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“Fuck.” I sat forward. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. It is what it is.” His voice held a touch of sadness, but his gaze was steady on mine. He meant it. “My parents are transferring most of my inheritance to my little brother.”
“What?” My eyes bugged.
He squeezed my ankle gently. “I’ll live.” Then a bitter expression crossed his face. “Mostly, I just feel shitty for Sebastian. He’ll be the one they dress up and parade around now, and I know he doesn’t want that.” His shoulders slumped, and for a moment, his mask of calm resignation slipped. “It fucking sucks.”
Pressing my lips together, I looked around the room, waiting for the others to tell me what bombs had been dropped on them.
“I almost got expelled.” Finn shrugged. “The school will put up with a lot of shit, but they cover their asses when it comes to stuff like buying good grades or manipulating their admissions process. My dad pulled all his donations to the school, and my grades all got docked. If I don’t get them back up this semester, I won’t graduate.”
“Shit. I can help you study if you want.”
He grinned like I’d just offered him a prize. “Yeah, maybe I’ll take you up on that this time, Legs.”
I still didn’t quite understand why Finn’s grades were so bad in the first place. He wasn’t a stupid guy—that was obvious if you talked to him for even five minutes. It could be partially just lack of effort, but he didn’t really seem like a slacker either.
My gaze tracked to the
other two boys. Both had remained standing. Mason leaned against the dresser, hands stuffed in the pockets of his dark jeans, and Cole still stood near the door, arms crossed over his chest. Neither spoke until I raised my eyebrows pointedly.
“I’m fine, Princess,” Mason said. When I opened my mouth to press harder, he shook his head. “I’m not kidding. My dad hasn’t done anything. I know he knows about it, but…” Something flickered behind his emerald eyes. “I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t care.”
Weirdly, my chest squeezed painfully as he said those words. Maybe it should’ve been a relief to hear there were no major repercussions for him, but it didn’t sound so much like Mason thought his dad didn’t care about the leaked family drama—more like his dad didn’t care about him.
And “nobody cares about you” is a shitty mantra to live your life by.
I wasn’t sure quite what to say, so I just held his gaze for a moment, trying to let him see through my eyes to the understanding beneath. There was a kind of freedom, an anonymity, in having almost no one in the world care about you. But there was also a desperate sort of loneliness, a feeling like being a corporeal ghost.
Mason wasn’t alone though. There were people in the world who cared about him, whether or not his dad was one of them.
There was no way I communicated even half of what I was thinking through the look I gave him, but whatever he saw in my face made his own expression soften a little, made warmth creep in at the edges of his eyes.
When I turned to Cole though, his bright blue irises were completely shuttered.
“It’s fine.”
Goddammit. No, it’s not.
Whether his father was beating him worse than before or not at all right now, things in the Mercer household were definitely, unequivocally not fine.
But he wouldn’t talk about it. I could see it in the stubborn set of his jaw. And I could understand it, even if I wished I didn’t. He knew I knew about his home life—in fact, I was sure every person in this room knew. But that didn’t make talking about it any easier.
I wanted to know though. Not that there was much I could do besides offer him my support, and he had that anyway. But I needed to know.
“Cole—” I started, but I was interrupted by the buzz of my phone on the mattress beside me. I cursed under my breath and reached for it, swiping to answer without looking closely at the number. “Hello?”
“Hello. Is this Talia Hildebrand?”
The male voice on the other end of the line was pleasant and warm, but I didn’t recognize it.
“Yes, it is.”
The guys all leaned in, and Cole took two steps away from the door like he might attack my cell phone if it tried anything shady. I shook my head to let them know it was okay.
“Wonderful. This is Gregory Nichols from the Pacific Contemporary Ballet. Is this a good time to talk?”
All the sound in the room seemed to disappear as if it’d been sucked into a vacuum. My grip on the phone tightened as blood rushed in my ears.
