As always, Pandora ignores me. She hooks her arm around mine, and I tense. Before I can pull away, she says, “If you don’t want all your secrets posted online, you probably should hear me out.”
I scoff at her. “What secrets?” I ask. “I’m an open book.”
Pandora watches a few people trail out of the classroom. “Hmm. An open erotica book? One full of somnophiliac rape fantasies?”
My heart drops into my stomach.
I yank away from her with so much force that I almost stumble. “What the actual fuck, Pandora?” I snarl at her.
How the fuck could she possibly know about that?
Only one person knows, and that person is nowhere near the school. Unless Zayden had seen the recordings, and she tortured our secrets out of him before she killed him… Well, that would track, wouldn’t it?
Pandora smiles at me. “What the actual fuck, Asch?” she mimics. “You’re so much dirtier than I thought you were. But do you really want to keep discussing thishere?” She motions around us, at the students walking through the halls to their classrooms.
I can’t quite catch my breath. The idea of Pandora knowing the only secret I’d kill to keep has a vise grip on my chest. She’s right, though. I don’t want to have this conversation out in public.
I don’t want to have this discussion anywhere.
No one was supposed to know.
The problem was that I’ve lived on the straight and narrow so much that I hadn’t had many real secrets to share, least of all any that was “good enough” to get me into Kappa Alpha. I’d tried others, but Zayden hadn’t accepted them.
Maybe if I hadn’t been the scholarship student, he’d have let it go with something tamer, but no.
“Fine,” I growl at her. “Your dorm room, then.” I grab her arm, hard enough to leave bruises, and I start forcing her in that direction.
“You know I have a roommate, right?” Pandora says, not sounding at all put out. “We’d probably be safer at your place.”
“Blaze and River also live at my place,” I tell her.
The last thing I need is for Blaze to hear this conversation.
He’d do worse than drop me if he found out what I’d done to him.
I’d be six feet deep before I knew what was happening — if I was lucky.
“River’s got boxing right now,” Pandora says. “He’s getting all sweaty and half-naked with some other guys. And Blaze has a group meeting with his marketing class, with that desperate girl who wants to hop on his cock.” She pauses and sighs. “That’s mean of me. I know she doesn’t have a chance, and she doesn’t know that Blaze is a raging dick. He charms well.”
I huff out another dark laugh. Oh, yeah. He knows how to charm them.
He knows how to charm everyone.
But her words give me pause. “How do you know our schedules?”
Pandora gives me one of her infuriating smiles. “I don’t know. How did River know mine? I bet Blaze knows my schedule too.”
The only person whose schedule I know is Blaze’s.
The only schedule I knew, at least. These days, I don’t know anything he’s doing when he’s not being a dick to me through River.
“Fine,” I tell her. “We’ll have to take the bus.” I don’t want to take the bus with her. I don’t want to take her home. I don’t want to go anywhere with her.
I stop short, realizing it means I’m going to have to take her into my room.
It’s nowhere near as bad as my room at the frat house was, but there’s still crap strewn everywhere. It’s not like I can borrow Blaze’s room, and I’m not having this conversation in the living room.
Fuck.
