"You won't?"

"No, Molls." He shook his head slowly. "I won't touch her…"

10 Present Day

Molly

Mentally reeling from my long overdue confrontation with Daryl, the next day at school passed by in a hazed blur. Mercy was hungover to the point where she couldn’t string a sentence together without gagging, so chatting with her was a bust.

Yeah, alcohol was the devil.

And even though Daryl and I had decided to give our friendship another shot, I found myself going out of my way to avoid him at school. Thankfully, it was Friday and I had the entire weekend to comb over my issues before having to face him again.

It wasn’t that I regretted our conversation last night, or that I had changed my mind on us being friends, but I needed a minute to wrap my head around the sudden and drastic turn of events.

All of it felt so surreal.

Last night, Daryl King was sitting on my bed, saying all the right things, smiling the best kind of smiles, hugging me tighter than he ever had before, but something didn’t feel right.

Because I knew he wasn’t the same person I used to know.

He wasn’t my Daryl anymore.

Yes, I genuinely believed him when he admitted that he hadn't intentionally pretended I didn’t exist, but I had two years to study the person he had become.

The popular jock who worked hard on the field and played even harder off it.

The Falcon's QB1.

The Academy's answer to James freaking Dean.

He'd been a busy boy…

For the rest of the night, we had talked about mundane things like football and school, our favorite tv shows and music. He didn’t go downstairs to join the rest of his friends who were partying it up and I didn’t ask him to.

Even if he wasn’t the same person I left behind, I still craved his company. His friendship. We had steered clear of the harder topics, the ones that hung heavily in the air around us. I knew there would come a time when we would have to talk about it, but he wasn't ready to go there.

To go back to that night.

His words, however sincere or not, had affected me.

For the longest time, my life felt like it was at a standstill. Excitement and joy had been ripped away, leaving nothing but depression, pain, and change in its wake. And now, after a stalemate that lasted almost a decade, life was moving quickly again, and I feared falling down the rabbit hole.

Common sense told me that I needed to be careful around him now, he wasn't the boy I'd grown up with, but the little girl inside of me screamed bullshit.

That little girl remembered the boy with the green eyes.

The boy with the bruises.

The boy with the secrets.

The boy who was the reason I was still breathing…

11 Daryl

I was the first one on the field for practice Friday afternoon and the last one to leave the fieldhouse afterwards.