And then he stopped. Shane leaned his forehead against mine, breathing heavily, our eyes still closed, and he tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.
"Astra," he mumbled against my lips. "Please don't hurt yourself."
And all at once, his body fell l...
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C H A P T E R F I F T Y - T H R E E
A s t r a *.✧
After Shane had left my house in an unexpected turnout of events, I walked into my own bed, snuggled up in my warm duvet covers, and fell asleep until 4pm the next day. Yet I was still tired at the end of all of that.
When I had to go back to school, I did my best to avoid Shane. It was the right decision, especially after our night together which never should have happened. There were only several weeks of school left before it was over for the year, so it wasn't as hard as I'd initially thought it would be. Shane also appeared to be busy with whatever it was he was busy with, which made it all the while easier.
While the time apart made me a little bit sad, I believed it was for the best. Whatever was happening between us was... scary, and what was even more scary was the thought of there not ever being an 'us'. What if the jitters I got around him were one-sided? Or the way my face heats up in his presence, sometimes even his name alone.
Aside from that, life was actually running pretty smoothly. Dusty apologised to me. He even got me flowers. Freaking flowers. Sometimes he helped me in the morning to grow my campaign for student council and put leaflets up. The leaflet he'd designed was super cool and I'd had a few people come up to me already saying they were looking forward to my speech.
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In our school, everybody knew that student council were useless. They had no real role but it was a flex for college applications and your CV. The only thing they did each year was organise prom for senior year which was something I wanted to do since organising and planning was my second nature and it would be a fun project to work on. Dusty and Leila reckoned I had a good chance of winning as my competitors supposedly weren't as passionate about it as I was.
Despite everything optimistic occuring lately, Leila, however, would not stop bugging me about the road trip. She was the mastermind behind the operation and since it was probably happening, it temporarily halted my very unhealthy coping technique to minimise the risk of my scars being prominent and fresh.
