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She grimaced. “I’m not sure. I’m trying to avoid him as much as possible, but he seems to be making a point of running into me. He teases me,” she added, hating how much like a child she sounded … but she’d been holding back the anger for so long that she couldn’t resist the urge to vent at least a little of it. “It’s absolutely stupid, really, but he’s always got a bunch of jerks with him who laugh at everything he says. I helped him with his stupid homework, you know?” She felt her fists clenching at her sides, felt her body tingling with anger. “He’d have been screwed if it wasn’t for me sitting there with him. And he was nice! He was nice to me when his stupid friends weren’t around, and then he was a jerk in front of them, and all he had to do was apologize, and he didn’t. He was so drunk at that party, and he acted like an absolute idiot, and he just got away with it! And now he’s being extra gross, I guess because he’s embarrassed about how poorly he acted, and it’s just… it’s ridiculous. We’re all far too old to be acting like adolescent idiots. But he’s got this stupid inflated ego because he’s always surrounded by people who are obsessed with making him like them, but they only want him to like them because his family has money and power! It’s got nothing to do with him! And he’s absolutely not as good-looking as he thinks he is, becausenobodycould be as good-looking as he thinks he is, and he’s just—he’s disgusting. He’s a disgusting, arrogant, stupid piece of—“ Morgan froze, then clapped both hands over her mouth, remembering suddenly where she was. Professor Reine had been listening intently to every word of her silly, juvenile little tantrum. She closed her eyes, wishing that the ground would swallow her up. “Professor, I’m so sorry. I—I got carried away. That was—”
“—full marks,” the woman cut her off, the widest smile Morgan had ever seen spreading across her face like sunshine. “Full marks for this week. We’re done. Go and celebrate.”
“What—” But she was already gone. Morgan closed her mouth, shaking her head a little. Every class she’d had with professor Reine had ended the same way, she wasn’t sure why she kept expecting something else to happen… the professor’s wings flashed in the sunshine as she performed a few aerial maneuvers, then uttered a brassy, triumphant bugle before diving straight back into the ocean.
Full marks? What was shetalkingabout? Morgan hadn’t done anything. They’d never done anything, actually. These classes were an inscrutable, cryptic exercise in patience and the suspension of disbelief, from what Morgan had been able to make out so far. Every week, she came down to the beach to meet the professor. Every week, they had a conversation that ran in circles and confused her half to death, punctuated by long periods of meditative silence that were somehow even more unsettling than the talking… and then, seemingly at complete random, she would declare the lesson over and hurl herself into the ocean. It was maddening. What was she supposed to make of it? It was like the professor was deliberately trying to annoy her. And she had more than enough of that going on, what with Archer seemingly determined to annoy her every minute of every day—
She was so lost in her ruminations as she stalked back towards the school that she didn’t see the impact coming until it was too late. She ran straight into something warm and solid, uttering a startled yelp of surprise as she ricocheted back. Her bag fell in the chaos, too, and she swore under her breath as she dived to retrieve it. Of course it was Archer, she thought sourly, wishing she could get out of the whole stupid situation without having to look at his stupid face.
“Woah. Watch where you’re going. You know it’s not safe to read and walk at the same time, right?”
“I wasn’t,” she snapped, too tired and frazzled to bother controlling her temper like she had been every other time she’d run into him. She rose to her feet and grimaced as she took in the sight of him, standing there blocking the whole hallway with his arms folded over his chest and a sunny smile on his stupid face.
“Oh. I guess I’m so used to seeing you hunched over a book that I assumed you were reading. Just clumsy, then, is that it?”
“Get out of my way, Archer.”
“Oh, what’s the matter? Bad day?” The chuckles of his idiot friends annoyed her… but not nearly as much as the mocking smirk on his face. He thought he was winning, didn’t he? He really thought this behavior was okay, that she was just going to let him get away with it because of who his family was. Something in her snapped.
“Yes, actually,” she said, drawing herself up to her full height. “It’s been a terrible day, because I’ve seen you no less than five times. What’s going on, Archer? Have you memorized my schedule? Because we don’t have any classes together today, so I can’t imagine how else I could have seen you this often.”
He looked a little surprised at the venom in her voice, and she didn’t miss the uneasy glance he shot to the guys behind him, whose voices were suddenly a little quieter. Then the smirk returned to his face. “You’ve been counting the times you’ve seen me? That’s embarrassing for you, Morgan. Other people have classes too, you know.”
“What class do you have in the east wing?” she snapped. “Answer quickly.” He opened his mouth, but his answer wasn’t immediate—and she pressed her advantage. “You can’t, because you don’t have one. The only freshman class in that part of the university is history, and we’ve all heard you bragging about how you got out of having to take that. So tell me why you were down that hallway this morning at the exact time I was leaving class?”
He hesitated… only for a moment, but it was enough.
“Shegotyou, bro,” one of Archer’s guys whooped. The look Archer shot him was frightening. For a moment, she could see the heat of a volcano ready to erupt from him.
“Whatever,” he muttered. “I don’t need this.”
He shouldered past her and stormed away down the hallway, too fast for any of his friends to follow. Morgan shared an uneasy moment with the group, who seemed suddenly much less intimidating without their leader to back up… and then they scattered, leaving her alone with her heart pounding and an odd exhilaration coursing through her body. She’d never stuck up for herself like that before. Sure, she’d had the impulse to snap when people were rude to her, but she’d always chosen to keep her thoughts to herself. Part of her was a little afraid of what might happen if she truly let go and spoke her mind. She told herself that keeping the peace was a better idea in the long run… that the world was better served by kindness than by making people feel bad.
But maybe, just maybe, there were people in this world whoneededto feel bad. Maybe that was the only way to stop them from inflicting their crappy behavior on everyone around them.
Chapter 10 - Archer
The weeks dragged on. With every passing day, Archer was getting more and more bored and restless. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d spent this much time in one place, let alone a place that was actively trying to force him to learn things he didn’t care about. Turning up to classes was a drag, keeping up with his homework was a drag… everything was a drag, these days. The only thing that sparked even a modicum of interest in him was planning the next full moon party.
After the roaring success of the last one, the Dean had sought him out personally to congratulate him on an event that showed such great school spirit. It had been all he could do not to laugh in the old man’s face. But the Dean had offered to put him in charge of the next one in an official capacity, even offering him a budget… a laughably small one, of course, but still. Maybe it would get back to his father that he was doing volunteer work for the school, and that would go some way to making up for the abysmal grades he was no doubt going to get at the end of the semester. That, or his father would blame his extra-curricular activities for his poor grades, accuse him of being more interested in partying than his studies. His father would read negativity or positivity into his actions depending on his own mood, Archer had learned that lesson a thousand times.
The truth was, he was less and less interested in his social life, too. Ever since that night, he’d been feeling a horrible, restless gnawing at the pit of his stomach whenever he thought about partying. He kept finding excuses not to head back to his dorm after classes… after all the effort he’d put in to establish their dorm as a social hub, he found himself resentful of how many students were always hanging out there. He took to flying around the island in the late afternoon, doing slow, lazy laps of the rumbling volcanic peak. There was something soothing about being dragon-shaped, about being in the sky. Up here, he didn’t have to think about—
Morgan. She was never far from his mind, which was maybe the only thing that was even more annoying than she was. She was still playing hard to get, ever since she’d stormed off like that at the party, and it was driving him insane. Every time he sought her out, she shrugged him off. There were women at this stupid university who’d have done anything for the kind of attention he was paying her, and she had the audacity to act like she was the one who was being inconvenienced? What kind of game was she playing? Not to mention the day when she actually attacked him in front of his friends, tried to humiliate him… that one was particularly galling. He was still seething with rage hours later when he finally made it back to his dorm.
“She’s a Scorpio, dude,” Brody said with a shrug, taking a long swig of his beer. “They’re crazy.”
He wasn’t going to disagree. But it hadn’t occurred to him to match her behavior to her star sign—he’d been doing his best not to think about all that crap. He didn’t like being reminded of the project they’d worked on together that day in the library… “Crazy how?”
“Crazy like, revenge.” Brody nodded solemnly. “It’s the fixed water sign, right? They’re like ice. Super cold, super hard… and if you screw with them, they get fixed on getting even.”
“Well,someone’sbeen doing his homework.”
Brody just shrugged. “I’d sleep with one eye open if I were you.”
It felt good to laugh with the guys about it. Women were crazy, that was always a comfortable refrain… it meant you didn’t have to think about why they’d gotten so angry. He’d certainly been doing his best not to think about the conversation at the party, about why she might have been angry with him. But it didn’t matter. The next party was coming up that weekend, and everyone was going to be there. That meant he’d have an opportunity…
“She’s not going to win,” he said aloud, gazing thoughtfully into the distance as the guys looked over curiously.
