Chapter 4 The New Transfer Student

Annabella.

My skin felt like it was on fire. Literally all day.

I couldn't focus on a single thing. AP English? Total blur. Chemistry?

Pretty sure I almost poured the wrong acid into a beaker because my hands wouldn't stop shaking. Every single time I closed my eyes, my brain, being the absolute traitor that it is, looped the exact same ten-second clip.

The party, the mockery. Well, as much as it hurts. I was done with Tyler.

But then my thoughts went back after the party, the cool night air, the stranger. The solid, heavy weight of his chest against mine.

The exact moment his lips stopped freezing and actually started moving against my mouth with that slow, dizzying heat.

God, Bella, stop it.

I tapped my forehead against the hard wood of my desk in third-period calculus. I was a horrible person.

A dine-and-dash criminal, except instead of food, I stole a luxury bedroom sleepover and a ride-home offer, then bolted like a thief in the night. He’d been nice.

Annoyed, sure, but he didn't leave me on the asphalt. And how did I repay him? By ditching him while he was in the shower.

The embarrassment was a living, breathing thing inside my throat. But whatever. It was fine. It was over.

I was never going to see him again. He didn't know my name, he didn't know my school, and our city was huge.

A statistical anomaly, that’s all last night was. A weird, slightly sweaty fever dream that I would bury deep inside my soul and never speak of to another living soul.

I just needed to get through the rest of the day.

---

Mrs. Gable was dragging her dry-erase marker across the whiteboard, her voice droning on and on about derivatives and limits.

The click-clack of her heels was the only rhythm in the suffocatingly quiet room.

I sat in the middle row, staring blankly at a graph that made absolutely no sense to my fried brain, clutching a cold bottle of water against my inner wrist to try and shock my system back to life.

Then came the knock.

It wasn't a loud knock, just a polite, firm two-tap against the heavy wood of the classroom door.

Mrs. Gable stopped mid-sentence, her marker freezing against the board. "Ah, yes. Come in," she called out, adjusting her reading glasses.

The door handle turned. It swung open.

My breath caught in my chest. Time didn't just slow down; it ground to a screeching, violent halt.

A guy walked in. Tall. Broad shoulders. He had one strap of a black backpack slung casually over his right shoulder, his jaw tight, his hair messy in that exact same effortless, infuriating way it had been when it was damp from the shower.

I blinked.

My water bottle slipped from my fingers, hitting the floor with a loud, hollow thud that echoed off the cinderblock walls.

Nobody noticed. Because everyone—literally every single girl in the room—was already staring at him.

My heart hammered against my ribs so hard I thought it would crack a bone.

No. No, no, no. This was a joke.

The universe was playing a massive, sick, twisted joke on me. It was him. The stranger. The apartment guy. The guy whose lips were currently burned into my permanent memory.

Mrs. Gable’s face lit up with that classic, overly welcoming teacher smile. She gestured toward him with her marker.

"Class, meet our new transfer student and also new Hockey captain."

I didn't hear the rest of her sentence.

The room started spinning again, exactly like it had on the sidewalk last night, except this time I didn't have a luxury bed to pass out on.

I was trapped. In a tiny plastic chair. In the middle of third-period calculus.

---

I think I actually died. For a second, my soul left my body.

His eyes swept across the room. It was a casual, bored scan—the look of a guy who had better places to be—until his gaze hit my row.

Our eyes locked.

His eyebrows didn't just rise; they practically hit his hairline. The tiny, subtle twitch in his jaw told me everything I needed to know. He recognized me. Instantly.

The emerald dress was gone, replaced by a baggy school sweater and a messy topknot, but he knew exactly who I was. The human beach ball from his balcony.

Panic, cold and sharp, took over.

I grabbed my massive, five-pound calculus textbook with both hands, hoisting it up like a riot shield until it was two inches from my nose.

My elbows were trembling. I stared at the tiny font of page 142, my heart rate going absolutely berserk. If I can't see him, he can't see me. I am a ghost. I am a wall.

"We have an empty seat right there in the middle," Mrs. Gable’s voice cut through my internal screaming. "Right across from Bella. Go ahead and take a seat, Dorry."

Dorry.

I risked a tiny glance over the top edge of the paper.

He was walking down the aisle. His stride was long, heavy, and completely confident. As he got closer, the details hit me like a physical punch to the gut.

It was him.

It was the stranger I had kissed him. I had slept in his bed.

Dorian pulled out the plastic chair directly across the aisle from me. The metal legs scraped against the linoleum floor with a horrific screech.

He dropped his backpack with a heavy thud, sliding into the seat. He didn't look at me. Not directly.

He kept his eyes fixed on the front board, his mouth set in a hard, rigid line.

He looked utterly annoyed. Irritated to his very core to be sitting in this room, in this school, next to me.

I shoved my face back into the textbook, my vision blurring with a toxic mix of old rage and fresh, suffocating humiliation. My hands were shaking so badly the pages rustled.

For the next forty-five minutes, I didn't breathe. I didn't take a single note.

I just sat there, the heat radiating off his body across the narrow aisle feeling like a localized sunburn. Every time he shifted his weight or clicked his pen, my entire body went rigid.

---

The second the bell rang, signaling the end of the period, I didn't even bother packing my bag properly.

I shoved my notebook and pens into my sack in one chaotic motion, zipped it up with a violent jerk, and bolted.

I practically knocked over two kids in the doorway, throwing myself into the crowded, chaotic hallway. I just needed to get to the cafeteria.

I needed to find Chloe and Maya. I needed to hide in a bathroom stall until graduation.

"Bella! Hey, wait up!" someone yelled behind me, but I didn't look back. I wove through the sea of lockers, my breath coming in short, ragged gasps.

I was almost to the exit doors leading to the courtyard. Just five more feet.

Suddenly, a heavy shadow loomed over my shoulder. Before I could push through the double doors, a firm, warm grip locked around my right wrist, stopping me dead in my tracks.

A gasoline escape through my lips.

I froze, my back still turned to him.

He pulled gently, forcing me to turn around and face him. Dorian was standing there, towering over me, his blue eyes dark and intense, his jaw tight with an emotion I couldn't quite read.

"We need to talk.”