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 S E V E N T Y
o n e m o n t h l a t e r
A s t r a *.✧
The coach pulled up to the place and everybody pressed their face against the window to look out at our destination. I rolled my eyes and yanked my earphones out, stuffing them into my pocket. I nudged Dusty’s shoulder from beside me to wake him up. His head snapped up and he made a weird “Eh?” sound, looking around dazed and confused.
We started filing out of the coach, one by one. Shane hadn’t even greeted me at all or bothered contacting me after the Christmas event, too busy with his immature clowning around and whatever else he had going on in his life. Even at work, he didn't communicate with me about anything other than customers.
It was like I’d poured my life story out to him and he thought “nope!” and unofficially dumped me. It's unofficial because we weren't together in the first place and we hadn't spoken about the sudden silence yet.
He’d just finished arguing with Mrs Smith and smearing hand sanitiser and shaving cream over his face and everybody was in fits and giggles. I sucked in a deep breath as we stepped outside after our mandatory thank you’s to the coach driver. We’d been taken to a marshy area on top of a hill with a steep drop to sharp rocks down below for a field trip. What we were meant to be doing here, I did not know.
“Um… miss?” Shane asked for the millionth time.
She sighed, exasperated. “Yes Shane?” He’d bombarded her with a million and one questions on the way here and it was safe to say that she was not thrilled to have been asked one more.
“Why on earth did you take a group of mentally unstable students to the edge of a cliff?”
I actually snorted out loud. His head swivelled in my direction and I sunk into my seat, clamping my hand over my mouth. We hadn’t spoken in a while and I wasn't going to be the first to budge.
“Do you want us to look at rocks or something? Because I’ve been doing that for the past hour and half anyway.” He slapped a hand onto Gray’s forearm, grinning. I bit my lip to stop myself from letting out another laugh. Graham, who was sitting next to him, turned his head and, still silent, simply raised an eyebrow.
I swear I haven't heard that boy speak a full sentence since the beginning of this school year.
“He’s such an idiot,” Dusty hissed from beside me, his jaw becoming increasingly clenched the more he stared at him.
“Don’t be rude,” I muttered. He grumbled something under his breath from beside me before shutting up.
We all awaited Mrs Smith to tell us what exactly we were going to be doing here. “No, we are not going to be looking at rocks. We are going to be observing historic remains.”
