Bitter winds of P.E

He gently touched my face and his eyes gently took me in. "I promised, didn't I?"
I lay back next to him and stared at the stars to avoid his gaze.
"I'm waiting," he said. I could feel his questioning gaze on me.
"Where do I start?"
"How about... start from the day you met him, you said you met him at a chess club you used to go to with your mother?
"You read my diary?" But my voice was more surprised than outraged.
Suddenly he was leaning over me, his face a mask of guilt. "Please don't be mad at me," he sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "I'm sorry, Nuru."
He waited for a moment. I still didn't speak.
"Now you're mad..."
He pulled me against his chest. My skin tingled from where he'd touched the bare skin in my arms.
I inhaled deeply and looked up at his face. "I'm not," I sighed.
He measured my expression for a second. "Okay."
I was embarrassed more than anything. I closed my eyes.
"You mentioned you went to high school together, did you sit next to him in class?" he probed.
I groaned. "No."
"What got you guys talking then? — you didn't write anything concrete in your dairy."
"Well — it was at lunch actually..." I cracked one eye open to steal a quick, cautious glance at him, he was waiting, curious. "He gave me a sandwich — peanut butter and jam," I continued. "He was the popular guy at school and my mother was friends with his mother."
He didn't respond.
"No one bothered to talk to me, Sid was the first person to ever share his lunch with me, the first guy to notice that puberty had been rather kind to me."
I watched him carefully. His mind was starting to connect the dots, and his face was in a permanent scowl, fitting the small pieces I was telling him to what he'd read.
"He asked for my number" — I edited all the crazy hearts I doodled in a piece of paper with an arrow baring Sid's name alongside mine — "And we kind of become friends."
Roman seemed more puzzled as I continued the story.
"... Or so I thought, he was just trying to be friendly, I assume. But I read too much into it..." I hesitated.
"Go ahead," he urged, his voice impatient. He even urged me on with his hand.
"He asked me over to his house. Him and his friends were having a party."
"And?" He growled in frustration.
I inhaled sharply through my mouth and let it out slowly through my nose. "And when I got there, I found there were no other girls. It was just me."
My voice was barely about a whisper now. I refused to meet his gaze. But I realized his hands were clenching and unclenching into fists.
I ignored the empty feeling in my stomach. I was afraid of his growing anger and I gulped to keep my voice even.
"And you immediately wanted to go home?" He guessed.
"Not really," I grumbled weakly." Only when he offered me a bottle of beer."
He was suddenly angry, I had no doubt that finally things were beginning to make sense to him.
"Sid, I suppose, thought I was familiar with — most things teenagers do," I whispered quietly. "He didn't think that I might have been inexperienced — in all aspects of the word." Suddenly I felt like defending him as I saw the murderous look Roman had worn the night he'd went out and beat Wyatt and his friends. Although they survived, if Sid still looked like before, skinny, tall, there was no doubt in my mind that Sid wouldn't come out alive.
"Really, though, it was my fault," I added quickly.
Roman's jaw tightened. "Enlighten me..."
I hang my head in shame. "Well, I might have, suggested in a not so subtle way, that I was ready for more."
He chuckled despite his growing agitation. "How?"
"Um... I... sort of went to his house wearing one of my mother's short skirts — it definitely sent the wrong message."
"That's when he tried to..." he gulped. His lips pressed together into a cautious line. "Take advantage of you?"
"They just thought it would be fun for Sid to have sex with me in the dark and then he'd leave in the pretence that he had to use the bathroom but only, he wouldn't come back, it would be one of his friends."
He looked away, furious. His face incredulous, he took a deep breath, in a failed attempt to calm himself down. "How did you get out?"
"I knew if I resisted, they'd only think I was playing hard to get," I mumbled, surprised by my anger. "I told them I had a surprise for them and asked them to give me a minute alone in the bathroom. I managed to escape out of the window."
His face grew dark and he pulled, roughly, out of the embrace.
"I'm confused," he bellowed, looking at my face as if he'd find all the answers there.
I groaned. "Why?"
"How did you know what they were planning?" his hands clenched into fists again.
"I think I caught on to it when all the girls who had slept with him gushed about how he was able to last for five rounds with only time to use the bathroom as the only time he needed to power himself up again."
He glared at my face. "What's his last name and social security number?"
I shook my head and chuckled darkly. "Roman, you are not going to kill Sid."
He frowned at me in confusion. "You know I will find these boys with or without your help."
"Oh I know." My smile was bright.
He started in surprise at my face. "Then why would you refuse to give me any information?"
I glared up at him. "I'm hoping, while you're still using your resources to track them down, I'll have enough time to warn them."
He chuckled. "We'll see."
"We will."
"So they just let you be?" He asked after a minute.
I tried to speak calmly. "Not really."
"Stop editing," he bellowed in frustration.
I sighed. "He made my life difficult, of course. It was so bad that I wished I could drop out of school or run away from home."
"What did he do?" His voice had carried a sense of urgency, like he considered this to be the eclipse of this particular story I was relaying to him.
"He just did stupid things, like spread a rumour that the reason we didn't sleep together was because I had some sort of nasty STD."
"Hmm..." His voice sounded miles away, his eyes were were blank, dazed and I would have believed he wasn't interested in the conversation anymore but his knuckles were white against his fist. His breath came out in short pants. He was mad.
"But I'm over that."
"Well, I'm not!" he snapped.
I finally knew I had managed to bring out the beast in him. His face was a hard mask, the anger pulling his features into a beautiful monster.
My voice was frantic and so was my heart. "What's that suppose to mean?"
"I'm still going to kill him," he said with an edge to his hard voice. A string of profanities started. His voice was barely audible now.
I stared in shocked silence. I'd never seen him so angry before, his eyes so wide and... cold. A chill ran through me. I had never been more frightened of him. I sat caged, terrified in his hostile rage.
"You will never understand..." he spoke through gritted teeth. "How a man feels when he's failed. I couldn't protect you. I wasn't there for you." he laughed bitterly, shaking his head.
The sound of his laugh hung in the air and I tried to hide my shiver of fear by running my hands back and forth over the length of my arm, they way I normally did when I was fighting the bitter winds of Port Edward.