The presumably faux blonde laughed. Her laugh sounded like a hyena getting fucked by a hippopotamus. Or maybe it was just the hangover.
Christ, what the fuck have I done? They were both hot at least, but the way they checked me out, they were clearly stuck in the “deep blue Skye,” as some fans had nicknamed me.
I hated it. Fucking hated it. I just wanted to play ball. Of course, I had loved it at first, but I was over being star fucked. I mean, fuck me, fine. Please, in fact. I’ve never stopped anyone, but I didn’t do the emotional shit after. There was no “deep blue Skye,” just balls deep Skye.
“Really? He was talking about us?” The redhead giggled, toying with a lock of flaming hair. Her green eyes sparkled as they ran over me.
Yup, I was definitely a prize. A story she could tell her girlfriends over sushi. Or margaritas. Or whatever the fuck girls did to gossip.
Fun times.
That was why I avoided morning-afters. After the “oh, baby” and the “fuck yeah, baby,” there was a level of expectation I didn’t want to meet. I only had room for one girl in my life, and the position was already filled.
“Hells yeah, he was.” Ryder smirked, pointedly holding my eyes. “He was just saying how he’d love to take you out to breakfast.”
Goddamn soul-sucking motherfucker. I needed better taste in friends. Or just new friends altogether.
Maybe I should have taken up basketball. I was well over six feet. I could’ve made it work. Or maybe I should’ve taken up a sport that required no teammates whatsoever. Fencing or snowboarding. Anything seemed like a better option than the one I was stuck with, thanks to my fucking teammate.
“Oh,” the blonde exclaimed, a slight Southern drawl evident in her accent as she continued. “Breakfast with the James Skye. Whoever would’ve thought? We’d love to. Just give us a minute to get changed, and we’ll be right down.”
The girls headed upstairs. I grimaced. Ryder doubled over laughing.
“Good luck, man.” He shot me his shit-eating grin and stumbled back to his bedroom. No doubt he was going back to sleep.
“Fuck you, asshole,” I growled. I grabbed my leather jacket and stalked out the door before they’d even made it upstairs. I didn’t need that shit. I needed to get to Harper.
Chapter Two
Gabrielle
“There is a special place reserved in hell for whoever came up with all these stupid ass principles for the validity of a damn contract,” Heather groaned from what used to be her dining room table.
We hadn’t been able to see the table in weeks, let alone eat at it. It was covered with piles of textbooks, notes, mind maps, and files. Scraps of paper lay strewn all over the floor of her usually neat apartment, and diagrams on everything from business entities to wills and estates covered the walls.
Ah, the life of a law school graduate. After three years of busting ass in school, we figured we’d be ready for the dreaded bar exam. It had taken me one practice exam to realize I didn’t know a damn thing. Those years of law school seemed like a waste of time now. What was the point if I still had to study other test prep materials to pass this test? Why did I go $100,000 in debt if school didn’t prepare me to get my license?
“You could always skip it with me,” I said.
Heather’s answering sigh followed me all the way to her kitchen, which was not all that far away in her tiny apartment. “No, I can’t. And you shouldn’t be skipping it either.” She huffed, finally looking up at me.
I’d been trying to talk to her for the last half hour, but she’d quite obviously been so caught up in her studies that she hadn’t heard a word I’d been saying.
I rummaged around her kitchen, searching for two clean mugs. In the end, I gave up and just washed a couple.
“Maybe not, but maybe I like being a rebel without a cause.” I could feel her eyes on me, silently questioning.
I fixed our coffee the way we’d been taking it since we met back when I was in my freshman year of undergrad. Heather, a senior at the time, had been a tutor but quickly became my best friend.
I placed her steaming mug on top of a pile of discarded notes, the summaries before the final set. Then I cleared a space on her couch, which masqueraded as a pile of dirty laundry. I wriggled my nose. This was getting ridiculous. It would be time for an intervention soon.
Heather looked me over for a long moment, her sharp brown eyes rimmed with red. Sleep deprivation was an old friend of ours. “I know why you don’t want to take the bar. I just think you should take it anyway. Once you pass it, no one can ever take it away from you. It doesn’t mean that you have to start practicing right away.”
“That’s the thing, though. Why take it at all if I never want to practice? This was all my father’s dream. Not mine. It’s not my fault he’s trying to live vicariously through me. I’m only 24. I just want to be young, for once. Live my life on my own terms and figure out what I actually want to do with it. If that really is taking the bar, I can take it then.”
I could tell she thought it was a shitty argument, but it happened to be completely true. School had always come easy for me. My father recognized that early on and started pushing me toward law school and the bar before I’d had the chance to explore any other options.
He started prepping me right away. As soon as I started preschool. By the time I was getting ready to start 6th grade, I tested out and was bumped up two years. They wanted to move me directly on to high school, but my father thought I needed some sort of social life. He didn’t want me to be too young in high school. Then, my senior year of high school was almost fully spent on a college campus. I had almost a full year’s worth of credits when I actually started college.