CHAPTER 11 - DENIAL

*Jace's POV*

By the third week of summer, Jace's friends had stopped asking if he was okay and started asking what was wrong with him instead, which felt like a smaller question but somehow landed heavier.

"You've been weird for weeks," Mason said, sprawled across Jace's couch with a controller in his hand, not even looking up from the screen. "Like, weirder than normal-weird. Actual weird."

"I'm fine."

"You've said that every day for a month."

"Because it's true every day for a month."

Mason paused the game and turned to look at him properly, which was somehow worse than the teasing. "You barely eat. You canceled on the lake trip. You keep staring out your window like you're waiting for a package."

Jace didn't answer that, mostly because there wasn't a version of the truth he could say out loud without it sounding insane.

*I keep waiting for a light to come on in a bedroom across the street.*

*I think about a fat kid I spent three years humiliating and I can't stop.*

*I think I might actually .... *

No. That thought didn't get to finish. He shut it down every single time it got that far, the same way he'd been shutting it down for weeks, because it was ridiculous. It was Ezra Monroe. Soft, quiet, easy-target Ezra Monroe, who Jace had made fun of since freshman year without a second thought, who he definitely did not lie awake thinking about like some lovesick idiot in a movie.

He couldn't love him.

He wasn't even sure he liked him, not really, not in any way that made sense. He just felt sick every time he pictured that hallway, Ezra's face going white, the door of the Monroe house clicking shut like something final.

Guilt. That was all this was. Guilt had a way of sitting in your chest and making you feel things that weren't real.

"Earth to Jace." Mason snapped his fingers in front of his face. "You just went somewhere for like a full minute."

"I'm here."

"Barely." Mason studied him another second, then apparently decided pushing further wasn't worth it. "Okay, well, since you're clearly having some kind of breakdown, Tyler's getting us into Element tonight. VIP list. You're coming."

"I don't want to."

"Wasn't a question."

Element was the kind of club that let seventeen-year-olds with the right last names walk past the line like it didn't exist, lights low and music loud enough that Jace didn't have to think about anything for a while, which was exactly the point.

For the first hour, it almost worked. Tyler bought a round of something blue and terrible. Mason dragged him onto the floor with a group of girls from the private school two towns over. Jace let himself get loud, let himself laugh at things that weren't funny, let the bass drown out the two words that had been living behind his ribs for weeks.

*Not anymore.*

He was three drinks in, leaning against the bar, when he heard the name.

"....used to look like the Michelin Man, I swear to god," some guy was saying, loud, to a small circle of people Jace half-recognized from a rival school. "Ezra Monroe. Senator's kid. Total joke back at Ashford."

Jace's whole body went still.

"He transferred or something, right?" a girl said. "I heard he like, disappeared."

"Probably couldn't handle it anymore," the guy said, grinning. "Dude wrote some love letter to a guy and everyone found out. Imagine being that pathetic you have to run away from your own school."

Laughter. Easy, careless laughter, the same kind Jace had produced a hundred times over the years without ever once feeling what it actually did to the person underneath it.

Something in his chest went white-hot.

"What did you say?" Jace's voice came out low, flat, nothing like the version of himself that usually filled a room.

The guy blinked at him, still grinning, clearly not registering the shift. "I said Monroe's a joke. You know him? Senator's kid, total...."

"Watch your mouth."

The grin faltered. "Excuse me?"

"You heard me."

Mason materialized at his shoulder out of nowhere, a hand landing on his arm. "Jace. Hey. Let's just...."

Jace shook him off.

"You don't know a single thing about him," Jace said, stepping closer, close enough that the guy's smile finally dropped completely. "So maybe shut your mouth before I shut it for you."

"Whoa, okay, relax...."

"Jace." Mason's voice again, sharper now, a warning.

It didn't land in time.

The guy said something else, something about how touchy Jace was being over "some fat loser," and the word barely finished leaving his mouth before Jace's fist connected with his jaw.

The circle around them erupted. Someone screamed. Glasses shattered somewhere to his left as the guy stumbled back into a table, and then there were hands everywhere, Mason and Tyler hauling Jace backward, the guy's friends surging forward, security cutting through the crowd with flashlights already up.

"Get him out, get him out now...."

Jace barely felt the hand splitting his knuckles. He barely heard Mason shouting his name, or the bouncer's radio crackling, or the furious blur of accusations flying in every direction as the club dissolved into chaos around him.

All he could hear, ringing in his ears louder than any of it, was his own voice from thirty seconds ago.

*You don't know a single thing about him.*

He hadn't decided to say it. It had just come out, immediate and certain, like something that had been sitting loaded in his chest for weeks waiting for a reason to fire.

And underneath the adrenaline, underneath the sting in his hand and Mason dragging him toward the exit through a crowd of furious strangers, one single thought surfaced with a clarity that terrified him more than the fight itself.

*I would do that again. I would do that a hundred times.*

*For him.*