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“My father has a fan club,” she said crisply.
I’d have to go back through the files I’d deleted from the web about Aurora. I had my bots at work every time she was mentioned, attacking each site to take it down for a day or two as punishment for daring to say our girl’s name, but every occasion was archived. Crazy always made me curious.
“You shouldn’t be seen with me,” Aurora told her friend.
Her friend looked torn but finally said, “Aurora, I’m not just going to abandon you. Again.”
Hey, she was self-aware. I almost liked her.
I turned to look at the man who was getting back up, helped by his friend. They tried to brush off his robes, but they would never be quite so white again. What was wrong with these weirdos?
“What do you want from her?” I demanded, and my voice sounded rough, intense. Not like myself.
“We want her to–” the man met my eyes, and something he saw there made him shrink back. “Nothing. We just wanted to talk to her about her father. To hear what he had to say from her mouth. She was the closest to him.”
I was on top of him in a second. His friend seemed as if he wasn’t sure whether to run or hit me as I wrestled inside his jacket, searching for his wallet. I yanked it out just as the friend made up his mind and went to deck me, but Aurora was there, catching his arm. She yanked him around, then punched him in the face. He landed with a crash on his ass, and I stepped on his arm to hold him steady while I grabbed his wallet too.
I flipped through the wallets and found their IDs. “John Wakofski. Peter Leonard.” I threw what was left of their wallets at their feet, but pocketed their IDs. “If I were you, I’d get out of town.”
“Or what?”
I fixed them with a smile and they backed off, though they shot threatening backward glances at Aurora.
“Thanks for the help there, blondie,” I told Aurora.
She looked at me dead in the eyes, her violet gaze steely. “United front in a fight. Even if I would like to watch someone punch you…but not as much as I want to punch you myself.”
Why did I find that strangely touching?
“Jenna, go home,” Aurora said, touching her friend’s arm, her voice kinder than it ever was with me. “We can text…I don’t think you should be seen with me though.”
“I’ll be careful,” Jenna promised. “You deserve to have friends, Aurora.”
Aurora smiled at that. “We don’t always get what we deserve.”
Then her eyes slid up to me, hardening, as if she was thinking just how true that was.
“Let’s walk Jenna home,” I said. “Being seen with me should help dispel some of the… danger.”
I couldn’t pretend as if some of the people who hated Aurora might take that anger out on Jenna or anyone else seen as being kind to her. But at least on this campus, everyone was either scared of me or in love with me. Or both.
When we’d dropped Jenna off at her dorm, Aurora said, “That was nice.”
She said it with a tone as if she couldn’t quite make sense of me. Well, that was mutual. I didn’t understand Aurora, and I didn’t understand how I felt about her.
“That’s me. Nicest guy in the Sphinx.” I fixed her with a bright smile.
“Low bar,” she shot back.
“You’d be an expert.” I rubbed my hand across my face, suppressing a laugh as I remembered Stellan’s put-out face as he stormed out of breakfast this morning. “You let Stellan finger-fuck you with bacon grease still on his hands. No standards.”
“But I wouldn’t let you finger-fuck me at all,” she said with an equally sunny smile. “So I guess even a girl with no standards still wants something better than you.”
“I hope Cain spanks you again at dinner.” I’d enjoyed the show. Cain usually acted as if he were a robot doing a halfway decent but glitchy imitation of a human; Aurora brought out something new in him and I was fucking intrigued.
“I hope he does too,” she said brightly.
Even if the two of us were ripping each other apart, it still felt like teasing banter, and there was something strange and light in my chest that I hadn’t felt since…well, ever.
