Fading Boundaries Again

Chapter Twenty

JACE

I didn't think that after making friends with my lab partner, just a month later, I would be mourning. Well, that was a little dramatic. But even without the fact that I had harbored illicit feelings for her, I would have still missed her.

She was funny and sweet to me. Even when we were hanging out just for appearance, I knew how we were in real life. We were both getting the hang of doing things together, and by the time more time passed, the more I started to enjoy it. It was supposed to be fun, hanging out with her. I liked helping her out, and I liked making her laugh.

Only now she doesn't want anything to do with me.

Because of him.

Because her ex-boyfriend made her believe that all athletes were the same. And yes, maybe we did fall into the same party scenes, but I wasn't like him. I couldn't afford to smoke, not with the way my biological parents' voices had been haunting me before I was born. I knew about the danger of smoking for the lungs since before I went to school, and ever since then, I had been swearing them off. And I couldn't do drugs, not when the sight of them made me sink into my own stomach the first few years. And my adopted parents have made it a point that if I were to do drugs, I wouldn't be able to live with them. Now, on my own, I still followed their own rules— if not to be respectful.

And considering how my life had been the first sixteen years of my life, I didn't care for any of it.

Liv didn't know that. I wish I could tell her that I hated the party scenes as much as she did. I wish I could tell her that the only reason I was even dared to show up to my first class drunk that day was because my friends knew I never let myself go that way. Maybe a beer or two, but not enough to not be conscious. I needed to be conscious of my own surroundings and needed to take care of myself after seeing what happened to my biological parents when they let themselves go.

I wasn't a very party-going person either. The boys had to drag me out of bed in order for me to join them downstairs whenever they had guests. It wasn't because I didn't like them; it was because I didn't like socializing. I picked my friends, the few people I can actually manage, but not anyone else.

I guess I let Liv slip in through the cracks somewhere along there.

I scowl into my pasta as I stab it with my fork at the thought of how well that had worked out for me now.

"The pasta do anything to you there, Jacey?" Zeke calls out from where he was entering the kitchen. He throws his water bottle in the air and catches it as he looks at me with a weary look. "Are you okay there?"

I shrug, playing it off as I ask, "Why wouldn't I be?"

"Because you were just now scowling at your pasta like you were going to fight it?" he says, snickering. "And we both know you throw a mean punch."

I looked down at where I was balling my fists at the counter. Relaxing my hand, I say, "Yeah, I haven't thrown a punch in a while."

"I know," Zeke says with a laugh. "You fought off a guy who was bothering me that first week of university, but you haven't yet done it."

"Yeah, because if my dad ever found out about it, he would absolutely punish me— no matter my age," I say with a shrug. "One of the rules of living with them, initially, was to not get into fights, which was hard to manage in my teen years, but I've come to better solutions now."

"Which includes you being so quiet nowadays," Zeke says with a frown, heading to the stove where he was helping himself to a serving of the pasta I had just made. He looks back at me with a mock pout as he says, "I miss the Jacey who used to protect me."