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“Just as well, since I’m not going to fucking get tired of her. How can you feel the way you obviously do about her and talk about her like that? Are you really that spiteful?”
She hated, absolutely couldn’t stand, that they were talking over her as if she wasn’t there. Verbally tussling over her like she was a juicy steak.
What she was at the moment was confused. And sad. And angry. And so, so happy she’d met West.
She’d never felt so many conflicting emotions all at once in her life.
“You know what, Reynolds?” Ethan stepped forward, going still as she slapped a hand on his chest.
“No. Enough. No more fighting. We’re all saying things we regret, and this isn’t the time or place.”
“Hardly. I just felt it my sworn bound duty to tell him why you’re really here, to do your little groupie research—”
Neck scalding-hot, she held up a hand. “West, how much have I asked you about the music business? About any of it really. The fans, the shows, the fame. Have I pelted you with questions?”
“No.” West crossed his arms. “We didn’t have a ton of time to talk.”
She knew quite well what he was insinuating—and she didn’t appreciate his manly posturing any more than she’d enjoyed Ethan’s. But she also got that he’d taken quite a few of her best friend’s jabs without delivering any in return.
“I haven’t been in research mode,” she told Ethan quietly, squarely meeting his intense dark blue eyes. “I intended to be. That was the goal. I forgot. I couldn’t focus on that because West and I… I don’t know how to explain it. We connected. I’m not ready to go home, and it’s not just because of my project. It’s because he sees me as I am, and somehow he still likes me.” She reached down to take Ethan’s hand, squeezing it though he made no move to return the gesture. “I hope the same is true about you. That when you go home and have some time to think, you’ll realize we’ve lasted this long because our friendship is strong and true.” Ethan averted his gaze, a muscle ticking in his jaw. “But it was never any more than that. It wasn’t meant to be.”
“Goodbye, Lauren. I wish you the best of luck.” Ethan let go of her hand and walked back to his SUV, parked some distance away from the bus.
And she watched her best friend drive away. Maybe out of her life for good.
When she glanced up at the bus, three faces—Michael, Juliet, and Molly—peered out at her from the windows. Soon as they caught her looking, they disappeared from the glass.
“Sorry,” West said beside her, rubbing her arm. “They don’t mean to intrude. They’re just—”
“Nosy.” She smiled faintly and went to sit on the steps of the bus. The door was still wide open. “Not like we weren’t being loud enough for everyone to hear. Everyone might as well know I’m a blind idiot.”
West leaned against the door beside her, bracing a foot on the bottom stair. “What project was he referring to?”
She told him how she’d gotten thrown out of school in her junior year of college in a slow, halting voice. Her nose was sniffly—damn allergies—and the sun trying to poke through the clouds kept making her eyes water.
It wasn’t because she was trying really hard not to cry.
“I plagiarized my paper,” she said in a dull voice, staring straight ahead so she wouldn’t have to read the judgment on my face. “The sociology of fandom class had just been an elective I’d taken on a lark to fulfill a requirement when all the classes I really wanted were full.”
“And you got caught,” West said without any censure in his tone.
“Oh yeah. Big time. I didn’t give a crap about the subject, I admit it. I’m a psych major. I want to work with little kids. What do I care about fan culture? So I went on some blogs and faked my way through a major paper for my class. I pretended I’d done the research on concerts and groupies and all that myself. Instead I spent a few nights on FanBuzz.net learning how it all worked. The way fans become obsessed with the music and chase the people who make it as if they were gods. I thought I was covered. I write well.” She rubbed the inside of her wrist over her mouth. “I just never counted on my professor being a contributor to that same site and recognizing some of the content I’d passed off as my own.”
Swallowing hard, she shut her eyes. “I deserved to get kicked out. The only child of two esteemed professors plagiarizing a paper is like the worst of the worst. I was so ashamed. I am ashamed—and all because I didn’t want to go to a show and do the research myself. I was too good to be a groupie. Too above it all to get down in the pit with the masses.”
“I noticed that about you when you were dancing in your bra the other night,” West said drily. “And looking goddamn hot while doing it, I might add.”
She laughed weakly. “I didn’t know myself. The first concert I went to, I was addicted, even though the band wasn’t for me. The Zags. Do you know them?”
“A little. Good dudes.”
“But the whole atmosphere, I just soaked it up. It was as if I’d found my people, weird as it is to say. How could I know what was meant for me when I’d lived my whole life in a box? I’d been sent to an all girls’ boarding school for high school and the girls I roomed with fawned over boy bands and did their nails up in pastel blue and pink. The biggest excitement was whe
n we’d have dances with the boys’ school across the way. Oh, and that time I was caught masturbating on Jo-Ann’s My Little Pony. But anyway, I had no clue—”
“Hold up. You were doing what to My Little Pony?”
She flushed. “I was curious about sex. Who can blame me? I saw something online and well, her stuffed animal was right there. I had my pajamas on. There was no fluid transfer.”
