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Still, I was looking over my shoulder constantly, some part of me sure that he’d show up again.
But he didn’t. To say I was glad to shut the doors on my flight without a Dante in my cabin the next day was a vast understatement.
I was so grateful that I didn’t have to deal with him again I was thanking God, my knees weak with relief at the respite.
It was done. I’d warded him off for the foreseeable future. It was enough.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
“Love isn’t something you find. Love is something that finds you.”
~Loretta Young
PAST
I was waiting outside the vice principal’s office again. For fighting. Again.
I’d actually been doing pretty well lately, so this was now a rare occurrence.
There had been some major changes in my life.
After that day when I found out Dante was fighting for me, we were near inseparable.
We just fit together, he and I. Not necessarily in a sweet or romantic way. We were both thick skinned and sharp tongued. A tad too jaded, a touch too sarcastic. Hotheaded and stubborn to an extreme.
Dante was just as prickly as I, just as jaded, more sarcastic, more hotheaded, but thankfully, not as stubborn.
Which meant that when we clashed, as we invariably did, I won more.
I needed more wins.
We both knew it, and he was kind enough to let me have it. It was one of many reasons why we fit so well together. Despite all of his flaws, his sullen moods, his tempers and rages, he showed me an enduring compassion that no one else ever had.
We were in our early teens. It was that age where the sexes had separated to a polarizing degree. Boys hung out with boys. Girls played with girls. Those were the rules. There was some general flirtatious banter, some note passing, and lots of brief, teasing interactions but other than that, there was a clear segregation of the sexes.
We didn’t care. We ignored that rule completely. We were each other’s only friends, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
We spent a good amount of time over at his gram’s house. Her huge mansion of a place was a five-minute walk up the hill from my grandma’s trailer, a walk I hadn’t known I was welcome to take before, but now, like magic, I was. She’d told me I could come over any time I wanted, and since my grandma was gone a lot, I took her up on the offer almost every day. And Dante, who lived on a huge property between, almost always met me on the way and went over with me.
Now I didn’t have to be alone so much. It was the best thing that had ever happened to me.
Things were so much better, in fact, that I wasn’t as angry anymore. Wasn’t fighting every kid over every insult they sent my way, and, miracle of miracles, there even seemed to be less insults these days.
No one was much intimidated by a little skinny girl like me, even a vicious one, but plenty of the kids had learned to be wary of Dante.
He fought like a demon, and word had spread that he’d pound anyone that messed with me.
It was wonderful.
But it was not absolute. Today was a case in point.
This time it’d been a boy I’d been fighting with. I’d decked the asshole right in the chin, and when he’d decked me back, I’d kicked him so hard in the balls that he’d fallen to the ground and cried like a baby.
The rest of our class had watched the whole thing with varying degrees of disgust, exasperation, and horror, but of course none of them had tried to step in or help.
I was used to all of it.
