Bullet

Chapter 4 - Over Protection Vs. Love

Chapter 4
Over Protection Vs. Love

A/N -  *Drum roll please...* Introducing Grayson Foster everyone ;) & A huge thank you to Stephanie for the awesome cover!

One Week Before…

The eerie sense of being watched was catching on quick in the last few days.

Wherever I went in school, it almost seemed like a camera was sensing my every move, behind walls and around corners of the halls. Even if I was sitting in class, there was this strange feeling that a pair of eyes was on the back of my head, burning identical orbs into the back of my head. I would eat a bite from my sandwich in the café and it seemed like the pair of eyes bit along with me. I’d flick a piece of hair out of my face and the eyes would flick along with it.

I couldn’t do a single thing without the creepy sense of a second person noting my every jostle.

Ever since the day in the hallway where Carter had almost choked the life out of Clay, it had been a quiet week. Clay was recovering slowly, a few purple and blue bruises dotting along his collarbone and near his Adam’s apple. He was sending smiles to others and treating me like he always had before the fights happened. But the way his smiles didn’t seem to crinkle at the ends of eyes made me believe that there was something much deeper going on in Clay’s mind that I would never understand.

Those times in his bedroom where he locked himself away from the rest of the world, not speaking to anyone and choosing to blanket himself with strangely silent air, always made me wonder what it was he was thinking about.  Every moment he remained quiet was a moment longer that he wasn’t opening up. Instead of talking to someone about what was going on in his head, he was making the decision to let his thoughts swallow him whole.

How long could someone bow down to their inner voices before they cracked underneath the pressure?

Along with the scary stalker feeling, Clay’s ever odd behavior and Carter’s disappearance came Marnie’s overwhelming sadness over her break up with Carter. For the past week she had been hanging her head as she walked to class with me, less verbal and more depressed than I had ever seen her before. It wasn’t like Marnie had time to think a rational thought last week before dumping the boy she was falling for. She just ended ties as soon as she saw the monster he truly was behind those mysterious dark blue eyes.

For years, Carter Wayland had a way with words and a physical attribute that made it so easy for others to get along with him and believe everything he said. He could bat an eyelash and make a girl swoon. He could make up the biggest lie from the top of his head without much hesitation and used his physical beauty to make the girl leave their doubts about him behind the heels of their shoes. I didn’t know why God graced him with the traits of a liar and fearful shadow, but there had to be a spec of karma waiting for him behind a corner somewhere.

Marnie was just another one of those girls who was spellbound by his charm, falling head over heels before he even took her hand in his.

She wasn’t speaking much as we spent time together. If I tried to engage her in any type of conversation I could to stem her away from thoughts of a certain football player with a mean streak, she’d just mumble a one-worded response and continue her frowning. I wasn’t used to seeing her like this, so lost and feeble. I was used to the bubbly Marnie with the eccentric cloud that always seemed to follow behind her. She was always the one making me feel better, so I wasn’t sure how to help her come out of this funk.

Sitting with my head in my hand while I stared mindlessly at the fair blue lines across my notebook paper, I kept replaying Carter’s words in my mind. The pair of eyes glued to my every move and belonging to an unknown patron only had me fearing his threat more than before. I was wondering if he was the one watching me or if he hired someone for the position of making me creeped out. Were they waiting for me to be alone? When I turned that corner, was the person whose eyes had been burning holes in my head waiting for me?