She blushes. “I’m not sorry. You’re making me crazy. I don’t want anything to do with you. We’ve finished our unfinished business, come to our agreement and now we move on. I can deal with Isabel. I don’t need to tell her anything. I hardly know her.”
I nod, calming, letting her soothing sense of right sink in, her confidence in her own promise as sure as the sunrise.
The DJ stops to return the floor to the mini orchestra, making our lack of motion less awkward.
“Let’s go outside and finish this conversation.” I don’t know what else there is to finish. Maybe it all seems too simple. I’m naturally suspicious of anything that comes too easy. Nothing in my life has been. Sure, I get the grades and excel on the field, but not without work and hurdles. Needing to go to the library all the time to use their computer for my papers in high school because I didn’t have one. Working my butt off to get in top condition and stay there year-round for football, which means I don’t drink or indulge in any of the recreational drugs other kids do.
No, nothing is this easy.
“We have nothing left to talk about,” she says even as she goes along with the small encouragement of my hand on the slinky dress at the small of her back. She smells irresistible, a heady mixture of almonds and cherries, probably something expensive. Definitely edible. The imaginary taste of her wakes up my dick again, inconveniently as I step through the open patio doors. It’s a perfect late summer night.
Her scent is as innocent as the night. Other people wander around outside down some stairs to a water fountain. I lead Joni to the side of the building into a shadowy area outside the beams of the patio lights where I lean against the wall. She stands in front of me a foot away. Maybe she thinks she’s out of reach, but she’s not.
Taking her by the hand I tug her in, just a small teasing tug, and in spite of the wary look on her face, it moves her to within an inch of me. I let her hand go and she rests it on her hip, keeping my eyes locked on hers.
“Look, if this is some big seduction scene,” she starts, but her voice, louder and higher than her natural talking voice, gives her nerves away.
“No. I’m not seducing you. I’m apologizing.”
She gives me the you’re as believable as the tooth fairy look with a skeptical arch of one perfect brow and I bet she doesn’t even know about all the natural grace she has. Must come with the sense of security and knowing who she is, true confidence and fearless loyalty to what’s real. Departing from my natural instincts, I decide not to play games.
“I’m sorry for what I did that day. The volleyball game. I’m sorry you got hurt.”
Her mouth opens into silence and I can’t see the blush, but I’m sure it’s there. She wears all her emotions, every last true feeling she has, on her face. She can’t help being real. There’s no way for her to hide herself. Her only protection is self-acceptance. A truly tough way to grow up. Worse when some jackass bullies you. She finally gathers herself.
“That’s it? Sure, you’re forgiven.” She pulls from me to leave and I realize she still doesn’t like remembering that day. Any more than I do.
“I don’t expect to be forgiven. I only wanted to close the loop. For both of us.”
“Great. Now we can go on our way.” She almost leaves then, but she stops after a couple of steps and comes back to me in a fury. Is she finally going to slap my face? No such luck.
Throwing her hands on her hips, she gets in my face, not an easy thing for most women, but she’s got the height. And the spunk.
“Don’t talk about that day to anyone. Ever again. Not even me.”
“What makes you think I would? I’m the villain in the story, not you.”
“Don’t say it—”
“Don’t say what?” She’s all hot and bothered and worked up and I’m trying not to like it but my dick has a head of its own—a saying Grandpa used to enjoy and shared by way of his words of wisdom. Beware the dickhead. I can hear him laughing now—not from heaven, but somewhere out there. Enjoying his ass off and rooting me on.
“Don’t label me the victim.” Her voice is tight and she takes a deep breath. “Okay maybe I was the victim that day, but I’m not anymore and I don’t want that kind of gossip giving people the wrong impression.” She pauses, breasts heaving, and I detect the jiggle even though I’m staring into her eyes. My balls tighten and it’s my turn to take in a deep breath.
Wrong move because I get a lungful of her sweet cherry-almond essence. Darting a hand out, I drag her into me and swing her around so I’m hiding her when I see someone looking our way. A couple, students judging by their easy movements, walking by on their way to the fountain. I don’t bother to try and place them, but chances are I know who they are if they’re at this reception.
“What do you care what people think?” I mean it. She looks startled, either because I’ve yanked her against me or because of the tenacity in my words. Maybe I’ve startled myself.
She licks her lips. I know she has no idea how she taunts me. I step back, getting some space between us. Last thing I want her thinking is that I’m here to seduce her. I meant it when I said I’m not.
“You’re right. I shouldn’t care what people think.” She calms, but the combative look on her face stays. “Why do you care so much?”
I laugh. “I wouldn’t, if I had your kind of money.”
“That’s not an answer. It has nothing to do with money.”
“Spoken like a spoiled princess who’s never been without money.”
“Don’t play the pauper card. You’re the big man on campus now. You aren’t poor anymore.”
Stay silent. Let her think that. It’s what I want, what I need her to believe. But no.
“Wait—what about your mother?” she asks. Because she knows my mother has no money, doesn’t work and she’s finally wondering how my mother lives.
“You’re smarter and quicker than I ever gave you credit for DD—”
Whack. She’s faster than I’ve given her credit for, too. Her slap catches my cheek before I can catch her hand, but I move my head enough to take the sting out of it. I grab her wrist, turning us around so she’s against the wall and my back is to the open door twenty feet away.
“Don’t you ever fucking call me that again.” Her voice is low and shaking.
“You’re right. Low blow.” But you struck first bringing up my mother. No need to say it. I let go of her wrist and she eyes my cheek, almost wants to touch it. I see the remorse in her eyes before she says a word.
“I’m… sorry. For slapping you. And I shouldn’t have mentioned your mother. I knew she was a… sore spot for you back in high school.” She pushes her hair behind one ear and fiddles with it. “I guess I forgot. Thought maybe you’d be over that by now.”
“My mother has nothing to do with anything.”
She nods. “I guess the lines are drawn then? You don’t talk about me and …. whatever. And I won’t talk about you. Same place we were before you apologized.”
“And before you slapped me. So now we both have our closure. Now we can go our separate ways. Pretend we never knew each other.”
“We never did,” she says. She backs up a step. I let her go, unaware until then that I had both hands on her hips.
I hear a squeak from outside somewhere. A decidedly feminine squeak and not the good kind. I turn and don’t see anything. But I hear the commotion somewhere beyond the water fountain in the dark. Without thinking, I walk in the direction of the sounds and when I hear another more distressed sound, like a sob, I pick up my pace and don’t stop until I reach the source. Joni’s right behind me and stops short, putting a hand on my back. She doesn’t say a word.
A couple of beefy guys I recognize from the team’s defensive line, Hatchinsky and Posen, are hassling a smaller guy—I recognize him as Kapallo, the second coming of Diego Maradona, from the soccer team. He’s with a cute petite girl I don’t recognize mostly, because she has her hands covering her face. They h
aven’t noticed us in their vicinity yet.
“You stay put,” I say to Joni before I move in. But she doesn’t listen. Along with growing a few inches, her spine has hardened in the past four years to an uncomfortable degree. But damn if it doesn’t turn me on. Fucking overexcited dick.
“Back off, Hatchinsky,” I say as he’s grabbing Kapallo’s shirt. But the big dumb ass is too drunk to pay attention to more than one thing at a time. He shoves Kapallo to the ground. I jump in front of him and push back.
Posen shouts, “Hey, what the fuck?” He’s is too cocked to stop himself from punching me in the nose. My reptile brain kicks in and I punch him back, a big powerful well-aimed roundhouse square on his nose that knocks him to the ground in a shower of blood. No need for quickness or finesse with a drunk guy. No one’s ever beaten me in a street fight. Not even grown adult men when I was barely fourteen and had to retrieve my mother from the local crack house on Grandpa’s orders. At that point, I’d have left her there. Instead, we sent her away to rehab with money we didn’t have and I’ve been bailing the water with a coffee cup from our battered, sinking, over-mortgaged ship ever since.
Aside from driving without a license and getting in a knife fight when all I had were my two fists, I got thrown in jail that night for resisting arrest when the cops tracked me down at the shack. But that was when I was a kid.
No way am I letting history repeat itself.
Keeping the rage from my voice, I make it clear to the two fuckheads that they are to leave and pretend this never happened and I don’t care if Posen has a broken nose. As he lifts his sorry friend from the ground still leaking blood, Hatchinsky, now all remorseful because he realizes it’s their own QB they’ve fucked with, points out that I have a shiner.
“I don’t give a fucking shit. Get out of here before we attract any more attention.” As it is, I’m aware of Kapallo’s girlfriend crying while Joni towers over her consoling the girl like a crazy combination of Nurse Nightingale meets Wonder Woman. I help Kapallo off the ground.
The dean spills from the door, looking around and heading in our direction. Someone’s alerted him to a problem. Either that or he has the kind of sixth sense I don’t want to think about.
“What the hell is going on here?” He spots me, makes a face like he’s swallowed a pile of crap, then storms over. “It’s you. I’m not surprised. What the hell—?”
He stops, looking over my shoulder at the two fuckheads stopped in the bushes, one of them heaving his guts onto the lawn. Shit.
“What the hell is going on here, I asked?” He marches forward to catch up to the fuckheads and I decide to leave. Grabbing Joni by the arm, I say, “Let’s get out of here.”
“Thanks for the save,” Kapallo says, bumping my fist.
“No prob. Do me a solid and don’t say anything, right? No punches were thrown.”
He nods and I drag Joni back through the open door to the reception. Hors d’oeuvres are being passed and we weave past the server and a small knot of people. I get a couple of looks, but I smile back. A glance over my shoulder toward the patio door tells me Dean Lassiter is on his way with one of the fuckheads in tow. He sees me.
“Let’s move.” I take off and Joni keeps up as we cut across the dance floor between people and catch some shit until they see it’s me. We head straight for the front door, only stopping for Joni to grab her bag. When we pause for that instant, I look back and see Lassiter with his cell phone out. No doubt calling the cops or an ambulance as he hangs onto Posen’s arm while Hatchinsky hands him a white linen napkin to wipe the blood off his face Lassiter turns and sees me and shouts something, but I turn away and Joni and I head for the door. I don’t know or care what the man said. We rush out the front door and I don’t stop.
Joni goes right along with me until we reach the parking lot and my dusty, dented pickup truck, the one with BMOC painted graffiti-style in black on the side of the truck bed, the one that I’m famous for.
“This your ride?” she says dryly. But she hops inside all the same when I fucking open and close her door like she’s my princess. The horrible image sticks in my head that there’s something terribly wrong, like we’re in an alternate universe, one disturbing and unfamiliar. It shakes me.
My hand shakes as I turn the key in the ignition, but I don’t waste time on second thoughts with my survival instincts finely in tune and we take off. She texts her dad that she got a ride home.
It’s not until I pull into the driveway of BMOC house that I realize I’ve taken Joni home with me. The sinking, irrational yet real feeling that I’ve betrayed everything I’ve planned for three years engulfs me. And I can’t turn back now as I turn to her and meet her serious, gorgeous, all too real eyes.
“Shit.”
“I know,” she says.
Her golden eyes shimmer in the dim light, reflecting the starlight coming in the truck’s windows. Neither of us make a move to get out. We shouldn’t be here—or rather, she shouldn’t.
“I’ll take you home,” I say, making no move to throw the truck back into gear, instead powering the windows down for air. Her scent’s draw is too powerful, and I lean in her direction, my eyes on her mouth. The plump, juicy lips are cock raisers and I feel my blood flowing, draining dangerously to feed the beast of desire. Fucking A.
When I find myself inches from her, and she hasn’t backed away or blinked, I know I’m in trouble. Swiping a hand through my hair, I lean back against the door and look away from her. I’m the more cowardly of the two of us, but that’s not new either. I hate my desire for her. It’s always been there lurking under the surface. Fuck.
But I hate even more that she has the courage I used to mock her for lacking. Maybe I’m nothing but a bully at heart.
“What is going on with you, Jack?” she whispers. “Why is it such a big secret about you being poor? Why does it matter?”
“It does.” I turn back to face her, to let her see the tortured, guilty side of Jack Hunter, the soul that claws desperately to not be who he is, to be something more, someone better, anything but the son of a drop-out drunk floozy and a no-name, no-show father.
She reaches out and touches my thigh, by way of comfort I suppose, but she may as well be throwing a lit match into a vat of gasoline the way my cock jumps and hardens, the way my balls tighten and my mind sees only red-hot woman in front of me.
This is Joni, damn you. She’s the enemy.
And she’s off-limits.
I lift her hand from my thigh. “Don’t start something you can’t finish, babe.” I rasp the words, my voice vibrating with tension, feeling the pulse in her wrist racing. She pulls it from my hand, almost jumping back in her seat, her eyes going wide and horrified.
“I’m not. I wasn’t—”
I laugh. Of course not. I know that, but she needs to know how easy it would be to do.
“Tell me why you need to keep your money situation serious or—”
“Or what? You’ll out me?”
“Maybe.” She stares back with a defiant tightness to her expression, like she’s trying to hold her breath for as long as she can but it’s a losing battle. “Okay, so maybe not,” she says on a sigh. “But tell me anyway.”
“Why?”
“Because I care,” she says. Simple. No backpedaling. No apology, only a small smile. She keeps her eyes on me bravely as I shrink back and try and undo the confusion between my cock and my brain.
“That right? Well then, I’ll tell you.” I look away from her because I’m not brave enough to hold up under her honest scrutiny. Whatever feelings I have, good or bad, don’t matter. Survival matters.
“The NCAA is looking into SPU because of rumors spread by competitors in the division. They’re looking at every angle for cheating and especially at the financials of full-boat scholarship athletes.” These are facts. It doesn’t matter if I tell her. The sports media know all about it or they can find out.
“So they’re looking at you?”
I nod, watching her intoxicating face, breathing in her cherry-almond nectar because whatever she has, whatever magnetism it is, has overridden my cowardice, my caution, and any good sense I’ve ever had. Even the survival instincts that fuel the bully strain to counter the pull she has. I lift myself from leaning against my door and move forward, close to her. She shakes, but doesn’t flinch or back away. Her eyes stay steady. When I speak my voice is a whisper.
“They have their eye on me because they know I’m poor and they’re suspicious of me accepting alumni money.”
“Did you?” She doesn’t blink. So neither do I and I give her the answer.
“I accepted a summer job. It paid very well. After an NCAA investigator visited the alumnus business owner my salary was cut to barely above minimum wage to save me from becoming ineligible and losing my scholarship, and worse, to save SPU from charges, fines and eligibility for league championships and bowl games.”
“So now you’re poor again.” I’m so close now I can feel her warm breath on my face, but I hold on. Because I have a point to make and a need stronger than life to survive.
“Princess, all I’ve ever been is poor. I’m poor down to my soul and that’s never gonna change no matter how much money I have. The most I can hope for is to not be so desperate.” I don’t know why I say it. I’ve never uttered such words to another living soul. I can’t count my one-sided talks to Grandpa at night. The way she looks at me now makes me regret it. She looks like she feels sorry for my pathetic ass. Is that what I want?
No, but maybe that’s what I need to stop the softening, stop the feeling, stop the wanting. Because she’s still my fucking biggest enemy and she always will be.
“Same way you’ll always be a princess no matter what. If you lose every penny, end up under a bridge eating half-eaten pie you scrounged from an alley behind a restaurant, you’ll still be a princess deep down in your soul.”
She shivers with enough violence so that I reach out and touch her, but the feel of her silky shoulder under my fingers scalds me with a punishing whiplash back to want and I lift them instantly. Clear my head with a deep breath of the warm late summer breeze wafting through the window behind me.
Big Man on Campus: an Enemies to Lovers College Romance (Big Men on Campus Book 1) Page 7
