bit my neck like a damn vampire? Or when the giant monster wolf tried to break into your house? Yes, of course I do! You’re the one pretending like none of it happened.”
I could practically see Ace’s mind racing behind his wide eyes. He seemed genuinely shocked. Confused.
It only added to my frustration. How stupid did he think I was?
“How’s your head?” he asked me suddenly.
“What? What does that have to do with anything?”
Ace looked at my hairline as if he could see into my mind and check it for pain.
“Does it hurt? Do you have a headache?”
I rolled my eyes. He’s trying to distract me again. ?“Stop changing the subject—”
“No, I’m serious, Doe. Are you getting a migraine?”
I thought about it. “No. My head feels fine. I actually haven’t had a migraine in a few weeks.”
It was a miracle really. My head had never felt better. I’d realized it a few days earlier but hesitated to tell Ace about it because I didn’t want to jinx it.
“Now, can we get back to what we were talking about?”
I crossed my arms, determined to continue even as my lip began to wobble with emotion. “You think you know me so well that you can tell what I’m thinking but forget that I know you well too.
“I can tell when you’re lying to me or trying to distract me so you won’t have to tell me the truth.
“I’m not stupid. And I hate that you treat me like I am. Like I’m some little girl that needs to be babied, who can’t handle the truth.”
The way Ace’s eyes softened brought me precariously close to breaking down in tears.
“Doe,” he said in a gentle tone. He reached for me.
I jerked back, putting space between us. “And if you touch me right now, you’ll just be proving my point.”
He dropped his arms to his sides and began flexing his hands. “I don’t think you’re stupid, Doe. And I don’t think you need to be babied.”
“If you really thought that, then you would tell me the truth. You would stop keeping things from me.” I paused, searching his face. “Tell me what’s going on in your life. I want to be there for you.”
Ace stared at me without saying a word. His expression, which was confused and vulnerable only moments ago, was grim and impossible to read.
His walls were up. His mind was made up. He wasn’t going to give me a straight answer. Wouldn’t give me a straight answer.
I nodded, tears pooling in my eyes. “Got it,” I whispered. My voice was broken.
Exhausted. “I want to go home.”
I turned and walked out the door.
Sitting in the car with Ace after the fight was awkward as all hell. I would have walked home, but it was pouring down. I wanted to tough it out and get wet, but, of course, Ace wasn’t having it.
I could feel him fuming next to me, his mind reeling for something to say as he drove me in silence. He was usually phenomenal at cheering me up.
But the only way to make me feel better was to tell me the truth. And he was incapable of doing that, for whatever godforsaken reason.
Something big was happening in Ace’s life, I knew it. The way people murmured to him quietly in the halls at school, the way the teachers acted toward him, the way he was always on his damned phone…
Hell, even my dad had said that big changes were happening in his life.
But what did any of it mean? I had no fucking clue.
It hurt. It felt like I didn’t know him. We were closer than ever physically, but my best friend of eleven years was starting to feel like a stranger to me.
I leaned my temple against the car window, crossing my arms around myself tightly.
A silent tear rolled down my cheek, but I quickly wiped it away before Ace could see I was crying. I really didn’t want him to know that I was shedding tears over this.
“Doe, please don’t cry,” Ace said, sounding like he was in pain. “I hate it when you cry.”