Page 24 of Bad Moon Rising

10

LILY

It’s in fifth period when the gossip reaches me.

“I can’t believe he asked her,” a girl in my class—Mallory Rivens—says with a haughty sneer. She flips her perfectly-styled, bleached blonde hair over her shoulder.

“What?” Her friend, Jessica Lemmon, gives Mallory a sharp smile. “Did you honestly believe he’d ask you?”

“I just don’t understand what Jackson freaking Bellua sees in a freak like Becka Leeway,” Mallory sniffs. She shifts slightly on the rickety wooden seat, the action causing her skirt to ride up her thigh, and then fingers one of the pencils on her desk. “Did you hear that her mother is, like, a TV psychic? That’s so weird. But at least Matt’s still single…”

I tune out the rest of their conversation as a dull thumping sound reverberates between my ears. At first, I think someone’s banging two cymbals together directly beside my head, but then I realize it’s my heart.

Tha-thump. Tha-thump. Tha-thump.

Jackson Bellua…my Jackson Bellua…has asked Becka Leeway to prom.

The same Jackson who refused to attend…has asked another girl.

Not me.

Not me.

My head feels like a raging thunderstorm has been set loose inside of it—the crash of thunder, the repetitive stomping of rainfall against the ceiling, the howling wind. I can barely focus on the rest of the lesson as jealousy, grief, and betrayal all war together inside of me.

Jealousy that Jackson didn’t ask me, that he apparently never thought of me in that way. And that Becka gets his sexy dimple all to herself.

Grief for what we’ll never have, what we can’t have.

And betrayal…because a part of my demented heart still believes he should’ve asked me. I tell that part of myself we’re not together and we never have been. He doesn’t owe me anything. Jackson is a friend of mine, nothing more, nothing less.

So why does it hurt so badly?

Why does it feel as if he shoved his hand into my chest, grabbed my heart, and squeezed?

I remind myself I shouldn’t care…especially not when I think about what happened yesterday.

My lips still tingle from Brooks’s heated, passionate kiss, and I instinctively reach up to brush my fingers across them. Being in his arms… It was everything younger me had always wanted. Craved. Desired.

My first kiss.

Heat ripples across my skin and sets up camp in my belly. That burning, searing sensation joins the jealousy still present there. It’s a toxic cocktail of emotions that I can’t quite deal with. And maybe I don’t want to.

I kissed Brooks.

I want to kiss Jackson and Orion.

I’m jealous that Jackson is taking Becka to the dance instead of me.

I want Orion to ask me.

I want all three men to ask.

What the hell is wrong with me?

That… That right there is an entire list of reasons why I’m so messed up. A normal girl shouldn’t feel this way about her neighbors. A normal girl should be happy that a guy as sweet as Chase asked her to the dance. A normal girl shouldn’t lust over her best friend a day after his older brother kissed the daylights out of her.

A normal girl shouldn’t want three guys at the same time…