Breathe Read Free Page A

to me and willed my heart to remain inside my chest. It pushed against my rib cage like it meant to escape. Flee to the safety and comfort of the water.
    “You’re a little jumpy,” Nolan sneered, leaning in and pressing his palms against the lockers on either side of my head. Behind him, I heard his friends snicker. “Do I scare you?” he asked.
    He terrified me. Always had. Ever since his tenth birthday party when I’d seen him and his friends try to microwave a field mouse. “It’s only a mouse,” he’d cried after I’d run and told his mama. Only a mouse. Something tiny and helpless. As if that made it okay.
    But I wasn’t about to admit that I was frightened. “What do you want Nolan?” I asked instead. I hoped he couldn’t sense my fear. Of course, Nolan was more animal than boy; he could probably smell it on me the way I could smell the rain.
    He’d delighted in torturing me just about as long as I’d known him—pushing me off the swings and the monkey bars, pulling on my pigtails. I remember Maggie once telling me he only behaved that way because he liked me. I’d wondered aloud how the two could be related. How someone who was supposed to love you could go out of their way to hurt you. Maggie had replied that love was all about pain. “It’ll tear you up good,” she’d said. “If it doesn’t, sugar plum, you’re not doing it right.”
    I was pretty sure it was all bullshit. Nolan didn’t antagonize me because he was harboring a secret crush on me. He tortured me because he was bigger and stronger than I was and somehow pushing me around and picking on those weaker than himself made him feel significant.
    My fear urged Nolan on. His nostrils flared and his gray eyes flickered to my minimal cleavage. Gooseflesh cropped up where he ran his fingers along my arm. All I could do was lean back and try to get to know the locker behind me a little better.
    “Well you did promise me some gratitude,” he replied.
    I brushed his hand away. “Okay. So, thank you,” I said. “Now if you’ll get out of my way, I need to change and get to class.” Leaning under his arm, I rounded his body and tried to walk away. I knew he’d turned even before the towel was wrenched from my hands and I was forced back against the lockers. I’d felt the air behind me shift. Sensed his mood as it changed from playful to dangerous. I’d been around enough of those kinds of mood swings to recognize it immediately.
    He pressed into me, not allowing me any room to wiggle free this time. His breath was hot against my ear. I reminded myself to breathe. Don’t let him see you squirm.
    I tried to listen but there was another voice in my head—one that shouldn’t have been there—telling me that it was my fault. That I deserved it. “Come on,” he whispered and I heard the other voice, deep and hard like it’d been cut from stone, saying the same thing— “Come on Abby. It’ll be fun.”
    Nolan’s fingers traced the side of my body down to the spot where my swimsuit met my hip. He lifted the fabric with a fingertip and let it snap back into place. It stung against my wet skin and I bit the inside of my lip to keep from flinching. “I know somewhere in there’s gotta be a little slut. Just like your mother.”
    “Hey!” Garrett shouted, his voice filling the room followed by a splash. Nolan blocked my view of the pool so I couldn’t see Garrett as he moved through the water. All I knew was thirty seconds later Garrett had wrenched Nolan away from me. There was a squealing of cleats against the tile, low growls, and the thwack of skin and bone meeting skin and bone, before Nolan’s friends moved in to break up the scuffle.
    “What’s your problem, man?” Nolan spat blood on the floor and wiped a trickle from his nose with the back of one of his bear hands. Garrett had punched him. From the looks of it, he’d gotten him good. 
    “My problem?!” Garrett hollered. “Keep your damn hands off of her.”
    I