Kass continued to whisper to me about how awesome things were, how great James was, and how happy she was after spending time with him. I listened patiently and the urge to tell her what was going on in my love life filled me. But it wasn’t an option. After all, Derek, Kass's brother, was supposed to be my future love life now.
So I kept quiet and nodded, asking questions encouraging her to go on about her own dates with James.
Danny shushed us a couple of times, but it was good naturedly. She was pretty engrossed in the movie, but I was pretty sure she had already seen it, so I doubted it was a big deal or anything.
There was some screaming from the movie as one of the pretty, dumb girls in the film died. Kass paused in her recount of her dreamy date to look over at the screen. She winced as the girl sputtered her last few breaths. There was a lot of unnecessary blood, I thought, and it was pretty dumb seeing as how her boyfriend was just on the other side of the staircase.
I looked over at Mason. “Where’s Mark?” I asked conversationally, reaching down to take a hand full of popcorn from Danny and popping it into my mouth. I chewed and added, “I thought he was coming?”
Mason nodded, glancing over at me. “Yeah, he is. He texted me and said he’d be a little late, but that he’s definitely going to be here.” He jerked his thumb towards the kitchen. “Especially since there’s some left over beer from the other night.”
He meant one of his frat brother’s parties. They had them often enough—they were a frat after all—but Mason mostly just went to those things because he was a brother and because of his actual brother. Mark could be a bit of a wild child and Mason was there to rein him in when things got hairy.
I rolled my eyes and he grinned.
“Has he ever considered what the world would be like as a sober person?” I asked jokingly. Mark really wasn’t that bad, but we gave him a lot of hell over it.
Mason shrugged. “He wouldn’t even know what to do with a world that didn’t spin around him.”
We fell silent then and turned our attention back to the movie. More people were dying, senselessly it seemed, and I think I missed the reason behind the massacre. I was leaning over, about to ask what the hell was going on and why that couple was having sex while their friends were dying all around them when I heard the door open.
Mason turned around in his seat to see who it was. When he figured it out, he made a frustrated sound.
“Jeez, Mark,” Mason said, irritation clear in his tone.
I turned my head to look at Mason. His expression was a mixture of irritation and exasperation.
“I told you. Only people we know. Don’t you ever listen?”
“I do know her,” Mark answered cheekily and I had a feeling he meant biblically. “Her name’s Miranda and she’s a freshman.”
I froze in my seat, popcorn half way up to my mouth. My eyes glazed over and I didn’t even see the movie that was playing before me, even though I knew that it was basically the goriest part of the movie.
It can’t be, I thought. Miranda was a plenty popular name, right? And there were probably a lot of freshman Mirandas around, right?
It couldn’t be her.
But then she spoke and I knew that no matter how much I hoped and wished, it was her. Miranda Ansell.
“Hi, sorry to just barge in, but I’m kind of new here.” Her voice was happier than it had been the other day as she spoke to me and I wondered if she hadn’t yet realized that I was here.
Quick, worthless plans of escape raced through my mind. I could sneak out, maybe through the back door or something. Or maybe, while no one was looking, I could head to the kitchen and when everyone had settled back down for the movie, I could sneak out the front door.
Even as I came up with the plans, I knew it was hopeless. I wasn’t getting out of here without her noticing me.
“It’s nice to meet you,” Kass said in a friendly tone, moving so that she could shake a long, slender hand that was pale and meatless. “And this is my roommate, Addy.”
I tensed up, but acknowledged that I would have to bite the bullet. Getting up from my seat on the couch, I turned to face her, bracing for impact. “Addy, eh?” she commented, her smile turning sly. “Is that what you’re going by now?”
Everyone in the room seemed to freeze suddenly, like the air had been sucked out of the room and everyone was holding their breath, waiting for it to come back.
At least, that’s what it felt like to me.
Then the moment passed and Kass looked at me quizzically. “You two know each other?”
“Oh, sure,” Miranda said. “We go way back, right, Ri?”
The more Miranda spoke, the more Kass looked confused—and a little concerned. I could tell that she didn’t like Miranda, and I knew it was because of the underlying tension that she brought to the room. No one knew exactly what her problem was, but they knew it was with me.
“Yeah,” I managed to get out. “I went to high school with her sister.”
The mention of Beck caused Miranda to tense and I thought for a moment that this was it. She was going to spill the beans, and I was going to have to face all of my friends about the person I used to be.
But she didn’t.
Instead, she just smiled and said, “Yeah. Those were wild times, weren’t they?” She glanced around the frat house and gave each of us a once over. “This is a little tame for you, isn’t it?”
“What are you talking about?” Kass asked, clearly confused and who could blame her? Everyone knew me as the good girl, the class act. I was the girl who went to bed early unless she was up studying late and who always said no to parties, because they weren’t her thing.
It was understandable that she would be a little confused about what Miranda was getting at. The girl she remembered was completely different than the one Kass knew.
Miranda opened her mouth to answer, but a ringing stopped her. She dug into her pocket quickly, frantically. Pulling out her phone, she answered it immediately, cupping her free hand around the mouth piece and turning away from us. Whoever she was talking to, she definitely didn’t want us all listening in.
As she found a place to stand in the hall and whisper furtively into her phone, Kass turned to me. “Ri?” she asked. “Who the hell is this girl?” This question was half directed towards me and half towards Mark.
He shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. “I met her on the quad. She was looking at sororities and my frat had a booth, so I encouraged her towards our sister house. We got to talking and when I told her that I was having a party with my brother, a get together with some friends, she asked if she could come. I didn’t think it would be that big of a deal.” He glanced over at her before looking back at me instead of Kass. “I had no idea you guys already… knew each other.”
He looked uncomfortable and I couldn’t help but wonder if he hadn’t had a little fun with her before taking her here tonight. It seemed weird to me that she might even be having sex. She was Beck’s little sister and I just remembered that dorky girl with the braces who followed us around everywhere.
But clearly she had changed a lot since then.
I looked over at her. “We haven’t really talked in years.”
Before anyone could say anything else or ask more questions, Miranda rejoined us. She snuggled up close to Mark and offered all of us a wide smile. It was fake—I thought, though I couldn’t be sure—and it seemed mostly directed at me.
She leaned up and whispered something into Mark’s ear. He smirked and nodded his head, then the two of us said good bye. They disappeared into the kitchen, leaving the rest of us silent in their wake. We all listened to the fridge open and the giggling start. Then there were footsteps on the stairs and the door shut.
I couldn’t believe that this was Beck’s little sister. She was so different, so opposite from how I remembered her… How could someone change so much?
When the sounds had mostly stopped—other than the screaming from
the horror movie—Kass rounded on me again. “Okay, what the hell?” she demanded. “Who is that bitch and how do you know her?”
I shrunk from her. “She’s just someone I knew a long time ago,” I hedged. “She’s the sister of a friend of mine.” I didn’t elaborate more than that and Kass didn’t push, though I knew she wanted to.
Her eyes narrowed and I could tell that questions were burning inside her. I thought maybe it was the present company that kept her silent, but she wanted to have this discussion with me. Desperately.
She wanted to know who Miranda was.
Chapter 4
“Are you excited?” Kass asked me, her grin wide across her face full of sparkling with teeth.
We were sitting in the living room at home, both of our sets of school books taking over most of the floor, table, and some of the couch. She had a big test coming up in one of her classes.
I blanked for a moment. What was there to be excited for, I couldn’t help but wondering? After the destruction that had been Mason’s party, I didn’t think it was possible to be excited for anything. Everything in my life was falling apart it seemed and I couldn’t think of a single thing that I was looking forward to. “What?” I asked dumbly.
She rolled her brown eyes at me. “For your date remember?”
I blinked at her once, surprised. Date? It took me a moment, but when I remembered, I cringed inside. My date with Derek. Kass’s attractive, premed, singer brother who asked me out the first night we met. Which just so happened to be the first night I slept with Logan.
Which I had definitely not mentioned to Kass. Or anyone else for that matter. And I definitely didn’t intend to. The whole thing was such a mess and I didn’t want anyone to know what was going on. And not just because it was all just a huge mistake. If Kass knew that I had slept with another guy… lost my virginity to him when I was just starting things up with her brother, well, I knew how she would react to that.
She’d be furious. And I would have no defense, because she had every right to be mad over it. I was basically cheating on her brother before we were even anything.
Or was I?
Forcing a smile, I said, “Oh, that?” I gave a laugh that I hoped wasn’t too fake or too nervous. “I just figured you wouldn’t really want to talk about it, you know? I didn’t want things to be weird.”
Right. Because things weren’t weird right now as I lied through my teeth.
She grabbed my shoulder and yanked me closer until we bumped together. Her eyes were glittering with excitement and I realized that this was really important to her—and that no matter what, I could never tell her about Logan.
Good, I thought. This was one more reason to keep me as far from him as possible.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she told me. “I want all the juicy details!” She paused a moment, thought about it, then made a face. “Okay, not all the juicy details. Just the cutesy stuff. And if you guys do the deed, kindly keep it to yourself because I don’t want to know any of the weird bedroom things my brother is into.”
“Kass!” I said, widening my eyes to tell her that she had definitely crossed some sort of boundary.
“What? I’m just saying that I don’t want to know, so that there’s no weirdness.” She winked at me and laughed.
I laughed, too. She was excited and now that I stopped and really considered Derek, why shouldn’t I be, too? Derek and I weren’t anything just yet, so my tryst with Logan didn’t apply, right? It was a one time mistake that I needed to get out of my system, because Derek was the person I was supposed to be going for.
He was the guy for me, right?
I considered his dark eyes and his easy smile. He was confident, but not cocky, with a gentle, sweet nature that was all about being a good guy. Wasn’t he everything I was looking for and then some?
I decided he was the kind of guy I could get used to and forcibly shoved the image of Logan’s scarred, tattooed body from my mind.
That chapter of my life was over and a new one was starting. I was okay with that.
We went back to studying for a moment. I tried to focus on business ethics, working on the paper that was coming up for class. I had a killer topic, but it was hard to gauge how the teacher was going to like it.
“Have you seen that Logan guy lately?” Kass asked me.
She was trying to sound casual, I could tell, but even the mention of Logan set me on edge. I jerked my head up to look at her, eyes wide. Did she know I had slept with him?
But she was looking down at her book, going over some lines and highlighting them with her neon pink pen. She was trying so hard to be casual that it was incredibly unconvincing, but it did put me at ease, because at least if she knew about me and Logan she would be screaming at me, not trying to have a calm conversation. I knew that much at least.
“Um, no,” I lied, looking back down at my book. I couldn’t focus on the words. They were all meaningless jibber to me, but I was trying to keep as cool as she was trying to keep, and I thought maybe if we both just focused on pretending to not care about the conversation, everything would be fine.
It was probably a plan born to fail.
“Oh,” she said, still in that nonchalant, no big deal tone of hers. “I just thought maybe he was still bugging you.”
I shook my head, though I knew she probably wasn’t looking at me. Like me, she was likely still looking down at her book not reading a god damned thing.
“No,” I said, my voice strained. “I haven’t really seen him.” I paused, glancing over at her. She didn’t seem all that interested… “Well, I mean, I saw him the other day. In the hall. He was talking to some girl.”
I was proud to say that my voice stayed even and unemotional as I said some girl. Even though it irritated the hell out of me. Her stupid face popped into my head, all made up and perky and popping pink bubble gum. She was a poster child for dumb blonde.
And here I thought Logan had better taste than that, but apparently he was just after anything with tits.
I tried not to be angry, after all, what did I care right? But it was hard. I wanted to yell at him that he was stupid and a jerk and how could he after the other night?
“Good then,” Kass answered, causing me to jerk my head up to look at her in disbelief. What was good about this exactly? “If he’s got someone else on his mind, then he won’t be bothering you,” she continued, oblivious to my reaction. “And I hope it’s some trailer trashy slut,” she added. “That’s way more his speed.”
“Mason said he wasn’t as bad as he seems,” I blurted in Logan’s defense before I even considered what I was saying.
This made Kass look up at me. She narrowed her eyes suspiciously, searching my face for clues as to why I said that. I did my best to keep my face neutral and uninvested. “Tell that to Lexie,” she retorted. “Lexie says he’s a total animal and a jerk to boot. Treated her like shit, and she definitely wasn’t the first one he treated that way.”
I couldn’t help frowning at her—or correcting her. “Lexie’s full of it,” I said dismissively. “You know how she is. She sleeps with some random guy and suddenly it’s love. Then when he drops her like a sack of hot potatoes, she gets all offended and says that he’s a total dick.”
“Yeah, but fact is whoever she says it about does sleep with her and dump her,” Kass pointed out in counter point and it was hard to argue that. “Which does make him a dick.”
I shrugged. “Yeah, but it kinda makes her a little crazy, too,” I told her. I’d actually had a lot of time to work this all out in my head. If Logan had actually slept with Lexie—which I was convinced now that he hadn’t—then it was hypocritical to think more highly of Lexie, who clearly threw herself at him (he who was a complete stranger at the time), and to damn Logan for being a dog. It was pretty hard to accuse him of taking advantage of her when it was clear that Lexie was interested in sleeping with someone she’d only just met.
Kass was staring at me now, disbelief
written across her face. She even looked a little annoyed that I was defending him. “How do you figure?” she demanded.
“Well, I mean, who sleeps with some random guy she doesn’t even know and expects to be treated like a princess? Was she really expecting it to be eternal love?”
Kass frowned, thinking about it. I don’t think she liked my rational defense. She wanted to hate Logan—I just wasn’t entirely sure why.
“Okay, so Lexie’s a slut. We knew that already,” she conceded. “It’s not like it’s a stretch, but still. He slept with her and didn’t expect it to go anywhere.”
I held up my hands to say alright. “I’m just saying, I don’t think it’s fair to judge him by one night with a crazy girl.”
We fell silent after that, turning back to our respective books. I don’t think Kass was very happy with me, but I couldn’t just let her badmouth Logan like that. We were over and he’d clearly moved on and maybe he was exactly the kind of animal she said he was… but that night in my room, I’d seen the scars on his body. I’d felt the trembling in his hands as he tried to believe that he wasn’t like his father.
I couldn’t tell her all of that—I couldn’t tell her any of that—but I knew that he hadn’t been faking it. No matter what little bimbo he was with now, he’d been real with me. I had to believe that.
Later that day, I sat at a coffee shop. There was free wifi and great coffee, so it was a nice place to study if I was tired of the library. It was especially true when I needed to be somewhere that people weren’t going to look for me. Most people thought I couldn’t exist beyond the library or my room or class. But I actually thrived on coffee.
Talk about the stereotypical college student.
I was making progress on my paper, mostly because I was so determined to think of anything but Logan or Miranda or what Kass said about Logan. Working on academics was strangely soothing to me. It used to be that I had to work and struggle to force myself to be a diligent student, but the more I worked on it, the more it became second nature.
Wrecked Book 3 Page 3