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Chapter 7

Sparrow

I’d like to say I sleep well that night, but nothing can be further from the truth. I toss and turn, unable to find rest, a perpetual cold biting into my very bones at the thought of never sleeping next to Louis again.

Every time my eyes flick back open, the shadows grow deeper and deeper. The patio door is the only barrier between me and the potential danger outside, and I imagine a hulking shadow rising on the other side of the glass.

An attacker. Aaron. He’s here to come get me, he’s here to hurt me…

I pinch my eyes shut, trying to find a sliver of safety from Louis’s occasional snores. I could sneak into his room and crawl into bed with him, but the potential repercussions keep me from it. What if he gets angry? What if he regrets his decision to let me stay and throws me out? If so, I’d really be in trouble.

No. I have to endure this night alone, and sometime between four and five o’clock, I finally manage to fall into an unrestful sleep.

It feels like no time at all has passed when I jolt awake from the clink of glasses. Bleary-eyed, I squint at the kitchen, where Louis is making breakfast and coffee.

The sun hits his bare back, illuminating his many tattoos. His upper arm is covered by a howling wolf, and beside it, his shoulder blade is dotted by something that looks like claws. Or tears? Blood? It looks gruesome. Gruesome and cool.

I sit up to get a better look, but at that moment, Louis turns around and catches my eye.

“Slept well?”

“Um, sure.”

He cocks an eyebrow as if he knows I’m lying. “It’s Monday. Don’t you have class?”

“Oh, right,” I say with more urgency and rise to get my clothes on. But then I stop in the middle of pulling on my sweater. “I-I can’t go.”

Louis pours two mugs of coffee and sets them down on the table alongside a plate of eggs and bacon. “And why not?”

“Aaron might be out there, looking for me.”

“And you think this Aaron guy is going to pull up on the side of the road and tug you into his car?”

“Given the chance, yeah, he will.”

“You must be a mighty good lay, then,” Louis says with a tilt to his mouth, not quite a smile, “for him to go through so much trouble to get you back.”

“Maybe I am.” As soon as the words are out of my mouth, an immediate flush to my cheeks follows suit. Why can’t I just be brash and confident like Lilith? Why does my voice have to shake and my eyes refuse to keep contact as soon as the embarrassment flares? I look away, hiding my heated cheeks with the coffee cup.

“I want to make a couple things clear,” Louis says. “As long as you live in my home, you’ll follow my rules.”

“Rules?”

He holds up a hand and starts counting on his fingers. “One: No late-night activities. I’m a light sleeper; I sleep, you sleep. Two: Clean up after yourself.”

“That’s fine,” I say, nodding.

“I don’t want to see any fucking cum stains on my couch either.”

“I-I wouldn’t,” I stutter, face burning.

“Mm-hmm, of course not. Third rule: Language. No swearing or acting up.”

“You curse sometimes.”

“Yeah, but I’m old. Older ,” he corrects himself, scowling. “I don’t want you learning bad habits.”

“Maybe I like bad habits.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t, and you’re living in my house, so that means you don’t either.”

“What happens if I refuse?”

“You really want to find out?” When I just shake my head, wide-eyed, he continues, “Four: Keep up with your schoolwork, and that means not skipping classes.”

“If you want me to go to class, you’ll have to take me.”

“That so?”

“I can ride at the back of your bike.”

Louis just looks at me with a challenging glint in his wolflike amber-colored eyes, and I force myself to keep his gaze. When he finally breaks eye contact, I’m sweating, and a strange heat that can’t be entirely caused by the coffee pools in the pit of my stomach. I don’t usually drink the stuff, but Louis seems to assume I do, so just to avoid his potential judgment and to seem more like the adult I want him to perceive me as, I force it down.

“What time?” he asks.

“Nine thirty.”

He sends a glance at his watch. “Well, it’s quarter past now, so we better hurry.”

“Crap, are you serious?” I shoot up from my seat with my mouth full of bacon. I hate being late. Hate walking into the lecture hall when everyone else has already taken their seats and having to quickly scramble to find one of my own. People stare at me enough as it is.

Louis hands me a huge leather jacket in the hallway. “Here. Fall’s coming, and riding a bike isn’t like riding a car.”

“How about you?” I ask. He’s not even wearing a long-sleeved shirt. “Aren’t you going to be cold?”

He shrugs his biker vest on and grabs his keys. “I’m used to it. Are you coming or not?” he asks when I just stay in the hallway, rattled by this sudden turn of events.

On the walk down the driveway to his motorcycle, I feel like I’m drowning in his leather jacket. It feels a little ridiculous, but it’s comforting too.

When Louis has his back turned, I lift the jacket and sniff the insides. It smells like him: masculine cologne, mint, sweat, and motor oil. My eyes flutter shut, heat spreading all over my body.

Louis hands me a helmet but gets none for himself. This time, I refrain from making a comment about it. It’s kind of sweet, after all, and Louis has rarely been sweet to me. Not that I want him to be sweet; I want him to take care of me, but he doesn’t have to be sweet all the time to do that. He can bend me over his bike and take from me what he wants, as long as he holds me afterward and kisses the tip of my nose.

I shake my head at my embarrassing thoughts as I swing a tentative leg over the bike. Ridiculous. Louis won’t ever do that with me.

“Hold on tight.” He grabs my hands and wraps them around his waist. At first, I hold him casually, not giving away how much I want to clutch him tight, but when he starts the bike and speeds up, my breath hitches in my throat, and I slam my body against his.

The engine roars as we speed down the street. Rows of two-story apartment blocks blur in my periphery, and my eyes tear as the chilly fall air hits me dead on. After a minute or so, I get used to the strange feeling of whooshing speed, and it gets more fun than scary.

I lean my cheek into Louis’s back, smiling and giggling. I feel free. Daring.

We come to a stop at a red light, and Louis turns around and barks, “You good?” over the roar of the engine.

“Yeah!” I yell back. “It’s fun!”

His teeth flash in a smile, and I squeal with joy when he speeds past a row of cars in the other lane.

We skid onto the main campus with three minutes to spare. Even though I’m nervous about being late, I feel no hurry to untangle myself from Louis’s waist and unmount the bike, but I suppose I have no choice. I unzip his jacket and hand it to him, and he hangs it over his broad shoulders.

“Thanks, kid,” he says, still straddling the bike.

I’m the one who should thank him , yet I can’t bring myself to do much more than smile at him.

“Let me guess,” he says. “You want me to come get you after class too?”

“Oh.” I haven’t even thought of that. “My class ends at two. And I should get my stuff from the dorm. Clothes and school supplies.”

“Mm-hmm,” Louis grunts. “And you want me to go with you like some kind of bodyguard, do you?”

“I mean, if…if it’s not too much trouble,” I say with what I hope is a grateful smile, but I just feel awkward and cowardly.

“So you’ll be safe here?” Louis nods toward the stairs, where groups of students are going to their respective classes and hanging out outside the main lecture building. Some have stopped to stare at us. I guess it’s not every day a student gets a bike ride from a guy as intimidating as Louis.

“Yeah, I’ll be all right.” I hope. “Aaron won’t dare approach me when there’s a bunch of people around.”

“Good.” Louis leans over and reaches a hand into my pocket.

My pants are pretty tight, and my mouth falls open when his other hand nudges my hip. What is he doing? He withdraws with my phone in hand, and after directing the screen at my face to unlock the Face ID, he types his number into my contacts. As he does so, I notice I have a bunch of unread text messages and calls from Lilith, but all that can wait.

“Here,” he says. “In case you need me.”

“Need you,” I repeat. I try to voice it as a question, but in my thin, breathy voice filled with an adoration I can’t hide, it comes out as more of a statement.

Silly me. Louis is just helping me out; he’s not… flirting with me, right? At least not in a serious way. I’m too young for him; he’s already told me that. My brain gets it, but my heart and dick don’t seem as easily convinced.

With nothing more than a “bye, kid,” Louis puts his helmet on and revs the bike, and I’m left watching him speed down the streets.

In case you need me. The words are stuck at the back of my head. I want to hear them again, and I want Louis to take the truth of my answer to heart. I do need him, but how do I convince him he needs me too?

Despite the many stares I get, I manage to survive walking into the lecture hall. The rest of the day passes by, and as promised, Louis comes to meet me after class. I resist the urge to run toward him and jump into his arms, and instead we make our way to the dorms in quiet.

If people stared when he dropped me off by the lecture buildings, it’s nothing compared to the looks we get in the hallways. One girl even drops her books when we walk past, eyes wide as she stares at Louis’s towering form striding next to me.

I can’t wait to get out of here as soon as possible. If we’re lucky, Lilith will still be in class.

But of course, we aren’t that lucky.

I open the door to the dorm room, and my jaw drops at what we walk in on.

Lilith is straddling a guy on the bed, making out passionately, her only clothes a black lacy bra and a checkered miniskirt.

Her gaze flips toward us in a glare. “Haven’t you ever learned how to knock?” she snarls, and she jumps off the bed but makes no move to put her top on.

The guy on the bed gets to his feet. He runs a hand through his wild mass of curly blond locks, flashing a charming smile. He has the same jaded, half-lidded look in his eyes that Aaron used to get when smoking weed with his friends.

“I’m Asher,” he says, holding a hand out to me.

“Sparrow,” I say, taking it.

“These your friends or what?” he asks Lilith.

“This one sure isn’t.” She points at Louis with a sharp black fingernail. “What the fuck is he doing here?”

Louis leans against the door, leather vest creaking as he crosses his arms. “You just worry about getting your clothes back on, little girl.”

“What the fuck are you doing with him, Sparrow?” Lilith snaps. “I thought I told you he’s sketchy as fuck. Is this why you haven’t answered my texts?”

“I’m just here to get my things.” True to my words, I grab my laptop and toiletries and stuff them into the backpack that, thanks to Aaron, is already half-full of clothes.

“For what?” Lilith asks, eyes narrow.

“Then I’ll be out of here.”

She stares at me, then at Louis, and her eyes widen in understanding. “Out!” she yells. “Both of you.” She herds Asher and Louis toward the door. “Sparrow and I need to have a little talk.”

“Um…” I start to sweat. Louis sends me a questioning look, and I nod at him. “It’s okay.”

Louis and Asher disappear into the hallway. Lilith turns to me and crosses her arms, still dressed in her lacy bra.

“What the fuck happened last night?” she hisses. “When I got here this morning, my mirror was shattered in a million pieces. Looked like someone had broken in or something.”

“Uh…” How the hell do I explain to her that my ex broke in and tried to kidnap me back to my hometown?

“Well? You could at least have answered my texts. I was worried sick, you know,” she adds with an overdramatic flip of her hair.

If she was really that worried, why was she making out with a guy in our dorm room with seemingly no care in the world?

“Can you keep a secret?” I ask, trying to ignore the discomforted feeling Lilith always seems to leave me with.

She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, sure.”

“I had a fight with someone.”

“A fight? You?” Her gaze travels up and down my body in a way I’ve learned to hate. Happens all the time—people underestimating and mocking me because of my short build and slight frame.

“With my ex,” I clarify, not in the mood to explain any further, but if I’ve read Lilith correctly so far, she won’t let me off the hook until I’ve told her everything.

“Your ex? Sparrow, are you going to tell me what the fuck is going on? You’re creeping me out.”

“He broke into our room and tried to get me to come back home with him, okay? And I didn’t want to, and we fought, and the mirror broke, and a shard cut my cheek,” I say in quick succession, pointing to my Band-Aid. “And I didn’t know if he was dead or what, but I wasn’t about to wait for him to wake up, so…I went to Louis’s house.”

She rolls her eyes. “All that, and your first thought was to go to him of all people?”

“What else could I have done?”

“What do you think, Sparrow? Call the fucking cops! That’s what you do when your ex is a crazy-ass stalker who breaks into your dorm. Not go to a guy who’s just as psycho and dangerous as the one you escaped.”

“Louis isn’t a psycho,” I protest.

Lilith rolls her eyes to the ceiling. “Christ, you’re almost too gullible to function.”

“I’m going to live with him for a while until Aaron leaves town,” I say, shrugging my backpack onto my shoulders.

“What? No, you’re not.”

“Yes, I am!”

Her perfect brows furrow in a scowl. “You can’t be serious.”

“Well, I am serious, and Louis and I are leaving now.”

Lilith follows me out to the hallway, where Louis and Asher are waiting for us.

Asher lights up at the sight of her. “Hey, babe.”

I go to Louis’s side and take his hand. It’s callused and rough in my own, and at first, he doesn’t react, but then his fingers slowly hook around mine and give them a squeeze before he lets go.

“You better leave him alone,” Lilith tells him. “Sparrow’s been through enough; he doesn’t need a big oaf like you ruining his life even more.”

“And what has he been through exactly?” Louis asks in that deep baritone of his that sends tingles all the way down to my toes.

“Nothing,” I say quickly. “Let’s go home?”

Louis glances at me, and for once his lips slope into what I can only interpret as a smile. It’s not wolflike and mocking like the ones he’s thrown my way before—no, this one is genuine, and a rare warmth fills my chest.

“Fine!” Lilith throws her hands up. “Go ahead, move in with this sketchy-ass guy. You have terrible taste, by the way. And don’t come running to me when he beats the hell out of you after you end up owing money to his biker gang.” She yanks hold of Asher’s arm and all but throws him into the dorm room before she shuts the door.

“That went well,” I say.

Louis scoffs. “You think?”

With what feels like a hundred eyes staring at us, we start walking through the hallway. I crave the feeling of Louis’s hand again but lack the courage to take it.

“Yeah. It was nice to see that she cares about me.”

“She was right, you know.”

“About what?”

Louis sends me a grimace. “Thisarrangement between us is just temporary, anyway. Either you’ll find somewhere else to live, or that ex of yours will get tired of stalking you.”

The remnants of the warmth I felt when he smiled at me disappear into thin air. Didn’t I already tell him I had nowhere else to go? Didn’t I already tell him Aaron won’t stop chasing me? Yet still he tells me this…Of course, I know I can’t live with him forever, butit feels like he’s pushing me away before he’s even given me a chance.

“You coming?” Louis turns around, and I realize I’ve fallen behind. Heart cold and wary, I hurry up to join him, and when our hands brush again, unconsciously on my part, Louis shifts his away.