To Keep You

Chapter Eleven: Friendship-

      I sent him a glare. "I'm running away from your bloody friends. I knew getting into it with you would only cause me more trouble." I muttered the last part more to myself.

      He looked confused. "What friends?"

      It was just our luck that they rounded the corner down the corridor I'd just flown down. I pointed towards them. Connor had his back to them, so he had to twist himself round to look. I said, "Those friends," with a faint quiver of fear to my words. They set off in a sprint to catch up to us.

      I heard some commotion coming from the end of the corridor that Connor had appeared from, to find that the people he'd been trying to escape from were also charging towards us at a frightening speed.

      "Oh shit," Connor said, rushing to his feet and grabbing a hold of my collar, yanking me upward too. He dragged me through some double doors to my left, up some more stairs that I'd never been up before. I had absolutely no idea where we were going but as long as it got us away from those guys, I didn't much care.

      "Why are they chasing me, as well? It's not like I did anything wrong!" I shouted behind him as we ran. I couldn't continue on like this for much longer as my legs were beginning to feel weak and my throat was sore from all the heavy breathing.

      "I haven't done anything, either!" He shouted back at me, throwing the words carelessly over his shoulder. He was more focused on putting as much distance as possible between himself and those guys.

      "Can we- can we just slow down and talk for a minute?" I rasped through clenched teeth and a tight jaw. With one glance over my shoulder to see that we hadn't been caught up, I sped up my pace and dove forward, wrapping my arms around Connor's waist as I tackled him to the floor.

      His forehead made an awful collision with the ground, which sort of made me feel a little bit guilty but I was too busy trying to correct my breathing has the sharp jolt of the fall had cut my oxygen off momentarily.

      "Ow, fuck." Connor groaned from underneath me, trying to move but my body was pinning his down. He couldn't quite get enough leverage to roll me off.

      So I rolled off for him. We both lay on our backs, staring up at the corridor ceiling that was glaring down on us with artificial lighting, even though there were a row of windows alongside us. I realised we'd somehow found ourselves pretty high up, at the front of building. It looked out upon the huge stretch of field.

      We lay there for quite some time, trying to slow our breathing. Well, there was no point in interrupting my history class half-way through so I decided to give up on attending third period completely.

      "What did you do that for?" Connor panted, rolling his head to look at me.

      "Because A, you deserved it and B, I literally couldn't keep running. I felt like I was about to collapse, so I was sure as hell taking you down with me." I'd replied in the same sort of way, panting and wiping the sweat from my forehead.

      Connor laughed, eyes back on the ceiling. We seemed to fall into a moment of pure amusement, heads back as we breathed out a mixture of laughs and content sighs.

      "God, I really like you." Connor had said, between laughs. After hearing those words, my own laughter died down until it was just a subtle presence on my lips.

      He looked away as though he were suddenly shy. He didn't meet my gaze for the rest of the day, unable to hold it as he ducked his head and smirked at the ground each time we ran into each other.