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O’Neal closed out her screen and smirked at the inverted pink-haired woman across from her. “Because reasons?”
“Ridiculous reasons.” She opened her eyes. “They just make us take these things so we have to stay here longer and then they can charge our parents more money. How will knowing how to solve forxhelp me treat someone’s anxiety or whatever?” She lifted her head and rolled over so she was facing O’Neal upright again. She sat her chin on her folded arms.“Xis givingmeanxiety. Stupidx.”
O’Neal gave her a sympathetic look. “Maybe the math will help you count all the money you’re going to make when you become the best therapist there ever was.”
She sniffed. “That’s what I’ll hire an accountant for. It’s important to know what you’re not good at.”
“I’m pretty good at math if you want some help,” she offered. Really, anything to get her mind off of what had happened with the guys two weeks ago would be good. Anything to save her from replaying everything over and over again. Sometimes, she was lucky and all that would replay were the steamy parts, the “before” parts. Those memories usually hit late at night when she was alone in bed and half asleep and her body got antsy. But those sexy memories were quickly eclipsed by the painfully embarrassing ones. Like her blurting out her love for Auden like some starry-eyed preteen.Ugh.
And lately, the most popular scene that her brain liked to play on repeat was what had happened with that guy Brick. The way he’d looked at her, had talked to her. Even knowing that the guy was an idiot hadn’t saved her from feeling what he’d wanted her to feel.
Diminished. Desperate.
When Brick had looked at her, he hadn’t seen some woman coming into her own and making adult decisions about her relationships and her own body. He’d seen some gullible freshman with a childhood crush who’d do anything the older guys wanted to get some attention. A plaything. An amusement.
She knew in her heart that Auden and Lennox hadn’t used her that way, at least not consciously, but some of the things she’d done with them…
When she was with Auden, she didn’t want to say no. She wanted topleasehim, to get that praise from him. What she couldn’t figure out was if she had let things go that far because she’d truly wanted to experience it or if she’d done it because part of her was still that girl with a crush, that girl who idolized her best friend’s big brother, the girl who wanted to be seen as more than a kid in Auden’s eyes, who had something toprove.
If another guy had asked her to do those things, would she have said yes? If another dude had told her there was no way he could be her boyfriend but he could definitely sleep with her and order her to her knees and share her with his roommate, would she have agreed or would she have run screaming in the other direction?
The answer made her stomach hurt. Which was why she hadn’t called Auden or Lennox or taken back anything she’d said to them, no matter how much she missed them.
She’d made the right call.
“O’Neal?” Quyen’s voice was a record scratch to O’Neal’s spinning thoughts.
“Uh, sorry. What?”
“I said, thanks, I’ll take you up on the math tutoring later but not right now. I need a break.” Quyen eyed O’Neal’s laptop. “How’s the investigative reporting going?”
O’Neal set her computer aside and stretched out her legs. She’d confided in Quyen, sharing what had happened with her mom and what her project was about. She’d been nervous at first to open up about it, but Quyen had been nothing but supportive. “It’s mostly mind-numbing, often soul-crushing.”
She pushed her lip out in an empathetic pout. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” O’Neal said, bone-deep exhaustion making her feel like she was wearing a weighted blanket. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to get anything worth writing unless I talk to actual people. I’m trying to psych myself up for that.”
“Who would you talk to? The police department?” Quyen sat up, her interest obviously piqued.
“Yes, though I don’t know how excited they’d be to talk to me or how much they could even share with me.” She picked at the corner of her quilt, an internal debate waging. “I also found out that one of the guys she was…seeing at the time still lives around here.”
“Seeing? Whoa, wait, like one of the DNA matches?” Quyen asked, already shaking her head. “No way. No interviewing potential murder suspects. I do not want to be a future interviewee on a true crime doc.She really was the best freshman roommate a girl could ask for…”
O’Neal’s lips lifted at the corner. “You sound like Lennox. He said the same thing. I’m not going to put myself in danger. The guy’s not a potential suspect. He was cleared. Two of the three matches were cleared with solid alibis. The third one is still unknown. Most people think that’s the killer.” She massaged her temples, trying to chase off a headache. “But it could’ve just been another guy she’d hung out with that night. There’s still so much they don’t know.”
Quyen rubbed her arms, a frown line appearing between her brows. “Either way, if you decide to talk to him, don’t you dare go alone. I will kill you.”
She snorted. “You would kill me to save me from being killed?”
“Absolutely.”
Her concern warmed O’Neal. “I wouldn’t go by myself. And I don’t know if I have the guts to do it anyway. I want to know what happened to my mom, but I also…”
“Are afraid you’ll find out stuff you don’t want to know?”
O’Neal sighed. “Yeah. I have very few memories of my mom, and my grandparents have filled in the rest, but I just…” She paused, that familiar anxiety unfolding inside her. “I have so little of her. I don’t want to…taint that. This research is already threatening that.”
Quyen’s head tilted in sympathy. “I get that. And you know, it’s okay if you decide not to do this project or to just put together what you know and not push further. Your mental health is more important than an A on a paper.”
