Page 44 of Rebellious

“What’s your fucking point?”

“I never expected to like you the way I do. Even though it wasn’t me who let the cat out of the bag about us, I never expected to fear for my life and…admire Rebel. I mean truly admire her. I’m still so fucking jealous of her, but I can’t imagine the pressure she’s under. I can’t imagine how it feels, knowing so many chicks want to humiliate you or break you. Mentally. Physically. Any way possible. We kind of expected her to fall apart. She is young. She is a kid. She is sheltered, naïve, and virginal. Instead, more of my friends ended up dead. Now I hear you might be leaving.”

Kaia couldn’t process all the fuckery she’d told him, so he responded to her last statement. “She…I don’t know anymore. She wants us to rebuild our friendship. I feel so fucking low for what I did.” Not once or twice, but three times when he included Jana.

He couldn’t exclude her, even if he’d fucked her because he was high and wanted to spite Diesel.

Fuck. As he’d told Rebel, he didn’t recognize himself anymore. Saying it to Rebel could’ve been chalked up as words to appease her. Admitting them to himself, though, felt different. Long ago, he’d known he was lacking money and power. Greatness died with his injury. He was the family pariah, who his parents abandoned in favor of everyone else during gatherings he wasn’t invited to. The guy who called Rebel ‘Chi’ to his ‘Huahua’ was the real him. He was a quirky poet, not a conscienceless Casanova.

Elbows on knees, he covered his face with his hands. “I’m so confused, Fia,” he admitted, having no one else to talk to. Kayce congratulated him for sleeping with a club girl for a second time. He didn’t understand how Kaia felt as if he was fucking up. “Rebel is gorgeous. She’s stubborn. Opinionated. Spoiled. But she sees me. She gets me.”

“I get you,” Fia responded.

She did, in a different way than Rebel. Kaia regretted not meeting her sooner, though he wondered how she would’ve felt about him when he’d been nothing but Kaia Riggs, the dude with the lost football dreams.

He dismissed the niggling idea that Fia would be a good girlfriend to the Kaia he was now. Rebel had become his ideal. No one compared to her.

Fia shifted. “I-I mean, don’t you think I get you?”

Kaia nodded, pretending he didn’t see her uncertainty. “I care about Rebel so much,” he said, pivoting the conversation back to the girl who mattered the most. “More than I want to admit because she’s young and I’ve messed up terribly.”

“How often did you fuck before you met Rebel?”

He didn’t want to give her false hope. And her question sounded particularly hopeful. There was no hope for them. He scrubbed a hand over his face and glanced over his shoulder. “Two or three times a week.”

“You went from fucking regularly to not fucking at all and you thought that would turn out well for you?”

“I didn’t think about sex. I just thought she was a beautiful chick that I’d spend time with for a bit.” He straightened and sighed. “She dressed up for our first date and blew my fucking mind. I was so fucking nervous. We talked at length. I admit some of the shit she said, I thought she wasn’t serious.”

Fia nodded. “How’d you two meet?”

“At Turn Creek. I was there when she cut class.”

“We’re friends. You can tell me the truth. Diesel and CJ set her up to meet you.”

That rumor as confirmed in front of everyone at the volleyball game, but he wouldn’t go into detail with Fia. He thought she was still there. Maybe she’d been too busy sobbing. It didn’t matter. He might want them to be friends, but that would never happen. “My version is the fucking truth,” Kaia snapped.

She sniffed and folded her arms. “Narci told me otherwise.”

“He wasn’t there. I was, and I’m telling you what happened.”

“Don’t be cross,” she said quietly.

“I have to get back upstairs,” he said, starting to stand.

Fia grabbed his hand, halting him. “Wait, please. I-I’m fucking this up so bad. I’d planned to text you before I walked in and saw you. I wanted to ask you to meet me in the cafeteria.”

“To say what?”

“That I hope you don’t leave. If you want to stay and work it out with Rebel, maybe you should throw yourself on Meggie’s mercy. Tennysee insists we’re alive because Rebel took up for us in some kind of way. That’s probably true. My life was so much simpler when I wasn’t competing with her directly. Over the past weeks, I have been, even if I didn’t want to admit it. You’re a sweet guy and I like you so fucking much. Neither of us grew up with a lot of money. We know about struggles and working and dysfunctional families.”

Rebel’s family was majorly dysfunctional, although he wouldn’t reveal that either.

“We like beer and pizza. Jeans and sneakers. We like to fuck and we like to slum it. Rebel’s version of slumming is wearing thousand-dollar sweats and five-hundred-dollar sneakers. Her parents adore her. If she speaks, everyone listens. Her brothers, her cousins …everyone. She doesn’t know hunger or fear or pain or anything that regular people face every day.”

“Rebel’s a real flesh-and-blood girl, Fia. She might not know hunger or struggling, but she knows about fear and pain and worry, and any other human emotion we all face. What the fuck is wrong with you? Maybe if you looked at her differently, you wouldn’t act as if she’s plastic.”

Fia’s shoulders slumped. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I keep…I’m trying to tell you how much I wish you’d give me a chance even as I know you’re hung up on her. I want to ask you to trust me. If we fuck, I swear I’ll keep it between us.”