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Chapter One
Harpy
“Do you believe this bullshit?” I asked my roommate as I handed her the advertisement. “Who the fuck would agree to do something like this?”
“Um…” Cass looked up at me and then showed me her wrist. She had a bright pink bracelet on it, meaning she was signed up to be interviewed.
“What!” That was not a question. It was a shout of disbelief.
“A house bunny—”
“Hoe. A house hoe. They can call it whatever cutesy title they want. You’re going to end up being passed around like a joint though I doubt you or them will last as long.” I dropped to the bed and sat there just staring at her. She was pissed at me for saying that, but we’ve been friends since elementary school. Like all the way back to bow-bows. We used to trade hair bows back then. Before my dad died. When my parents had enough money to make it look like I could afford to be friends with the people I went to school with. I could only go to school in that district because my mom worked at the elementary school. It set me on a path. One I often wish we, as a family, never started down.
I won’t trade a pencil with her if she goes off to get fucked by an entire fraternity. I check my attitude and, with some calm and less feminist righteousness rolling through, ask, “Why, Cass?”
She rolled her shoulder and shocked the hell out of me when she said, “I get to pick who, when, how. I get paid to clean the house. So what if they have a uniform that’s a magazine bunny uniform. I’d rather that than a furry bunny uniform.”
The visual cracks me up. I reach out with a hand and say, “Paw me that beer, girl.”
She tries not to laugh.
I puff out a breath and say, “Okay. I’m judging. I just…I don’t get the appeal of any of this.”
But since she knows me. Knows what I did in high school. She knows better. I don’t want to get the appeal of any of this. I have tried really hard to close the door, turn the page, and any other put the past behind me tactic that I could think of. She tilted her head and looked me over head to toe and back again. I feel entirely too visible under this scrutiny. Like she can see that I’m curious even though I hate that I feel curious.
She said, “They hire more than one. They need full-time housekeeping, and it’s the largest frat on campus, the oldest, the richest, and…” She lifted that brow, and I shook my head, no. “Popsicle is there.”
I fucking hate that nickname. It’s not mine. It’s his. He got it because of me, but it is his nickname. I was boiling at this point. Sure, I knew coming to this school meant being on the same campus as Tituss, but I hadn’t managed to see him. I really wanted to see him. I tried for calm I was slowly losing grasp of. “Why would that matter?”
It mattered a lot. It was the primary reason I was pissed about this. It wasn’t like this was something they did every year. They had this gigantic fucking property off-campus now. Some old ass estate that had at least four buildings on it. They housed them up by year so the spoiled fuckers could live like kings as if they didn’t already. Their old house on campus went to the sorority version of old money assholes. Cuntholes in this case. I sort of wished Cass had pledged but realized maybe this had been her plan all along. Get into that frat house instead.
Cass titled her head and asked, “Seriously?”
“I don’t care that he’s there. I do not care that he is in the Sophomore house, and that means if some…fucking house bunny said he can have his way with her, then he can have his way with her. I. Do. Not. Care. About. Him.” I loved him. Had since the day I met him. He was a senior, I was a junior, and we both had study hall the last hour of the school day in the learning resource center. We essentially would check in and go to one of the study rooms. Sometimes we did schoolwork, but most of the time, we just talked for that whole hour.
By the second month, we were dating, and we would sneak into a study room alone. Sometimes with other football players and we would sit at that table and touch each other, and I got off on the fact that those guys didn’t know we were doing that. I sucked in a sharp breath. Until they did know.
I would not think about that. Prom. What we did. No. Those days were behind me. I did not give a fuck about him, about them, and I was NOT that girl anymore. I wasn’t that girl before I met him. He wasn’t that guy before he met me. I don’t know how I became that girl after I met him. I just…did. We brought out the best and, according to everyone else, the worst in each other.
“Well, don’t go.” She rolled a shoulder. “I’m going. It’s good money, and it’s a good opportunity to hook up on my own terms should I choose to. Nothing said we HAVE to do anything with any of them. It’s just an option.”
“It’s prostitution,” I shouted.
“No. We don’t get paid to fuck them. We get paid to clean the house. We fuck them…if we want to and…I could think of worse guys on this campus to choose from than the wealthy, the athletic, the brilliant, the inventive—”
“No. Hey. I got it. Go ahead.” I was being bratty, and I knew it. Why did I care what she did? Cass had to marry into money. Had been groomed to do just that. “You want to go dress up like you belong in an old naughty magazine and do dishes for some frat boys, knock yourself out.”
“I won’t say yes to him.” She titled her head, and I sucked in a breath. So. Busted. She knew that was my problem with all of this. “If I even get the job. You realize I still have to interview, and a lot of girls on this campus want that job, and there are four houses.”
It was good money, and she was right. There were worse options on this campus. I was a work-study student, and I hated my job, which did not pay nearly as much as this house bunny would make. Maybe she wouldn’t get selected, but I was almost positive if Popsicle was one of the ones to interview Cass, she would get in just because he knew she was my best friend. Tituss and I hated each other now. Since he graduated, came to college, and suddenly, I wasn’t good enough for him anymore. I was a high school senior. He was a college man, on the team, a backup quarterback as a freshman, and so many other excuses, which all boiled down to him wanting to move on from that horrible situation and start a new life where he could go off and fuck other girls and I could…I sighed. I could feel the storm building inside of me. I was about to do something. I just didn’t know what.
I looked at her and said, “I know.”
Three of the girls I knew applying for one of these open positions were in my feminist lit class. It was how I found out about it in the first place. Then I saw the flyer. Then I saw the people chosen to conduct the interviews. Two from each house. Eight brothers’ total. Chi Iota Chi or XIX was rarely presented in all caps these days. It became evident that a lower-case x could turn it into a xIx which they used to symbolize a cock. Essentially, that was what the whole thing was about, even back then, when it was a perverted secret hidden behind a bunch of privileged, young white men pretending to be God-fearing Christians. If any of them believed in God or Christ, maybe they should have worried about the hidden meaning of it being Cocks in Cunts. Cunts! Fucking bastards.
At least back then, they had the decency to hide it, but the guys at this college were really fed up with all the political correctness. They wanted to be assholes and wild and run around like college animals without any more or less judgment than their sorority counterparts Omega Beta Delta ΩΒΔ which was also a whole other abbreviation than the one forged initially on the founding documents in the eighties as Only Brave Divas. Those bitches didn’t even have the decency to use Latin or Greek tradition. Only Big Dicks was the secret, not so secret, motto there. Sure, like every dude in their counter-frat, much less the rest of these frats had a big dick. According to their symbolic letters, maybe. According to statistical averages…a decent number of average cocks were in those houses.
Popsicle did not have an average cock when we were in high school. I hated thinking about it. Him. Them. But…I was. Cass left the room without another word. I dropped back on my bed and pulled out my phone. I didn’t like having these pictures. I just couldn’t get rid of them either. I scrolled all the way back to the images that I should have deleted ages ago but hadn’t. We were a good couple back then. Kenyon and Met were two more guys from the team. Met was mixed, black and white. Kenyon had something in his bloodline that bordered on exotic because he was beautiful. I never asked, and he never told, but wherever his heritage originated, the world needed more like him to look at.
