AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I’m borrowing them.” Nathan did his best to wipe gently at the smudges with the edge of his white towel, but it was little help. He could make out a few of the words, but most of it was barely recognizable. Great. Add that to the list of study questions he’d stayed up late to write down so he wouldn’t forget to ask Tully.
“Who the hell trusted you enough to think you’d actually study?” Bruce asked.
“Who else? It’s his girlfriend.” John Webber entered, with a towel covering his lower half, and opened his locker right next to Nathan’s. “I heard she’s valedictorian.”
“Damn,” Joey patted him on the shoulder with a somber shake of his head. “You’re whipped, man.”
“You’re all grown up, Rondeau! Studying for a girl.”
“Shut up,” Nathan waved them off so he could return the notebook to its spot in his bag. He got a few more joking remarks as they all teased him a little bit at the time, some asking questions, some saying he’d gone soft for some random girl.
“She must not be very smart if she chose him,” someone said to which Nathan responded with a quiet but resonating gesture in their general direction. His mind was running too slow to come up with any more wit than that.
That damn dream did something to him. His head was on loose, and he hadn’t eaten breakfast yet, so his stomach was empty.
Once he got some food in him and walked it off, he’d be back to normal by the time classes started. Dreams were weird like that. They just lingered sometimes. No reason to worry or overthink anything. Besides, it was probably nothing.
He left the locker room quicker than the others and entered the hallway with his hair still slightly damp as he ran a hand through it to style the little mousse he’d put in and walked towards his locker.
“Morning, Nathan.”
Nathan recognized the voice immediately. He wanted to keep walking. Move ahead and pretend he never heard it, but he couldn’t. A tanned hand with pink nails held him in place. “Just got done with practice?”
Joliet’s wide eyes blinked up at him, and even though she’d already successfully stopped him, her hand stayed put to keep him there. He strained to keep his face straight, because all it wanted to do was twist in disgust at her. Even the feel of her lotioned hand on his arm repulsed him more than it ever had.
That smile on Joliet’s face told Nathan what he already suspected about her: she really thought she had a chance. She had thought so since they were kids, that just because many guys would kill for even a night with her, Nathan would too. But he wouldn’t.
Something about her rubbed him wrong. He always thought it was an annoyance because she was ridiculously clingy even as children, but he knew exactly what it was now: the blatant insincerity in her eyes, the falsity of her smile. Even the way she stood felt off to him—too straight or something.
He knew what Joliet was like, going after Tully’s boyfriend just to spite her. He knew exactly what kind of person she was behind all the pretty clothes and shiny hair.
If there was ever a speck of interest in her, it had become endangered the second he started dating Tully, then it was extinct the second he heard she was a cheater.
Along with any particle of respect.
Now here she was, trying to use him the exact same way she used everything else to get back at Tully. Nathan’s patience was thinner than ice.
“Yeah.” He pulled his arm away.
There was one thing he had to give her though—she was resilient as hell. It just pissed him off that her resilience hurt Tully. “You must be hungry then. Here.” She reached into her bag and pulled out a small Tupperware. When opened, it revealed what looked like some fresh Danish pastry. Nathan stared at it. Hungry, but unimpressed. “You can have this. It’s just an extra I had.”
This is what agirlfriendis supposed to do. Joliet wasnothis girlfriend. She was his girlfriend’ssister, who was gravely overstepping the boundaries normal people respected. Maybe it was that dream again, but Nathan couldn’t believe how insulted he felt for a couple of reasons.
The first reason: How dare she think that he would cheat? Had she done this with Tully’s ex-boyfriend too until he gave in? Did she think Nathan was that low?
The second reason, which was more potent than the first: How dare she try to hurt Tully? Tully might be a fake girlfriend, but Nathan realized now that he still cared about her a lot. She was his friend. And it was beyond offensive to him that someone would try to treat any friend of his that way.
Just because Joliet’s words did not say anything terrible, didn’t mean her actions were so pristine.
“No thanks.” Nathan was petty. It was one of his skills when he wanted it to be. Right now, he wanted to be petty as hell. “I already brought breakfast.”
Like Joliet, he reached into his bag and pulled out food. The breakfast wasn’t packaged in a nice Tupperware.
His breakfast was two, foil bags that crunched when he held them up. Unopened, and freshly bought on his way to school.
Joliet grimaced at the sight of the two pop-tarts he held, disgusted by the sight of something she must deem incomparable to some fresh pastry. “You’re going to eat that?”
“Well, it’s notjustfor me, of course.” He smiled so hard it could never be seen as anything but sarcastic. “One is for Tully. Blueberry is her favorite.” He held up the blueberry Pop-Tart in his right hand to punctuate his sentence and put an end to the conversation.
