Kisses after midnight (WICKED #0) | ✓

18

JAY WOKE UP IN the middle of the night, his lips parted in a silent scream. As soon as he realized he was in his bed he placed his hands in front of his face, the sweat on his forehead reminding him that though he was awake, the nightmare hadn't ended. He always had the same one and yet he never stopped feeling that same fear.

It started in a huge room, the floor glistening like diamonds and filled with the same luxurious, white furniture in his father's house. In the middle of it all he was sitting, the space around him unoccupied, and though the room was so large, though the beautiful windows were ajar, he always suffocated in his dream. He got no air and there was nothing he could do about it.

And there, on the other side of the room, sitting on a throne befit a king, sat his father, ever so high. He looked down on him and just stared as he choked, not lifting a finger to help, his face the same emotionless mask as always. Jay hated the fact that even in his dreams his father haunted him, but he couldn't get rid of it, couldn't stop the fact he woke up full of panic several times a week.

He stared at his arm then, the intricate lines of the tattoos he had curling around his muscles. This was the only thing that was his, the only way he could make sure his body was his own. His father chose everything else for him: his clothes, his education, his friends. But this, this was something he couldn't do anything about. The man had raised hell when he had found him after his first tattoo about their now stained reputation and he had felt the consequences of his choice days later, but that didn't matter. Whatever his father did, however far his power went, it wasn't enough to make the tattoos on his arm disappear.

So he continued on. With each new tattoo he had he felt like he could breathe again, not only because it was his choice, but also because of the anger it caused to his normally cold father. It was a petty form of revenge, that he knew, but the only one he could have. More importantly, nowadays it was the only thing which made him feel alive.

His feet touched the cold floor then as he stepped out of bed and he walked towards the closet, quickly pulling on some jeans and a shirt. That man wasn't home today, off to God knows where for the weekend. Jay hadn't asked and he hadn't said, like always. He was glad he wasn't home though as he sneaked out of the house, careful to not alert the guards stationed all around it. After years he had learned all their routes to heart and he knew exactly which paths to follow to avoid them all.

This was how he had been able to go to that party as well. A large part of him had wanted to stay home, but Sahar had asked him. That had been enough of a reason to go honestly, because she was one of the few people in this world who looked at him with no expectations in her eyes. There was no prejudice, no need to profit off him or ridicule him. She didn't care that he was the son of some ambassador, no, for some reason she just wanted to be friends with him.

He wasn't quick to trust people, but he had seen and heard enough about Sahar during his years at Athena to know it was genuine. She had been one of the most popular people there and yet hadn't cared about any of that. In the beginning, when his father's bodyguards forcibly dropped him off at school and practically pushed him inside, he had gone to great lengths to annoy the man further by skipping class almost immediately.

His father's bodyguards were stationed around the school, his influence not yet enough to get them to enter a school as famous as Athena High, so he just stayed on school grounds. That was before his father went even further, before he paid his classmates to get closer to him and keep a close eye on him. But he didn't want to think about that, only about her for a moment. The cab he had called in his room pulled up then and he sat down, murmuring an address.

On the roof of Athena's staff building, smaller and mostly empty during school hours, he spent most of his time. It was secluded and literally hidden behind the main building's shadow, the only thing there a small patch of flowers; marigolds, poppies, forget-me-nots. He wondered who took care of it and the same day that question was answered, as a pretty girl in blue came. She sat down beside the flowers and took care of them, before taking a navy blue pin from her bag and placing it down in the soil. It was an eye, he noticed, a droplet of baby blue in the navy, a pupil in the middle.