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“Oh, myGod,you’ve got to be a good luck charm or something,” Leah squealed as quietly as she could manage, but I still shushed her. “Or maybe you’re the lucky one? I don’t know. But finding a way to hook up with Dane Schwartz so soon after starting at Coldwater is truly a miracle, and I commend you. I’ve lowkey wanted that boy to notice me for like three years—even just to make fun of me a little.”
I laughed. “Trust me, you don’t want him to make fun of you.”
“Some people are into that, Jade! That’s all I’m saying.” She shrugged, and the two of us laughed together.
Our chuckle fest was interrupted, though, by the least expected of visitors joining our little lunch table. One second, Leah and I are struggling to breathe through our amusement, and the next, Dane Schwartz is pulling up a chair and sitting next to me, close enough that I nearly melted at the feeling of his warm outer thigh pressing against mine.
“How’s it hangin’, new girl?” Dane asked, only glancing at me for a second before his eyes moved to Leah. “And who’s your friend?”
“Leah,” she croaked out, and Dane nodded, smiling a little with recognition.
“Right!Right. We had drama class together a few years back, yeah?”
“Yeah.” Leah half-laughed, clearly shocked that Dane remembered her. “Yeah, intro to drama. The place where I learned I’m tragically not meant for a life on the stage.”
Dane’s laugh was warm and sweet like hot tea with honey, his demeanor holding an easy breezy air I hadn’t suspected he was capable of before this moment. “Same here, sister. I’ll just stickto reading Shakespeare on the page, the way the Bard definitely didn’t intend it.”
Leah giggled at his joke, and I flushed red when I felt his leg press more firmly into mine. Was he being nice to Leah because she was my friend? This felt like the early stages of boyfriend-hood where your prospective partner tries to cozy up to your friends.Myfriends. But I’d only ever had that experience with Owen, who’d really been trying to cozy up to my friends for nefarious purposes. What Dane was doing now felt… normal. Genuine. Friendly. That simply did not compute.
As Dane and Leah chatted, filling in the gaps that would have been left behind by my utter speechlessness, I marveled at the normalcy of this. There was no hint of flirtation in Dane’s interactions with Leah, unlike Owen, who used to make blatant eyes at my friends in front of me and then try to gaslight me into thinking I’d just imagined that because I was so insecure. I hadn’t been insecure before Owen’s scheming, though. Slowly but surely, Owen even turned all of my friends against me with his put-upon charms.
Part of me resented Owen even more because of how he’d ruined my female friendships. Cassie and Maria had been my two best friends at Worthington, and Owen had slept with both of them by the end, but not before he’d convinced them not to bother being my friend anymore even in appearance. I still missed how Cassie loved to braid my hair during class and Maria’s quirky obsession with horoscopes that always seemed weirdly accurate. But even just my brief time knowing Leah already felt like a better replacement for the friends who had so easily left me behind for a smooth-talking boy. Leah was funny, kind, and the way she easily forgave me for ditching her at Xander’s party told me she had a generous soul.
Too bad I’d built our entire friendship on lies.
“Oh, comeon.” Dane was laughing louder this time, breaking me out of my thoughts. “You don’t seem like a Kardashian kind of girl, Leah.Pleasetell me you’ve got more brains than that.”
Before I could swoop in to Leah’s rescue, follow my immediate defensiveness that arose with Dane’s sneering tone, a huge grin split Leah’s pretty face. “Listen, Schwartz, I can be smartandlove some petty drama. You think Einstein was all physics, all the time? Nuh-uh. I bet he loved to talk shit on other scientists as a hobby.”
“Touché.” Dane chortled. I felt his hand come to rest on my knee under the table, and his touch, the memory of our tryst in the pool house, filled me with fire. “We can’t all have impeccable taste in media, I guess. If you ever want some real recommendations of what to watch—or better yet, a fuckingbookto read—I’m your guy.”
Somehow, half of the lunch period had gone by. And here we all were together, having normal conversations that Dane’s snarky snobbery hadn’t even tried to ruin. It wasn’t just Dane’s warm skin practically burning a hole through the fabric of my skirt, the way I could have sworn he was inching the material slowly up my thigh, that had me feeling a little off-kilter. Somehow, this sexy, often-rude enigma of a man had revealed the side of his blunt personality that was actually kind of… funny. Endearing was too strong a word, but he definitely seemed a little more human than the guy who’d blown me off after giving me the strongest orgasm of my life.
“Well, it was nice talking to you, Dane, but I’ve actually gotta get going,” Leah suddenly said, standing up with her lunch tray in hand. “There are some yearbook pages I’m behind on, so I’m gonna head to Mr. Nelson’s room a little early. No, don’t get up! You two stay right where you are.”
The wink Leah gave me wasn’t even trying to be subtle. But before I could find a way to scold her for meddling withouttipping off Dane, she was sweeping out of the room in a puff of smoke.
Which left me and Dane alone, his hand slowly creeping up my thigh, my blood singing with desire in response.
Before I could even form a coherent thought, much less a sentence, Dane was leaning into me, pressing his mouth into my hair right by my ear. His breath against my skin gave me goosebumps. He gripped my thigh with a dark possessiveness that made me want to reenact our little scene in the pool house, cafeteria full of students be damned.
“I’ve gotta get my hands on you again,” Dane told me boldly. “That sweet pussy is too good to have just once.”
Fuck.This was so wrong, but my body didn’t care in the slightest. I wanted him to bend me over this lunch table, spank me like I’d fantasized about, and then drive his cock into me. I clenched my thighs together, which made Dane let out a gruff, amused huff.
“Meet me after school,” Dane said then. His hand inched my skirt further up my legs until his long, strong fingers were pressing into my heated skin. I knew how those fingers could make me come apart. It was getting hard to breathe, much less remind myself that I only wanted to use him for revenge.
“Where?” I rasped, not even able to spare enough inflection to sell the question. Dane pressed his smile against my neck for a brief second, the sensitive skin there practically lighting up with the too-fast touch. He whispered some instructions in my ear, the directions to the place at the back of the school grounds where I should meet him to finish what we’d started Friday night.
Then he let go of me, stood up, and the moment shattered. Clarity fell into place—or tried to through my lustful haze. Dane was gone in a flash, and I was left hot, bothered, and lying to myself that I wasn’t going to go where he sent me.
10
BRYCE
God, I really loved football more than most things, but today I just wasn’t in the fucking mood. There was nothing I wanted to do less than listen to Coach Pritchard yell until his already-red face turned puce, run boring drills, and endlessly tweak our playbook for the rapidly-approaching homecoming game. Still, it was a team sport, and I was the undisputed star of the team. So, I let my body carry me to the locker room on autopilot. The game must go on, or something.
Even though I wanted to tell myself my grumpiness was due to the gloomy weather or the pop quiz I’d failed in third period, or how they’d run out of Jell-O cups in the cafeteria line before I could snag a red one, I knew the real reason was Jade fucking Wells. The bane of my existence, if I had one of those.
