She flips Penn the finger before lifting her head and taking a bite of her sandwich. “You’re the one who said let’s get fucked up.”
Penn barks out a laugh, shaking her head. “Yeah, but I didn’t mean literally fucked.”
I shake my head, trying not to say a thing, considering what happened the last time I drank. Zero judgment right here.
“It could be worse,” I tell her. “You could’ve recorded it.”
Charli giggles at me while Serena looks horrified, as if searching her memory to make sure she didn’t do exactly that.
“I didn’t do that. I don’t think. Please, God, tell me I didn’t do that. No more tequila,” she says, shaking her head. “Can we please talk about something else? Please? Anything else.”
As if the universe answers her plea, the door to the cafeteria opens and in walks what I’ve dubbed my own four horsemen of the apocalypse. The royalty of Saints U, who are anything but Saints.
I turn away from them, but I can feel Travis’ glare burning into my back. We have that stupid family dinner in two days, and I’msolooking forward to it. Not.
The crowd of princesses that follow them in with an air of hairspray and giggling is enough to make me gag. What twists my stomach more is how aware I am of them all. It’s ridiculous. One drunken night and some assholeish comments shouldn’t make me automatically tune in whenever they enter a room and yet, anytime they’re near, I just seem to know.
“Incoming,” Penn says, glancing over my shoulder, grinning at me as she wags her brows. Her laughter starts when she sees me roll my eyes. “Just the emo one, though, don’t worry.”
My shoulders sag a little. I caught Penn up with everything that happened on my first night in Serenity Falls over the weekend, and after her initial shock, she laughed at me for a solid thirty minutes. So she knows that Asher—a.k.a. the emo one—doesn’t seem to be a bag of dicks. Well, not entirely anyway. Unlike the ones I actually had a goddamn orgy with, he seems to want to play nice.
“Hey, Briar,” he says as he stops beside me at the table. “You got a minute?”
The voice in my head screams that I absolutely don’t, but the people pleaser that's been beaten into me smiles and pushes back from the table while Penn smugly grins at me.
I casually flip her the bird behind my back as I follow Asher past the others. Sawyer at least smiles at me, but Cole and Travis act like I don’t exist.
Better than calling me out and hurling shit at me I guess, but since I’m with Asher, apparently I get a pass.
Yay me.
We head out of the building and around the corner, where it's less crowded. “This doesn’t seem ominous at all,” I utter, and he smiles at me.
“Don’t worry, Briar. I have zero ill will toward you. Surely you’ve managed to figure that out so far?” He pushes his glasses up his nose and runs a hand through his hair. I’ve noticed he does that when he has to tell me something I probably don’t want to hear, so I’m already on edge.
“Uh-huh. If you say so. What did you want?” I ask, folding my arms across my chest, knowing I need some sort of barrier between us. He’s too nice, and I need to remember that he’s still essentially #TeamWeHateBriar or #TeamTravis at the end of the day, even if he does seem to be trying to keep the peace.
His smile drops a little and I already know I’m not going to like whatever is about to fall out of his mouth. He lifts one of his delightful lean, inked-up arms behind his head, rubbing the back of his neck, flexing as he does. Pretty sure he’s not doing it on purpose, but if he’s trying to distract me from what he’s about to say, it’s working.
“Thursday…” he starts, and every instinct tells me to walk the hell away from this conversation, but yay trauma, because my feet stay planted exactly where they are.
“What about it?”
He runs a hand through his dark blond tresses again and, for a second, I could swear he almost looks uncomfortable. “I know you and Travis aren’t exactly on the best terms, but his dad… well, his dad is an asshole.”
“And you’re telling me this, why exactly?” I ask, quirking a brow. Travis’s dad can be an entire santa sack full of dicks, but if he keeps my mom happy, stable, and out of my way, then I’m happy.
“Travis has no idea I’m telling you this,” he says warily. “He thinks I’m talking to you about the girls, and how he absolutely tore them apart about the slushie thing—though let’s just say nothing else should happen to you, and if it does, I need to know—but I’m telling you this because Travis is going to be even more on edge than usual. I’m just asking you to play nice.”
“You’re kidding me, right?” I scoff. “I’ve done nothing but play nice. He might have yelled at them about the slushie but he’s still the asshole in all this, Asher. I keep going off at you, when I should be going off at him, but he’s too much of a coward to ever actually talk to me. Ever since I walked into the kitchen that morning, he’s done nothing but look at me like I’m not worthy of breathing the same air as him. Like I’m less than, just because he didn’t know where he was sticking his dick. This is all fully ahimproblem.”
“I don’t thinkthatis his problem,” he mutters, shaking his head. “I get it, I do. I just… we’d all usually be there, playing buffer between the two of them. Chase likes to stay in good graces with the Becketts, because having a senator as a friend is always useful for someone like Chase, but since it’s a family meal, we’ve been asked not to come.”
“I don’t get the feeling you guys usually follow orders, so why now?” I ask, more than a little curious.
He lets out a deep sigh, and his shoulders drop. “Because Travis asked us not to.”
Huh, curiouser and curiouser.