The Worst Birthday Ever

Ember's POV

Tonight was supposed to be the best night of my life.

I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and carefully lined my lips, taking my time the way I never usually did. I was the kind of girl who rushed through getting ready because there was always something more important waiting — a lecture to read, an assignment to finish, a test to study for. But not tonight. Tonight I took my time because tonight was different.

Tonight, Ethan was going to tell the whole world we were together.

For six whole months, I had been his secret. We talked on the phone late at night when nobody could hear. We met in hallways where the popular crowd never hung around. We sat at different ends of the cafeteria and pretended not to know each other. Six months of being invisible, of being the girl he was too embarrassed to be seen with in public. And I had accepted all of it because I loved him, and I believed him every single time he told me he was going to make things right.

Tonight was supposed to be that night.

He had promised. Tonight, at this party, in front of every person on this campus who had ever looked through me like I was made of air, Ethan Thurlow was going to stand beside me and say out loud that I was his girlfriend.

I had even bought special underwear for the occasion. That was how much I believed him.

I stepped back from the mirror and looked at myself in the lingerie I had picked out, feeling both silly and brave at the same time. It was delicate and pretty, nothing like the comfortable cotton things I normally wore. Nothing like the practical, no-nonsense Ember Cole who spent most of her life worrying about grades and internship applications and whether the financial aid office had processed her paperwork yet.

I wouldn't normally do something like this. But tonight is special. Ethan deserves to see me try.

I pulled my coat over everything and reached for my phone to send him a text.

After you get changed, meet me in my room. I have a surprise for you!

His reply came back almost immediately, and I could hear his excitement through the screen.

Let's go, baby! Bro, I gotta change. Be back in a second!

I smiled so wide my cheeks hurt. I finished my makeup, double checked my hair, and walked out of the bathroom feeling like a girl who had finally gotten everything she had been waiting for.

The party was already loud and crowded on the lower floors of the building. Music was thumping through the walls, and people were everywhere — laughing, dancing, shouting over each other, spilling drinks on the carpet. I had been at the party earlier with Kimberly and Jessica, but I had slipped away when I saw Ethan heading upstairs to get changed. I wanted to be in my room waiting for him when he arrived. I wanted the surprise to be perfect.

I walked down the hallway toward my room with a smile on my face and butterflies in my stomach, thinking about how this night was going to go, thinking about how good it was going to feel to finally be somebody's official girlfriend.

I pushed my door open.

And the butterflies died.

The sound hit me first — a moan that I heard before my eyes could even adjust to what I was seeing. And then I saw them. On my bed. In my room. Ethan and Hilary Davis, tangled up together like they had forgotten the rest of the world existed.

I just stood there.

I don't know how long I stood there. It felt like forever and like no time at all. My brain kept trying to make sense of what my eyes were showing it, kept trying to find another explanation, another way to understand what was right in front of me. But there was no other explanation. There was no other way to understand it.

Hilary noticed me first. She looked up and her eyes went wide for just a second before she caught herself and put that bored, unbothered look back on her face like a mask.

"Get out!" she snapped. Then she actually looked around the room and something shifted in her expression. "Oh wait — isn't this your room?"

"Oops," she added, like she was talking about bumping into someone at the grocery store.

Ethan scrambled to sit up. "Ember." He said my name like it was a question. "I thought this was Hilary's room. I swear, I just — I got confused, the doors all look the same and—"

I wasn't listening to him anymore.

I bent down, picked up my shoe from the floor beside the door, and threw it at him as hard as I could. It hit him on the shoulder and he flinched.

"Oh my God!" Hilary shouted.

"Fuck you, Ethan," I said. My voice was so calm it scared me. "We are done."

I turned around and walked out. I didn't slam the door. I didn't scream. I didn't give either of them the satisfaction of seeing me fall apart. I held my head up and I walked, and I kept walking all the way down the hallway until the party noise swallowed me up and I was just one more person moving through a crowd.

Hilary's voice floated after me before I got too far.

"Relax, loser. Ethan plays hockey and you play trombone. He was always out of your league."

I kept walking.

I wasn't going to cry. I absolutely refused to cry in the middle of a party on my birthday, surrounded by people who would talk about it for the rest of the semester. I pressed my lips together, blinked hard, and kept moving toward the front door.

I almost made it.

Right at the edge of the crowd, I walked straight into a wall — except the wall was warm and it had arms, and when I stumbled backward and looked up, I realized it wasn't a wall at all.

It was Knox Rivers.

He reached out and caught my arm before I could fall, and for a moment we just looked at each other. Knox Rivers. The captain of the hockey team. The most talked-about guy on the entire campus. The one person every girl seemed to have an opinion about, whether they had spoken to him or not. Up close, he was taller than I remembered, and there was something about his eyes — gray and steady and completely sober — that made him feel different from everyone else at this party.

"Hey," he said. "Easy."

"Sorry," I managed.

He let go of my arm but he didn't move away. Instead he turned slightly and looked past me, his jaw tightening for just a second as his eyes moved toward the window and the dark sky outside.

"I don't think it's a good idea for you to go out there alone tonight, Ember." He said my name like he had always known it, like it wasn't strange at all that he knew who I was. "There are wolves on the prowl tonight."

I stared at him. "Wolves. On campus."

"They're always around," he said quietly. "You just don't know it yet."

I didn't know what to say to that. I was about to tell him I would take my chances with the wolves over spending one more second in this building, when I heard footsteps behind me and a voice I recognized and had never wanted to hear again.

"Ember."

Ethan.

He had followed me.

Knox turned around slowly, and something about the way he did it made the air between him and Ethan feel immediately dangerous.