Shunned: a reverse harem bully romance (Kings of Miskatonic Prep Book 1)

by Steffanie Holmes

  For a couple of minutes, I heard nothing. Then an odd sound, like a wail. Like a person in pain.

  Summoning the courage, I peered around the door, expecting to see one of the showers leaking or something. What I didn’t expect was to see Trey Bloomberg slumped on a bench with his head in his hands and tears streaming down his cheeks.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Okay, what do I do? I’m staring at the guy who’s made my life hell. I should be dancing around him in triumph. So why do I feel like crawling into the floor?

  I could just say nothing and walk away. But that wasn’t my style.

  “Hey,” I said.

  Trey jumped, turning his body away from the door in an attempt to hide his face. “Fuck off,” he muttered. There was no fight in his voice.

  “Is that any way to talk to the only person who’s come to see if you’re okay?” I took a step toward him. “Something happened on the field today.”

  “Yeah. Fucking Quinn.” Trey laughed, the sound broken, erratic. He wrung his head in his hands. “I bet you feel fantastic, seeing me like this.”

  “Did you feel good when you destroyed my friend’s journal, or when you stuffed my locker full of meat or threw maggots in my food or tarred my hair, or called me and my friends awful names? Did you feel fantastic when you held me over the edge of a cliff? Did that make you feel like a big, awesome person?”

  Trey didn’t say anything.

  “Quinn didn’t put that powder in your shorts. I did,” I said. Fuck, where did that come from? I hadn’t intended to tell him the truth. Trey’s eyes widened. The corner of his mouth tugged up, and it almost looked like he smiled.

  “Damn, Hazy. I underestimated you.”

  Hearing Quinn’s nickname for me on Trey’s lips made it seem different somehow, affectionate. I sucked in a deep breath. Am I really doing this?

  Guess so. I crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bench. “I thought it would feel good to see you suffer. And it did, for a bit. But your dad is an even bigger bully than you are, and I can’t stand watching anyone be bullied.”

  Trey snorted. “I thought maybe this time it would be different, you know? He’d see that I was top of the school, captain of the team. I did everything he asked for, and it wasn’t enough. It will never be enough.”

  “You don’t have to measure yourself by his standards.”

  “What do you know?” Trey snapped.

  “Hey, don’t snap at me, or next time it’ll be you in Old Waldron's bed with your eyes full of itching powder.”

  As soon as I said it I wished I could take it back. Anger flashed in Trey’s eyes and I shrunk away, afraid he’d hit me. But he didn’t. He placed his head in his hands and let out a deep, racking sigh.

  “I peeked in on him on my way here,” I said. “Courtney was there and she wouldn’t let me in. They’re washing his eyes out and he’ll probably be fine, but he’s in agony. You should go. Convince them to call an ambulance.”

  “He won’t want to see me.”

  “I bet you’re wrong about that. Assholes like you and Quinn tend to stick together. I noticed you didn’t ask me why I did this. It was because you nearly killed me, in case you were wondering.”

  “You said you wanted to die. You’re…” Trey didn’t finish his sentence. His eyes locked on mine, deep pools of cool blue – no ice this time, only glittering gold crystals and deep water.

  A tap dripped.

  Trey’s lips met mine, hot and hungry. My whole body responded like I’d been plugged into a light socket. My body trembled as fire danced through my veins. His lips were warm and soft, but the kiss itself was frantic, a mash of teeth and tongues. We bled our pain into each other, relishing what we took because it made the other human, vulnerable. Trey’s vulnerability was wild, reckless, desperate for affection, for acceptance. And I gave it to him in this moment, so he would return the favor.

  Trey’s hands reached up, digging into my hair. “I feel like I’m kissing a boy with this haircut,” he murmured.

  “Are you gay for me, Bloomberg?” I teased him. He responded by kissing me harder, his teeth grazing my lip, arms wrapping around me and drawing me deeper under his spell. I reached up to touch his cheeks, feeling the wetness of his tears as his mouth drew out a roaring fire from inside me.

  What am I doing?

  This is Trey Bloomberg. We’re not supposed to be kissing. I shouldn’t be consoling him because his dad’s a bastard. I should be gloating over my revenge.

  But instead, my body melted into Trey, flame on flame, heart on heart. The more we kissed, the higher the fire raged inside me, the more of Trey I understood, the more I knew exactly why he had hated me – because when he looked at me, he saw a wildness that he longed to embrace. Trey Bloomberg was just as trapped, just as caged, as I was. The only difference was that his cage was made of gold.

  Trey’s hands skimmed my body, dragging me closer, tugging me so that I straddled him awkwardly on the bench. His finger snaked beneath the hem of my shirt, untucking it from my skirt so his thumbs grazed my skin. Just that touch made my body flare like a star gone supernova, and I moaned against his lips. Trey’s fingers trailed higher, pushing up my shirt, grazing the underside of my bra—

  “Trey? You back here?”

  Trey jerked away from me, his eyes wide, just as Ayaz came around the corner. I yanked my shirt down, my face hot.

  If Ayaz saw what we were doing, he had the fortitude not to mention it, or even to acknowledge my presence with more than a flicker of his dark eyes. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Come on, man. Quinn’s asking for us.”

  “Yeah?” Trey stood up and followed Ayaz. The door swung shut behind them, leaving me sitting in an empty boys’ locker room with the taste of Trey Bloomberg on my lips, wondering what the hell just happened.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “What’s wrong?” Greg said as I slumped down at the breakfast table. “We should be celebrating, but you’ve got your glum face on.”

  He was right. Our plan had gone off without a hitch. Quinn was recovering in the infirmary (his blindness was only temporary, but his eyes were scratched and swollen from irritants in the powder, not to mention his mysterious black eye), and Trey and Ayaz were laughingstocks. One of the yearbook photographers had snapped some pictures of them scratching themselves on the field, and someone copied them and plastered them on all the notice-boards in the dormitory. All the parents saw them as they left the school after their all-night alumni party. When I’d glanced at Andre across the table, he’d flashed me a silent, knowing smile.

  I shoved my bacon around my plate, checking around and underneath it for any maggots. My lips still tingled from Trey’s kiss. The whole thing was insane. Why did he kiss me? Why did I kiss him back? Why couldn’t I stop thinking about it, and about what might have happened if Ayaz hadn’t come in?

  I pushed my food under Andre’s nose and shoved my chair out. “I’ve got to meet Ayaz in the library. We’re working on our project.”

  Greg’s eyes widened. “Wait, Hazel—”

  But I was already halfway to the exit. As I walked past the monarch’s table, Trey’s eyes followed me, burning into my flesh. My lips ached with the shadow of his kiss. The trails his fingers laid over my skin sizzled with fresh desire.

  Beside him, Tillie Fairchild glared at me. If her eyes were daggers, I’d be skewered on the wall. Does she know? Fuck, I hope not.

  She can’t know. If she knew, I’d be lying dead in a pile of my own eviscerated organs.

  Who am I? Who is this girl who wastes her time lusting after someone else’s boyfriend, after the guy who tried to kill her? I’m sick. I need help.

  It can’t ever happen again. If Trey Bloomberg thought he was going to slum it with me while dating Tillie, he had another thing coming. I wasn’t some guy’s pity fuck or mistress. If he wanted me the way he’d made me believe he wanted me during that kiss, then he can break up with her. He won’t, so it’s over.
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br />   If only… My whole body shuddered with heat at the memory of his fingers trailing the edge of my bra. I rubbed my lips as I jogged across the quad toward the library. There was no use hoping or wishing. I must’ve imagined the connection between us. What happened in the locker room was an accident, a strange side-effect of Trey’s vulnerability over the prank I’d pulled. We weren’t attracted to each other. We didn’t even like each other.

  Right?

  Right?

  I tapped my pen against my paper and checked the clock on the library wall. Ayaz was supposed to meet me twenty minutes ago. He’d never been late before.

  He’s probably got his tongue down some girl’s throat, I thought to myself, remembering Ayaz sitting in the grotto with the two girls. I’d found out from Greg that they were juniors, and that apparently they’d both been in Ayaz’s bed that night.

  “Hey, Meat.” A muscled frame dropped into the seat across from me. But it wasn’t Ayaz. It was Quinn.

  “Shouldn’t you be in the infirmary?”

  Quinn looked awful. Both his eyes were swollen and puffy, the skin on his face red with irritation. The bruising around his black eye had darkened into splotches of color, and it looked even worse when combined with his other injuries. I was surprised he could even see enough to find his way here.

  “Yes. I should.” Quinn placed his chin in his hands and stared at me across the table, like he was trying to unpick my mind. “What are you doing in the library on a Sunday? This is the day of rest.”

  “Yes, and you should be resting. I’m studying so that I can get into a good college. Unlike some people, I’m not relying on my daddy’s purse-strings to open doors for me.”

  “Touché.” Quinn reached across the table and rubbed his finger across my knuckles. The touch sent a river of fire through my arm. “Trey tells me you’re to blame for my current condition.”

  Guilt tightened my chest. If Quinn went blind, I’d never forgive myself. I didn’t want anyone to get hurt, not like that. “I’m not. Trey was the one who dumped that powder on your head.”

  “Yeah, total dick move on his part.” Quinn kept stroking my knuckles. My hand froze, pen poised mid-stroke. I hated how much I didn’t want him to stop.

  “Are you going to be okay?”

  “They think so. Trey kept insisting they take me to a hospital, but Dad wasn’t going to have it. Finally, they agreed to bring a specialist just to shut him up. They flushed out my eyes with saline and dropped in this orange dye so they could see any particles that were left.” Quinn rubbed his eye socket and winced. “Everything’s still pretty blurry, and I may have a bit of scarring on my cornea from the fibers, but apparently, I’m going to be fine in a couple of weeks.”

  Now it was my turn to wince. “I’m so sorry, Quinn. I never meant for this to happen to you.”

  He shrugged. “Yeah well, you don’t know everything that’s going on. If you did, you still probably would have done it – under the circumstances, I’d say your actions were justified.”

  I nodded, but the guilt still twisted in my gut.

  “It’s not all bad,” Quinn added. “I get out of class for a few days and they’ve got me on these trippy painkillers. Right now I can see three of you. You are literally Hazy now.” He gave a loud laugh that sounded a bit maniacal.

  “Have you seen Ayaz?” I asked, for something else to say.

  Quinn tapped his chin. “Maybe. What’s it worth to you?”

  “Huh?”

  “I’ll tell you where he is, for a price. I don’t want much. Just a little kiss.”

  “Jesus. Forget it.”

  “No, seriously.” Quinn leaned across the table, his eyes lighting up. “I’m injured, and I think your kiss might be just what I need to cure me. Trey told me what happened in the locker room.”

  I gulped. “What did he say happened?”

  “That you two locked lips, and that it was, to quote his exact words, ‘not unpleasant’.” Quinn’s lopsided grin only made him more adorable. “One kiss from you and Trey’s forgotten all about his shitty dad, so you must be working some kind of ghetto magic on him. I could use a little bit of that. So go on, Hazy, pucker up and I’ll tell you where Ayaz has got to.”

  “Why are you bothering me? Don’t you already have a girlfriend?” I jerk my thumb toward the library door, where Courtney had just walked in. She stopped in her tracks when she saw the two of us leaning close. Her face turned stormy, and she whirled on her heel and stormed back out.

  Quinn grinned. “Just because Courtney believes she’s my girlfriend doesn’t make it so. I don’t do commitment, Hazy. But I do other things remarkably well.”

  With that, Quinn Delacorte grabbed the collar of my shirt, yanked me across the table, and pressed his lips to mine.

  My stomach leaped into my chest and fire danced through my veins. This was as hot and sensuous as our kiss in the grotto, only a hundred times more exciting because we could get caught at any moment. Quinn’s tongue slid between my teeth, expertly teasing my mouth open, demanding and inviting at the same time. Against my will, my body folded against his, pulling him closer, ready to taste more, more…

  “That’s it,” Quinn murmured. His thumb brushed my blazer, darting over my nipple. A sliver of fire drove straight through my body.

  This is crazy. I tore my lips from Quinn’s, gasping for breath. “Why did you do that?”

  Quinn tried to raise his eyebrow, but his eye was too swollen, so all he managed was a weird kind of squint. “Blame the drugs?”

  “What this about, Quinn? You already kissed me at the party. You fulfilled your part of the plan by humiliating me. Why would you kiss me again?”

  He shrugged. “I wanted to. And see, now I owe you one. Ayaz is in classroom 2F, doing a little extracurricular work for the headmistress. He must’ve forgotten to tell you.”

  I leaped to my feet and rushed to the door, desperate to get away from Quinn and all the confusing emotions swirling around my head. At least Ayaz wasn’t confusing like the other two – he made no secret of the fact he despised me. There was something to be said for consistency.

  2F? Where is 2F? I think that’s in the same wing as history class—

  I rounded the corner of the corridor and stopped dead.

  Tillie Fairchild had Loretta pinned up against a locker, her arm against Loretta’s throat. Behind her stood Courtney, her head held high, her blonde hair glinting with dappled light as she imagined herself in front of a Hollywood camera. She read dramatically from a small notebook while Loretta stared at a spot on the ceiling. Her eyes were completely blank, as if she weren’t really there.

  “… all ah want is for them to leave me alone,” Courtney cooed in a sing-song voice, affecting Loretta’s accent. “Ah don’t even want to be at this school. Ah only came because Grandma made me, because being invited to a rich white school would help her to regain face after what Mama did. But they’re never going to stop tormenting me. There’s only one escape ah can see, and it looks brighter and bright every day.”

  My heart leaped into my throat. Somehow – probably with the aid of the copy of the room key – Courtney and Tillie had got their hands on something private Loretta had written. Now they were reading it out for the whole school.

  My eyes met Loretta’s, and what I saw there sickened me even more than what the monarchs had done. Loretta looked serene, completely at peace, as if what was happening to her right now was destined to be. I saw what happened to a person after the bullying and belittling become too much – Loretta believed the lies they were telling about her. She accepted that she was nothing.

  It made me sick. It made me see red.

  “Oh, Mama!” Courtney wailed, reaching a crescendo as the students around her rolled about with laughter. “Ah wish you would talk to me. Ah wish ah could be with you right now. Why did you have to leave? There’s no point to any of this without you—”

  Courtney spun around as she read. Her eyes met mine, glinting
with triumph.

  No.

  I’m not letting this go on.

  Courtney was only doing this because of me, because she was still pissed about the party, because she realized she couldn’t hurt me the way she wanted to, so she was going after someone who she could crush completely.

  “Oh Mama, ah just want to be with you again—”

  I marched up to Courtney and snatched the book from her hands. “That doesn’t belong to you.”

  “Silly gutter whore,” she smiled. “Everything in this school belongs to me. Everything in this world belongs to me. Face it, I’m just better than you in every way. The sooner you and your pathetic little friends understand that, the better off you’ll be.”

  “Hazel,” Loretta said, her voice flat. “It’s okay. I don’t care.”

  You should care. I wanted to scream at her. You can’t just crawl into a ball and give up because of what they say.

  “We’ve all learned some very important things about our classmate, Loretta,” Courtney said sweetly, addressing the gathered students. “I know we all wish her the best for her latest endeavor. Loretta has failed at everything else in her life. Let us hope that she will find the strength to succeed at this.”

  “Kill yourself, kill yourself!” Students chanted. I grabbed Loretta under her armpits and dragged her away. Courtney’s hyena laugh echoed off the corridor.

  “That’s it,” I growled, pulling Loretta toward the faculty wing. “We’re reporting them.”

  Loretta wrenched her arm away. “No.”

  “Loretta, they are literally telling you to kill yourself. That’s beyond just normal bullying. That’s fucking abuse. The teachers have to do something about this. They have to—”