Total pages in book: 213
Estimated words: 201920 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1010(@200wpm)___ 808(@250wpm)___ 673(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 201920 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1010(@200wpm)___ 808(@250wpm)___ 673(@300wpm)
“Like at your parents’ place?” he asks me.
“No, just here.” The thought of going home to my mother’s is one I don’t give the time of day.
“Got it,” he says, moving his bookbag he didn’t even touch to the top of his desk.
“Well, I’m heading out early tomorrow morning. You want to hang out tonight?” he asks me and then winks. He’s not going to be here this weekend. My heart slams hard against my rib cage, although on the surface I keep my body relaxed. I had plans. Plans that were easy because he’d be at the frat party. But maybe this means I can save him from all this. Maybe it’s meant to be this way.
“Come on, don’t make me go to bed all alone,” Dean says and pouts when I don’t answer fast enough for him.
I can’t help but laugh.
“You want to fuck me but not bring me home to your mother, that it?” I tease him back.
“You want to come? I’ll bring you.”
“You’re fucking crazy.” My laugh is joined by the zip of my bag as I close it.
“I’m not staying there long; you want to come with?”
“I don’t think I’m the type of girl you bring home to your parents.” And I have things planned. I don’t tell him that part. He can’t know.
“First, you’re blind and delusional. Second, I hate my mother.”
“So, bringing me home would be to spite her?” Suddenly feeling lightened by the situation, a smirk graces my face. “Like to piss her off?” It’s another game.
“You’re something else, you know that?” he says, not answering my question.
If only he knew.
“What about rugby? Don’t you guys have a game or something?” I ask him, feeling a stir of anxiety deep in my stomach. It radiates outward as he answers.
“It’s not important, and the guys know I’m leaving. I’m not an official member anyway. It was just Kevin’s idea that I join.”
“You close to Kevin?” I ask him.
“His uncle really. He’s paying my ride here.”
“Why?” Shifting my backpack to rebalance the weight of the heavy books, I wait for an answer. I didn’t know that. It’s not something I would have been able to look up online, but damn I don’t like it.
“I got into some stuff, beat a guy pretty fucking bad and Jack’s friends with both my uncle and the judge. He said he’d watch me and offered to ‘set me straight.’” He huffs a laugh but it’s obvious that Dean’s grateful for it.
“He sounds like a good guy.” I breathe out the words although I feel empty saying them.
“It’s a favor to my uncle. Not that I don’t appreciate it.”
He runs his fingers along his stubble as he looks up at the clock. He’s got another class to attend and we’re already taking too long in this empty room, but I have to ask. “Why’d you get into a fight with that other guy?”
“He was just getting a little too handsy.”
“With you?” I joke, but he doesn’t even smile.
There’s a hardness about Dean, just beneath his cocky and facetious exterior. “With this chick. I was drunk and so were they. Turns out she was his wife.”
“He was just flirting with his wife and you beat the shit out of him?” I say but again he doesn’t laugh.
“If flirting means grabbing her by the hair to pull her out of the bar, then yeah. Sure.”
“Why the hell did you get locked up then?” I ask him, feeling my heart drop at the image of what he’s describing playing in my head.
“She lied. She didn’t want her husband to go to jail.”
Sickness coils in my stomach. “I’m sorry.”
“Yo,” I hear someone call out and turn to see Daniel in the doorway.
He nods at Dean, his face cleanly shaven and his hair pushed back. “You got a minute?” he asks Dean and my heart hammers hard and fast, like I’ve just been caught in a lie.
Daniel doesn’t even look at me. It makes me wonder if he knows something he shouldn’t. Or if I’m maybe missing a piece to the puzzle.
“One sec,” Dean says quietly and then plants a kiss on my jaw before leaving me behind. It’s odd what one little kiss will do.
Knowing before he left, he had to leave me with one little kiss.
I just hope it’s not my last.
DEAN
Pissed off is something I’m used to.
Enraged, irate, resentful.
But none of them compare to how I feel right now.
“You can’t even really tell it’s her,” Daniel says and I don’t trust myself to answer just yet. I can’t even take my eyes away from the picture on the phone.
“You think she’ll be upset?” he asks me.
Do I think Allison is going to be upset that a picture of her riding my dick by the dumpsters at the diner is on the university’s social media accounts and it’s circulating like wildfire? Yes. Yes, I fucking do. You can’t identify me in the picture, but her? Clear as day. At least to me.