by C. Morgan
My new friend chuckled, his black brows jumping up as he looked at me. “It sounds like there’s some serious history between you two. I guess I’ll leave you to it then. I’ve got to get to Politics, which I think is across campus. Later, dude.”
He threw a hand up in a wave, already backing away from me before he turned around to stride off toward his next class. Unfortunately for me, he’d already pried open the hornets’ nest that was my history with Hadley Sage.
The last time I’d seen her, she’d made me feel weaker than I ever had before. In that moment, I’d known what it felt like to feel truly small and pathetic.
It’d been the darkest time of my life. That very morning, my dad had told me I was being transferred to a school in Hawaii. Mom had come with me, but New England had been the only home I’d ever known. Our house, my friends, and my life had all been right here in Massachusetts.
After I found out that the decision had already been made, the only person I’d wanted to see was Haddie. A girl who I’d thought of as my Haddie at the time. I’d been head over fucking heels for her, and I’d thought she felt the same way.
Nothing except for some kissing had happened between us, but the chemistry and tension had been there. We just hadn’t known what to do with it when it had started brewing as intensely as it had when we’d met at only fourteen.
Before that day, I’d thought of Haddie not only as mine, but also as one of my only real friends. She’d been one of the only people who’d known me. Not the version of me that I’d put out for the world and not the one everyone else thought they knew, but me me.
Out of everyone in my life, I’d thought that when the shit hit the fan, she’d be the one to stand tall beside me. That she’d have my back and believe me no matter what, but she hadn’t. Not even close.
It’d been my first real taste of betrayal when she’d publicly laughed at me right along with everyone else, and it was a bitterness that’d stayed with me. I’d shed many layers over the last few years since that day. I’d changed, grown, and learned, but my hatred for her hadn’t faded. I didn’t know if it ever would.
I rushed into the gym, my heart racing and my entire being hurting. Everything was going to shit.
Last night, I’d overheard Mom telling Dad that our lives were going to hell in a handbasket, and I agreed with her. The allegations against Dad were all lies. I knew they were, but no one seemed to believe us.
The cops had barged into our house during a garden party a couple of weeks ago. Since then, the only life I’d ever known had imploded.
With flashes of badges and warrants, the police had silenced my parents’ protests and they hadn’t left until they had my dad in cuffs. It’d taken us nearly a week to get him out of jail even though we had the best lawyers in town. Even once they’d released him, it hadn’t been before they’d frozen all of our assets.
We wouldn’t even be allowed to stay in our house. They said Dad had stolen millions of dollars. The papers accused him of embezzlement and called him every name in the book.
When he’d come home, I’d thought it was all over. Instead, he’d told me to pack a bag with nothing but my clothes and essentials in it. We couldn’t even afford our own plane tickets. My uncle had sprung to fly my Mom and me to Hawaii.
Apparently, he agreed with my dad that it was better for us to get away. They’d said they wanted to spare us the fallout until the dust cleared and they managed to prove it was all just a misunderstanding, but it felt like much more than that.
I’d rather have been staying. I wanted to stand by my father’s side and show the world that I supported him. But that decision had been taken out of my hands.
It felt like my heart was being ripped out of my chest whenever I thought about leaving Hadley. Dad said it would only be a few months at most, but I couldn’t leave her for that long. I wouldn’t survive it.
When I’d told Mom that, she’d called it teenage angst and told me the period of separation would be over before I knew it. It didn’t feel that way to me, though.
The plane my uncle was chartering for us had eight seats. Mom and I were only two people. I knew Haddie’s parents wouldn’t be able to afford to fly her out to see me and since my parents were newly penniless as well, I wouldn’t be able to make the trip back and forth either.
Which left us with only one option. Hadley had to come with me. She could transfer for the semester or something. Something. Anything.
When I pushed open the doors to the gym with both hands, shoving them open so hard that they bounced against the walls on the other side, all movement inside stopped. I ignored all the fucking sheep, knowing they’d be all over me again and begging for my forgiveness as soon as all this got straightened out. My sights were set on only one girl.
My girl. My friend who didn’t know yet how I felt about her. The beautiful Hadley Sage. She was just shy of a foot shorter than I was, but it only meant that she fit so damn comfortably in my arms. I’d mostly had her there when we hugged, but I was hoping that would all change soon.
In fact, I’d been working toward changing it when everything had happened. Hadley had even been my date at the garden party when my father had been arrested.
Her eyes were this incredible shade of brown, and they always melted like chocolate when they met mine. She was growing out her black hair and I loved it when she wore it loose, but I loved it just as much when she put it in a messy bun on top of her head.
Although I hadn’t asked her out yet, I’d already sworn off all other women. She was the one for me. I didn’t want anyone else.
The only body I wanted to touch these days was hers. Those soft curves haunted my dreams and every time I saw her in a bikini when we swam together at my house after our tutoring sessions, I got so hard it was painful.
She was also the only girl I really laughed with, talked to, and opened up to. My former, so-called friends had started noticing my disinterest in the other girls recently, and I hadn’t even balked before telling them that it was because she was mine.
A lot of those guys were in here now, stopping whatever they were doing to watch me as I approached Hadley. They were still watching when she ripped my fucking heart out.
“Stop talking to me, Daxton,” she said snootily. “I don’t want anything to do with you or your criminal family. Why don’t you do us all a favor and just leave? We don’t want you here, Breyer. Get the fucking hint.”
With her words still ricocheting through my head like bullets that had shredded my heart, I felt my mood plummeting as I marched into my next class. I dumped all my shit out on my desk, but I didn’t even open my books.
Spreading my legs and folding my arms, I stared off into the distance without even checking if I was in the right class. I wasn’t super interested in paying attention right now, and if I bombed this class, I could always just try again.
No one on this campus could say no to my father. Not now that I’d been proven right and every damn other asshole in my previous school had been proven wrong. Hadley included. Dad had been acquitted of all charges, but Haddie hadn’t even been tried yet.
A jury of my father’s peers had eventually found him innocent, but in her case, there would be no jury. Only the judge—me.
And since I already knew she was guilty, I hoped she knew what was coming. Lord knew, I hadn’t. Maybe it would be more fun if she didn’t either but for everything Hadley was, stupid wasn’t one of them.
She’d be watching her back, but all it meant was that I’d have to get more creative about how to go about exacting my revenge. Luckily, I didn’t mind thinking creatively. In fact, fantasies about what I might do if given the chance had become a favorite pastime of mine over the years. I’d figure it out and when I did, I was going to love watching her squirm.
Chapter 8
HADLEY
We were only half a week into classes, and I was already feeling overwhelmed by my studies. Edgewater didn’t have the reputation it did because it went
easy on its students. While it was all still introductory work, it felt more important than ever to stay on top of things.
I wasn’t the only one feeling the pressure. Ruby had also already buried herself in her textbooks, but she claimed that listening to music helped her focus. Since she was no longer only reading up on things to get ahead, she said earphones were no longer good enough.
Our dorm room was now as loud as a bar when she was there, and she refused to turn to it down or to use the earphones only for the times when I was in the room as well. While I loved music as much as the next person, it was terribly distracting to try to study with it pounding in my ears.
Eventually, I’d given up on my dorm and tucked myself away in a study nook in the library. I was still hoping that my relationship with Ruby would improve over time, but until it did, it seemed studying in my room would be impossible.
It was a strange new world I was trying to get used to. College wasn’t turning out like I thought it would, but I supposed that was the difference between fantasy and reality. It was the reality I was trying to navigate, and it was much more difficult than I’d anticipated. All the college-based rom-coms I’d watched didn’t seem to have prepared me for this at all.
Slowly but surely, I was getting into my own routine, though. It mostly consisted of classes, going to the cafeteria, and coming to the library, but I’d discovered a nice place on the lawn outside to eat my lunch in the sun.
Tucking my hair behind my ear after it fell free, I was bent over my notes when someone came to sit on the edge of my table. His ass half covered my notebook, and the sight of the paper crumpling beneath the denim of his dark-wash jeans made my stomach turn.
“What are you doing here, Hadley?” Daxton’s rich, smooth voice met my ears.
I lifted my gaze to his, breathing in quietly but deeply as I tried to push past my irritation about what his butt was doing to my perfect, neat notes. On their way up, my eyes skimmed past his T-shirt-clad torso and his golden brown, well-defined arms until they hit his narrowed blue ones.
“I’m studying,” I said calmly, sending a pointed glance at our surroundings. “It’s what people usually do in libraries. You know, unless they only come in here to bother other students.”
He chuckled, but there was more menace than humor in the sound. Leaning forward slightly, he tilted his head to get a look at my class schedule which was pasted inside my open diary. “It’s good to see you haven’t lost your bite, even if you are a sheep.”
I sat back in my chair to put some distance between us when he didn’t move. As he’d leaned forward, his face had come so close to mine that I’d caught the faint scent of his minty breath when he spoke.
“How have you been, Dax?” I asked, taking in the sweep of his blond hair over his forehead and the angles of his strong jaw.
He’d even grown into his nose since I’d seen him last. It was straight as an arrow and pointed down at his perfectly oval mouth. His lips were full and looked soft while his cheeks were clean shaven and topped by cheekbones that could cut glass.
How many hours have I spent cataloging each and every detail of that face? Too many. That was for sure. And yet, while his features remained familiar despite how much they’d matured, the open hostility on his face was as unfamiliar as it was frightening.
I’d known he had a nasty streak, sure, but this was something else. Something that looked suspiciously like pure hatred.
When our eyes met, there was a cool glint in his as he smirked at me. “I’ve been okay. Better for having learned that people can’t be trusted. Back to my earlier question. What’s a little fish like you doing in a pond like this, huh? Whose dick did you suck to get in?”
While he spoke, he picked up another notebook that was lying on one of my textbooks and paged through it. It was my Business 101 notebook, and he nodded slowly as he flicked through the pages.
My fingers twitched with the urge to swipe it back from him, but I didn’t act on it. If he wanted to page through my notes, so be it. Even if he was creating crinkles in the paper, but it could’ve been much worse.
A thousand responses to his comments zipped through my head. There were so many things I could say to every word he’d said, but I focused on the part about him having learned not to trust people. That was what all this was about, after all.
“I’m sorry about what I did, Dax,” I said after considering it for a moment.
The other night, I’d intervened with that security guard in the hopes that it would make us even and also because I hadn’t wanted to see him hurt, but I’d never actually apologized for my actions.
His eyes flashed and his nostrils flared. When he didn’t interrupt me, I took it as my cue to continue. “I know you must hate me for how I treated you in high school. There’s no excuse for what I did.”
“You’re damn right about that,” he muttered as he folded his arms, but I wasn’t done yet.
Waiting for him to look at me again, I locked my gaze on his and pushed ahead. “I wish I could go back and change what I said to you. It’s something I still feel terrible about. I know that I should’ve stood by you. It was just so much easier to do what everyone else was doing.”
I exhaled quietly, reaching deep within me to pull out the admission I knew I needed to make. “I didn’t have the courage to stand apart from the crowd like you did. It took me a long time to realize that I acted like a coward. I’m not going to try to make excuses, but I’ve been wanting to apologize ever since.”
For a minute after I stopped speaking, he just stared at me. Right into my eyes. It was a little disarming, but I held his gaze.
There was a moment when I thought that he was going to accept my apology. Seconds when his eyes softened like they used to when he looked at me, but then it was like I watched a heavy metal gate slam shut over those emotions.
As the frost settled in his gaze again, he laughed. “You’ve got that right. You are a coward and you should’ve stood by me.”
The way he looked at me stung. I’d apologized. I didn’t know what else he could possibly want from me, but he was staying put.
“Fine,” I said. “Will you leave me alone now? You got what you wanted from me, right? I said I was sorry, and that’s all there is.”
His tongue came out to swipe across his lips, but it was predatory gesture as opposed to a seductive one. When he shook his head, I could almost see the gears in his head turning.
He leaned forward again, bracing his palms on my table as his eyes bored into mine. To an outsider, it might’ve looked like he was about to kiss me or gently trail his fingers over my cheek, but that was not what was going on here.
“Mean girls like you don’t get off the hook so easily,” he said, his voice quiet but harsh. “You don’t deserve to be here, Hadley. I have no idea how you got here, but someone like you doesn’t belong among the elite. It’s not just because you’re poor. It’s because you’re you. I’m part of the elite. This is my school, not yours, and I’m going to make sure you know it.”
Tears jumped to my eyes, but I held them back. He’d already seen me teary once. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction again.
“What happened to you in the last few years to make you so cruel?” I whispered, my gaze searching his. “You never used to be like this, Dax. What happened?”
His eyes narrowed again and he leaned in more. So close that this time, the tip of his nose was practically touching mine. “You happened.”
Lips twisting in disgust, he sat back again and reached for my Business 101 notebook. He flicked through it again, then lifted all the pages with notes written on them and clutched them in his fist.
“I didn’t really pay enough attention in this class.,” he said with a hint of glee in his tone. “I was too busy looking at the back of your head and wondering what the fuck you were doing here. I could really use some notes.”
With a low rip, he tore the pages out of my notebook. My heart sank and anger flared up in my
stomach. “You can’t have those, Dax. If you really want to, you can copy them, but that’s only because I’m trying real hard to be the bigger person here.”
He snorted, then pushed himself up off the table and stuffed the notes into his back pocket. “Nah. I’ve got them now, so I don’t need to copy them. Thanks, mean girl. I guess I’ll be seeing you around. Until you come to your senses and drop out, that is.”
With one last cold smile my way, he turned and walked toward a cluster of tables in the corner where some of the frat guys had taken up residence. When he reached them, he was greeted by high-fives and grins before he dropped down in one of the chairs.
My blood simmered, but marching over there and insisting that he return my notes wouldn’t end well for me. Those guys might not know me, but I had no doubt that they’d jump to his aid without any explanation required.
Besides, I had no desire to add any fuel to his fire. If everything went well, it would burn itself out when he got bored. If not, well, then I’d have to come up with a plan when the time came.
For now, I picked up the now empty Business 101 notebook and my pen. I’d just worked over those notes again this morning. With any luck, I’d be able to remember the most important parts with the help of my textbook.
Dax had caught me by surprise this time, but I wouldn’t let it happen again. Just because I had no interest in retaliation or fueling the fire didn’t mean I would let him walk all over me. I’d get those notes back, too. I just had to be smart about it.
Chapter 9
DAXTON
“You ready to go?” Ryker yelled from the hallway, hammering on my door as he walked by from his room next door.
“Be there in a minute,” I replied, running my hands through my hair and giving myself a final onceover in the full-length mirror mounted against my wardrobe.
With our first week of classes over and done with, a few of my new buddies and I were heading out. It was Saturday night, and while we had plans to join up with the rest of the house at a sorority party later, we were hitting up a local bar for wings, burgers, darts, and pool first.