Zach's POV

There was a girl sitting in my lap, taking up space and making it harder for me to eat. She was chatting away with some of the other guys but I didn't listen, I didn't hear it.

I looked over my shoulder and tensed at the scene I saw. It felt strange. I kept on telling myself that I couldn't care less about the guy, but for some reason I knew I was lying to myself. He was making me angry, frustrated. Filled with emotions. So it stood to reason that I had to avoid him. That hadn't worked out too well.

My body remembered. It remembered the heat of his skin, the beating of his heart, the faint smell of him beneath the alcohol. It remembered and it made me afraid.

I closed my eyes, fighting off the emptiness that had crept up on me now and then ever since he had left me to shiver between his sheets, twice. The last time I'd sobered up and left. I had left and found my way home. Throughout yesterday I'd realized that it was impossible to fight off this feeling with the far more familiar void I usually kept inside me. A void I kept to protect myself. I'd realized that I would have to find a new way to stop my thoughts, a new way to rid myself of unwelcome emotions. Sex wasn't working, I knew because I'd already tried it now before lunch – tried it with the girl sitting in my lap. I wanted to shrug her off of me, but I couldn't find it in me to do it. Alcohol clearly didn't help either. That plan had completely back-fired. I had tried to make my body forget its reaction to him, the reaction I had gotten when I had pulled him into that room.

I looked at the guy again, seeing the pain he hid so badly. I wondered what it was he was hiding. It hadn't been there on the first day, the day he bumped into my shoulder—the day I drew his portrait. He had been someone else then, someone who had seemed to see far too much, far too deep. Now he didn't seem to see at all, he just looked hollow. Like me.

I knew I should look away, but I couldn't. There was something about the guy that just wouldn't allow me to ignore him. I had one more option left that I could use. One option that would sate the need, quiet the insistent voice inside of me. Hopefully it would work.

It had to work.