James Games

by Rose, L. A.

  “I’m sorry. This is so weird.” I grip my tea mug tightly. “I didn’t mean to put you in this situation.”

  He raises an eyebrow. “You didn’t put me in any situation.”

  “I mean, we’ve had sex twice, but…” There. I said it. The quiet thing that’s been buzzing around us all night, even though nobody’s acknowledged it. He grips his tea mug tighter, like he’d been hoping I wouldn’t.

  “I’m sorry about that,” he says tightly. “The second time especially. I hope—I hope that wasn’t too sudden for you. Especially after what that bastard did, I can’t help but worry I was like him—”

  “No!” I jump off my stool and stand, overwhelmed with the need to punch that very concept out of existence. “No. What you did what nothing like that he did. I wanted that. God, I wanted it.”

  I look him dead in the eyes.

  He laughs a bit and rubs his forehead. “I’ve never met a girl who could say that so straightforwardly. It’s a little intimidating.”

  “You want to talk intimidating? Jesus, a picture of your face is under the dictionary definition of intimidating.”

  “That so?” He tilts his head curiously. “I didn’t get the impression you were intimidated by me.”

  “The more intimidated by someone I am, the more aggressively I act around them. It’s kind of how my brain works.”

  “I must have been scaring the shit out of you, then.”

  I grin. He’s putting me at ease, even though I still feel somewhat sick to my stomach. What happened with Damien is starting to seem more and more like a bad drunk dream.

  He continues, “I am sorry about those two times, though—”

  “The next time the ice cream truck hands me a giant caramel smoothie for free I’ll make sure he apologizes, too.”

  His lips twitch. “I just mean that I should have communicated more. Gotten to know you first. The truth is—”

  “The truth?” I press.

  He circles the kitchen counter and puts his mug in the sink, allowing me a full view of his smooth, toned back, his tanned skin and the slight shifting of his hipbones. After what happened, I’m still resolutely not in the mood, but that doesn’t stop me from staring. Staring at a shirtless James Reid is like closing your eyes when you sneeze. If you’re human and if you have eyeballs, you can’t help it.

  “I’ve never seen someone and immediately wanted them the way I wanted you,” he says in a low, faraway voice. “It was like being put under the influence of some experimental drug. My whole body reacted. It swept me up.”

  “Huh.” Good to know I’m not alone in that. “I guess I thought you were one of those ‘you see what you want and you take it’ alpha male types.”

  “Well,” he says, looking sideways at me, “I won’t disabuse you of that notion entirely.”

  It’s a testament to what a gross sleazeball Damien is that my uterus doesn’t combust on the spot.

  “But I’m usually careful about not sleeping with UCSD girls. I go off campus—to dark clubs, with older women less likely to recognize my face. The mask-themed concert was perfect, even if there was a danger of running into someone from the school. I guess I considered you might be someone from UCSD, but the functioning part of my brain was overruled that night.”

  I remember the way I ground my hips into his. Fair enough.

  “The next day I saw you getting lunch at the dining hall. I asked around. A lot of people know you, even though you’ve only been here three weeks. Not all of them had nice things to say.”

  “Good. That would be boring as hell if they did.”

  “Someone mentioned you were in that Philosophy class, which I’d been taking as an independent study. I do that a lot. I find it less of an ordeal than actually going to class. But when I heard you were in it, I got curious and decided to attend for once.”

  “Ah, right. Where I found out that you’re a nihilist.” I finish my tea and he refills it.

  “That was enough to make you hate me, apparently.”

  “Well, no.” I bump my feet against the back of the stool. “I’m sorry for being so snappy. I’d heard all about this James Reid guy and hated the idea of him. My pride didn’t want to anyone to think of me as just another girl drooling over him. So when I found out hooked up with you already, I hated you even more. Without even knowing you. That was pretty dumb.”

  “Maybe we should be formally introduced.” He puts out his hand. “I’m James Reid. Nice to meet you.”

  “Fiona Arlett. A pleasure.” I take his hand and shake it daintily, like a woman in a Jane Austen book. His hand is warm and solid. “James Reid, can I ask you something?”

  “I guess you’ve earned that.”

  “Why did you agree to the terms of the Games—you know, to take the winner out on a date? Seems like kind of a pain.”

  “I’ve known Brooklyn for a long time. I owed her a favor,” he says.

  “What? Seriously? Where did you meet her? What kind of favor?”

  He takes a long draught of tea, and it’s a few seconds before I realize I’m not going to get an answer. Finally he says, “You’re probably exhausted. I have a pullout couch.”

  As he says it, I realize how true it is. Even my bones are yawning. I want to curl up inside him and sleep forever.

  He sets up the bed for me, with fresh sheets and a feather pillow. Maybe it’s not the greatest idea in the world to sleep here, but I’m not known for having the greatest ideas in the world. And despite the fact that I’m supposedly his new drug, he hasn’t made a single move on me tonight, which moves him up a few pages in my book.

  After a while alone in the dark, though, with the unfamiliar shapes of someone else’s living room all around me, the badness starts to cluster back in. Damien’s weight on top of me. I draw myself in closer, compacting my arms and legs to my body, but I can’t escape the sensation. There’s a new danger, a new dark side to the world that I wasn’t aware of yesterday.

  There’s no way I’m getting to sleep tonight.

  When a shadow steps back into the room, I nearly pee my pants, but then my eyes adjust and it’s James, carrying an e-reader. “I can’t sleep,” he says. “Do you mind if I sit in the corner and read for a while? I’ll keep the light down low.”

  “It’s your house,” I say, letting out a long breath.

  He settles into an armchair in the corner, his features barely lit up by the dull glow of the screen. I didn’t realize how much I needed someone there until I feel all my muscles un-knotting. Again, he’s displayed that uncanny ability to understand me without a word passing from my lips.

  “James?” I whisper, after a few minutes.

  “Yeah?”

  “I really am sorry. I mean, I went to a freaking party naked, what did I expect—”

  “No,” he says, his tone hard. “Don’t. What happened wasn’t your fault.”

  “But—”

  “It wasn’t. No matter what you’re wearing, or not wearing, that’s not giving someone permission to attack you. What he did was on his shoulders. No one else’s.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  “No one ever does.” He returns to his book. I fall asleep with my face angled toward his silhouette.

  And when I wake up in the morning, he’s still there, his arm dangling over the side of the chair and the deep peace of sleep on his face.

  ~10~

  “Fiona! Jesus Christ, there you are!”

  I open the door to my dorm room and am immediately mauled by my roommate. She’s practically hissing, her claws out and her face projecting even more murderous beauty than normal. “You went off in James Reid’s arms and I had no idea what happened to you. Damien’s in the hospital and you vanished. I texted you seventy-two times.”

  I take out my phone and check. “Seventy-three, actually.”

  She growls like my cat used to when I was nine years old and dropped him down the laundry chute.

  “Hey!” I hold up my h
ands. With the cat, this had just resulted in me getting clawed-up hands, but it’s worth a shot. “I’m sorry. Don’t scratch me.”

  “I’m going to do a hell of a lot worse than scratch you.” She moves forward, and I wince, expecting to be knocked out and later used in a pagan sacrifice, but instead she yanks me into a sudden and distinctly non-Wiccan hug.

  “I was really worried about you,” she says shortly, releasing me and taking an awkward step back.

  I beam. “Iris, this isn’t like you. Does this mean we’ll be watching My Little Pony together and composing songs about the power of friendship?”

  “Freaking out because my roommate was kidnapped by a psychopath isn’t the same as watching to watch shows about ponies. Damien looked like he got hit by a truck. I thought James snapped and took you off to his murder dungeon. I can’t believe I thought that violent jerk was cute.”

  “Damien is a shitbagel who deserved every punch he got,” I say fiercely. “He attacked me.”

  “Wait, what?” All the color drains from Iris’s already-pale skin. “What the fuck. Are you okay? What happened?”

  “I’m all right.” I force a smile. “I guess James was the only one who heard me yelling. He kicked the door down and beat the crap out of Damien. Without him…”

  I don’t want to think about without him.

  Iris takes three steps backward into the room and collapses onto her bed. Comforting people isn’t really her forte. I put a hand on her shoulder. “I’m all right. He didn’t hurt me. And according to Brooklyn, Damien won’t be going to UCSD anymore. I stayed at James’s last night and he gave me a ride here.”

  “You stayed at James’s?” Her eyes travel over the shirt of his and the sweatpants that I borrowed, the string pulled as tight as it would go across my hips to keep them from falling down.

  “I slept on the couch. I wasn’t really in the mood for more. You can imagine why.”

  “Okay.” Iris sighs and stares at me like she’s searching for symptoms of something. I try to look fine. “But you have to tell me where you’re going next time you disappear from a party. Otherwise my head goes to a bad place.”

  “I promise I will. I didn’t mean to make you worry.”

  “You’re sure you’re all right?”

  “Totally! It takes more than a drunk frat boy to get me down.”

  Which is true. He didn’t hurt me. I’m Fiona Arlett and I would never let someone like him change me.

  Right?

  The concerned slant doesn’t disappear from Iris’s eyes, though it’s joined now by guilt. “I should tell you what everyone’s saying, though.”

  “What everyone’s saying?” I echo, a bad feeling sprouting in my chest.

  “You’re not going to like it.”

  “I don’t actually give a shit. I’m just asking out of curiosity.”

  “Well, they’re saying that you invited both James and Damien upstairs and told them whoever beat the other in a fight got to have sex with you.”

  “What?”

  “Ow.” Iris leans away from me. “I don’t have the money for eardrum surgery, okay, miss doesn’t-give-a-shit?”

  Now it’s my turn to collapse on my bed. “So everyone in Phi Delta Chi thinks I broke the first rule of the Games. Not only that, they think I broke it in the most psychopathic way possible.”

  “It’s more like the whole campus, not just Phi Delta Chi,” says Iris.

  “Wow, thanks. Why don’t you just hang your therapist certification on the wall.”

  “I’m not your therapist. And you shouldn’t need one. We’ll set everyone straight, now that I know what actually happened.”

  “You didn’t believe them, did you?” I glower at her.

  “I didn’t believe you told them to fight, but the way you whispered to James just before dragging Damien upstairs…it was a little suspicious. I thought maybe you were proposing a three-way or something.” She pauses. “Stop glaring at me! Don’t pretend you’re not the kind of crazy bitch who would give that a shot.”

  A three-way with James and some equally handsome male…Leonardo DiCaprio, possibly…no, Fiona, get that thought out of your head. It’s not like James has Leo on speed-dial. Probably. “Look, I have to go to class.”

  “Okay. Be careful, Fiona.”

  “Come on,” I laugh. “It’s been like what, a day? I’m sure the rumor hasn’t spread that far.”

  But several dirty looks I get on my way to the academic complex seem to prove me wrong. I’m glared at even from a few people I’ve never met before. UCSD is in love with James Reid, and now I’m the girl who supposedly threw him in some screwed-up sexual pit fight.

  Oddly enough, I prefer that to the girl who went naked to a party and got attacked.

  I’m almost to the building when I’m ambushed by my favorite maniac. Sigrid sinks her claws into my shoulder with the apparent intention of shearing my flesh from my bones.

  “Ow. Who replaced your fingernails with knives, Kanye West’s dentist?” I complain.

  Her grip tightens. “You’re awfully jokey for someone who supposedly got assaulted last night.”

  “It was attempted assault. And there’s nothing supposed about it.” I shake her off and close my eyes, squinching up my forehead and concentrating.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m seeing if I can psychically command a bird to come poop on your head, like one of those animal-themed superheroes.”

  She jabs me in the forehead so that I’m forced to open my eyes. When I do, I wish I hadn’t. She’s up in my face, an actual vein popping cartoonishly above her eyebrow. “Brooklyn vouched for you. That’s the only, and I mean the only, reason you are not six feet underground right now. If I see you so much as sneeze in James’s direction again, I’ll make you wish you’d never been born.”

  “I haven’t sneezed in his direction yet.”

  “What?”

  “You said again. That implies I sneezed in his direction before. Although I might have, when I was like three or something—I’m sure at some point in my life I sneezed southwest and he was southwest. Also, what about coughing? Or breathing? If you expect me to follow directions you have to be thorough.”

  “Are you trying to piss me off?”

  “I prefer the term succeeding.”

  “Watch your back, Fiona Arlett,” she spits in my face before stalking off.

  I glance over my shoulder to make sure things are all right back there before continuing. Instead of feeling jaunty, though, the way I normally do after antagonizing Sigrid, I’m just exhausted. I want to go back to bed forever.

  That desire increases by fifteen hundred percent as soon as I step into the Philosophy room. Every head swivels toward me at once. It’s like walking into a room full of owls. Bitchy owls who start whispering to each other, squinting at me like I personally insulted their owl grandmothers.

  I can feel James’s presence in the back of the room, but I can’t quite look at him. I’m not sure how to reconcile my antagonistic hook-up partner with the tender protector of last night. I head toward my usual chair, but the girl next to it throws her bag on the seat.

  “Taken,” she sneers.

  I simply veer toward the next available seat, too tired to argue, but someone else wraps her ankle around the chair and pulls it toward her. “Why don’t you go sit with your boyfriend.”

  I know who she means. She thinks I’ll wimp out, blush and duck to the front of the room. Instead I turn on my heel and march to the back. I’ve got to face him at some point.

  “Morning,” he says as I swing into the chair beside him.

  “It is, isn’t it?” I take out my notebook. “Act natural. It would seem some people are watching us.”

  I glance at him to see that he’s staring coldly at the whole classroom. “Take a picture. It’ll last longer,” he says, and nearly everyone jolts and turns around, except for one girl who giggles,

  “Nah. I’ll just use that picture that
came out with the article.”

  “What article?” I ask.

  “It’s nothing. How are you doing?” he asks quietly. The concern in his eyes goes straight to my heart, which has no business getting involved in this interaction.

  “I’m fine. What article?” I repeat, but Professor Moore foils me by showing up.

  Discussion gets underway, but I’m not paying attention. There’s a pit in my stomach. I write what article? twenty times on a piece of paper and slide it over to James. No one can turn down that kind of determination. Impressed, he raises his eyebrows, shrugs, pulls something up on his phone, and passes it to me.

  It’s a picture of James and I, at the party. The party where I was naked.

  There are black rectangles obscuring the inappropriate bits, but it’s very obvious that I’m naked and from the way I’m leaning toward him, seated on the counter with my feet swinging and a drink in my hand, it’s very obvious that I’m hitting on him. Even if I wasn’t. Not technically.

  I scroll down.

  James Reid, who won the hearts of teenage girls everywhere with his hit show All About Us, though it was mysteriously and unexpectedly canceled several years ago, has been striving to achieve a normal life as an undergraduate at UCSD. And like any college boy, he’ll have to navigate the pitfalls of young love. Unfortunately, this one seems less like a pitfall and more of a cliff’s edge. Freshman Fiona Arlett, already known as a party girl, gained immediate notoriety Friday night when she showed up to a gathering naked, a stunt that clearly attracted the attention of James. The fun turned sour when, after James disappeared upstairs with Arlett and another young man, a fight ensued, leaving the young man—identified as Damien Sando—in the hospital.

  “She was hitting on Damien all night but as soon as James showed up, she paid more attention to him. They say she couldn’t decide which one she wanted and told them to prove to her which of them was worthy of sleeping with her,” said our anonymous source. “She screws everyone within screwing distance. Most guys around here know better than to get involved with her.”