CHAPTER 2
Walking through the giant gates opened wide, Sarah watched a colossal ‘WESTHIGH’ crowning one of the three buildings looming before her.
The highschool campus was empty, except for the few early arrivals scattered here and there. They each glanced her way in open curiosity, making her nervously fiddle with the charm bracelet her Grandma had gifted her that very morning.
Sarah had never found comfort standing out from the crowd. And being the new girl at school was daunting.
Wanting to avoid their scrutiny, she decided to take a tour of the school herself. It was far better than the school she transferred from in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Every amenity–classrooms, gym, track, football-field, indoor summing pool–of WestHigh, in the small town of Westerley, located on the north-western part of surreal Upper Michigan, could rival with the best of any big city moneyed school.
It was hard to believe this was all due to the goodwill of a benefactor, who preferred to remain anonymous. Except for the few important members on the School Trust Body, no one had even an inkling of who he might be.
Grandma had said, though the people of this town craved to know his identity so they may get to personally thank and honour him for his generosity, they also didn’t want to disrespect the man’s wish to continue remaining nameless.
Thud!
A heavy, dull noise interrupted Sarah’s expedition.
At the back, within the school premises, a large tract of land was under construction. It seemed the sound issued from there, though at the moment no work was being done on the single storied structure.
Sarah listened again, but nothing came to her this time. Still a sudden anxiety churned, wanting her to leave here. She could not explain this restive feeling. But before she did anything about it, yet another sound caught her notice. A sound that closely resembled a muted.. scuffling?
Wonder at its source overrode her anxiety. One wary step after another, she neared the closest brick wall as faint talking replaced the earlier scuffling noise. Even as the quality of the voices suggested it contained a trace of repressed aggression, she couldn’t stop herself peering from the end of the wall.
As it was, her instincts weren’t wrong. By the picture she witnessed not thirty yards from her, it appeared a bout was being carried between two boys.
One with the sandy brown hair was sprawled on the ground. His limbs frantically laboured to raise him from his degrading position. But when this effort met with the other’s quelling foot planted squarely on his chest, whorls of anger contorted his features.
Since this other boy, with his raven head, had his back to Sarah, she couldn’t see his face.
“You don’t scare me, Maximus.” The sandy haired boy spat up fighting the weight keeping him down. “Nothing you do, would make me admit something I haven’t done.”
At the challenge, the imperious foot entrenched on his chest slid its way up to his throat, splaying him over the ground completely and thus effectively stopping his bid at freedom, since struggling would only have had the pressure on his windpipe choke him.
Although the boys were physically bigger, Sarah didn’t think they could have been much older than she. However, this Maximus seemed to grow even larger as he nonchalantly rested one arm over the leg bent at knee, that still had the boy underneath its captive, while his other leg extended back powerfully on the rough ground.
“You’ll do well to fear me, Mike.” He sneered so low and deep, it took all of Sarah’s concentration to gather what he threatened. “I always, always get what I want.”
The blade of absolute conviction in his words slithered down her spine, rousing her to the danger he was.
She needed help. Mike needed help.
Her sight madly searched the long pavements, empty parking-lot, gardens now deserted of even the few students who sat there only minutes before.
“Not this time, Maximus. Don’t walk away from me!”
The sharp retort had Sarah swivel in time to see Maximus’s dismissive back moving farther away from both Mike and where she stood hidden. But before she could breathe easy believing the fight finally broken, Mike wanting to even the score on his humiliation, lunged after him without warning.
With the advantage of having his opponent’s back turned, Sarah thought Mike might succeed. But remarkably, Maximus had anticipated this comeback.
Swift as lightning, without having looked back, he bent precisely under the arm that reached out to hit him. Then using this continuous motion to skilfully generate enough force, he landed one of his own solid punches in the dead centre of Mike’s guts.
He didn’t stop at that. As Mike hunched at the loss of active breathing, together with a killer pain battering his diaphragm, Maximus, not encumbered with scruples, mercilessly backhanded his face.
Mike doubled over on the ground, trickles of scarlet seeping down his nose and mouth.
The scene Sarah witnessed, drained her blood. Their violence evoked memories of her only too raw, turbulent past. She didn’t ever want to see anyone hurt again. Spurred into action, she spun around and screamed.
Screamed for help once, twice, but just when she was about to let out a third cry, a vice hold seizing her left arm viciously snatched her away from plain view of the school to the other side of the single storey, then shoved her back against its unrelenting wall.
Sarah gasped as much from the novelty of an intimate touch as the rattled bones in her body, because this shove came from a hand that boldly claimed its place right over the heaving tops of her breasts.
But the life of her awareness to this novelty at the prospect of a new threat gaping wide was only as long as that gasp lasted. Sarah instinctively closed her eyes against it. However, just moments before what had dominated her vision was a tall form clad in all black. The expanse of the chest and shoulders so great, it had blocked her sight of everything else.
“Well, well, what do we have here?” The deep rasp was mocking.
It’s him, it’s him. She was fighting panic from taking over.
“Look at me.” That rasp commanded, steeled with the certainty of one that had never been refused.
He was close, too close. The heat his body exuded was impossible to deny. She could feel his scalding breath make its leisurely path from the subtle grace of her face to the delicate slope of her neck, then back up to sweep over her one ear.
A knot grew in Sarah’s throat at its ominous pause there.
An intake of a deep, rough breath. Was he smelling her hair?
Then the rasp spoke again, and the chill of Artic iced her veins. “Open your eyes birdie. The lion wants to play.”
If someone were to take her hands then, he would have thought them carved from blocks of ice.
And just so, they lay either side of her, useless.
“Come on,” The demand softened, almost coaxing. “Open your eyes.”
With a shudder, Sarah found his softness far destructive than the mocking coldness of before. The inexplicable reaction it catalysed running over her skin as thousand feathers, frightened her all the more.
Fear in its base form she understood, but this..
It felt as if myriad embers were taking light within her. What was she feeling? Was there even a name for it?
Her eyelids pressed down tighter, too shaken to comply.
“Open. Your. Eyes.” Gruffly, he changed to demanding again.
This terse reversion was vastly welcome, though no less frightening.
“Or else..” His patience had clearly run out of its reserve.
In past, ‘or else’ had always been the precedent of painful punishments from her dad. So it was again arrant fright that had her eyes jumping open.
Surrounding her was Maximus. He was even bigger this close. A need to hyperventilate came over Sarah.
A fall of rakishly dishevelled raven hair hooded above his piercing amber eyes as flecks of gold within the ambers blazed with predatory instinct. The nose so straight and proud must never have had to look up but down on people. His mouth taut in the grinding of his teeth delineated a jaw strong enough to sand rocks.
This clear sign of anger over the lethal angles of his chiselled face profoundly unnerved Sarah. Her eyes immediately darted to his, needing to find what he intended for her.
But in the second she moved her vision from his mouth to his eyes, his whole demeanour had taken a turn.
An inquisitive, too probing a stare was pinned on her. He was studying her with such gravid interest, it appeared the world around had lost its appeal to him.
At that, his slackening his brute grip on her upper arm but not letting go completely was unexpected and confusing. And if she didn’t know better, she would have mistaken the barely grazing movement of his fingers for a caress.
It couldn’t be.
Before she decided more on it, the periphery of her vision showed a club swooping down on her captor.
Sarah wouldn’t see even him hurt.
“Sto-!” Her wail to avert that attack rose only to be crushed by a mouth suddenly affixed over hers. She froze then and there.
The club smashed a hit against Maximus’s back. But the strike did nothing to faze him from the kiss that only increased in contact.
The fullness of the connection was shocking, electrifying.
The two school guards who have come to rescue Sarah had yet to spot Mike, the sandy haired boy, still recuperating from the punch he had suffered in his guts lying where he had been left a long way back. To their understanding, she likely cried for help from Maximus’s assault on her.
When their first hit didn’t bring the desired result, one went on to deliver another, while the second tried physically prying the boy from her.
Maximus levered himself from the captivating taste of Sarah’s lips, seemingly yet unaware of everything else but her. Nothing in the least succeeded in diverting his intense gaze off her, not even long enough for him to convey his annoyance–if any at all–over the pesky needling of the two other.
But Sarah wasn’t as oblivious of their growing agitation with Maximus. Their clubs had to be hurting him!
Why wouldn’t he do as they wanted? She was certain they would stop too, once he freed her.
Just, let go.. As tender greens of her eyes tried to reason with the sparkling ambers of his, a third guard joined the fracas from behind her. Wrapping his arms about her tiny waist, he yanked hard.
The unexpected adjunct force had Maximus’s grip on her upper arm slip down to her wrist.
In protest of this tug of war, a whimper escaped Sarah.
The sound of her anguish affected Maximus as nothing had ever before.
If someone knew how to look, really look, he would have seen the shade of her pain reflecting in him.
Sarah dreadfully watched. For some reason his entire countenance turned for the worst with his anger raging.
Maximus’s condemning glower marked this third man alone for causing the girl hurt. His filthy arms still spanning her waist was another offense Maximus couldn’t set aside.
So adrenaline pumping, despite the two other guards holding him back, he managed to ram a debilitating kick in the man’s spleen, peeling him cleanly off Sarah.
As this third guy fell back, his head hit the wall behind and opened an ugly gash.
The fear that had as yet kept Sarah docile in caution, now goaded her to frantic proportion. She had to get free of this boy.
I have to!
She spun from the sight of the fallen man to pry the hand still keeping her left wrist imprisoned. She wrenched at it, she clawed, but Maximus’s grip was like an iron band. However hard she hit, however deep her nails raked, it wouldn’t give!
All through this struggle, Sarah had evaded looking into his eyes directly again. Afraid to see what she might find there in answer to her daring. Though his unrelenting hold had her helplessly wondering, what made for his perverse strength?
So when nothing worked and exhaustion was taking over, her will surrendered and her gaze eventually travelled up to meet his.
All fight fled her at the enigmatic emotion gleaming there at its rawest form. It shook the base of her very being. Threatened to a level where for the first time she was aware of herself as a female vulnerable to the superior dominance of a harder, bigger male.
Then, in the line of unexpecteds, he dealt one more.
Sarah felt his hold on her wrist breaking. And this time, the brush of a caress was unmistakeable as he gave the freedom her innumerable thrashing and clawing were unable to win back.
Even the guards had proved ineffective against his unbending tenacity. And the suddenness with which he ceased all resistance sent the remaining two still grabbing him reeling back on their backsides.
Sarah was baffled. All this, just to have her meet his gaze once more?
She looked down at the wrist he freed, or so it might have seemed, but the tendrils left from the heat of his touch braiding through her veins still had her imprisoned as effectively as an invisible chain.
When her incredulous eyes roved back to him, a throng of people had begun to converge around them. Students and teachers, all wanted to rake juicy details as the security personals grappled to salvage their tattered pride leading away now a cooperating–albeit, reluctant–Maximus.
He was permitting their every other push to move him only a step or two backwards at a time, refusing to lose sight of Sarah as long as he possibly could.
The single minded glint in his eyes was burning its way into her. Slithering down her quivering insides it coiled deep within the pit of her stomach creating a tension she was yet too innocent to comprehend.
But one thing was certain. They would meet again.
Sarah went weak to her bones.
It was plain on the hard-edged face, the tall arrogant bearing.
He would carve his way to her through the fires of hell if he had to. But see him again, she would.
*****
