When her eyes meet mine, I see a flash of something. It’s barely detectable, but she’s telling me to go with the act.
Of course. If she’s a student here, nobody can know she’s been banging the newest teacher. Not to mention one that’s about to be related to her by marriage.
I suck both my lips into my mouth anxiously and give everyone an awkward wave. “I’m Crosby. I see you already know the ice princess.”
Everyone laughs, that is until Hadley elbows the girl to her right to shut her up.
“Ice queen, future prom queen, same difference.”
I watch her traipse over to a table and take a seat. I marvel. Everyone actually stops and waits for her to get seated before they sit. She really is a fucking queen.
But she’s my queen, and I won’t have her brushing me off like this.
“Can I talk to you a minute? It’s about your mom.”
Ridley laughs. “What does Bianca want now? To ask me to ask Daddy for her boat payment because she spent her allowance on Botox injections?”
Everyone laughs.
I dare to put a hand on her shoulder. She gasps and looks down at my hand and then up at me like she might just end me before I get out another word.
But I’m not having it.
Something comes over me, a possessiveness, a desperation, that I don’t recognize in myself. I never needed anybody, never wanted to possess a woman. I’m an enlightened, modern man. But Ridley and I have things to talk about and we need to talk about them now.
“Now,” I say through gritted teeth.
Ridley’s eyes tell me in the briefest second that my reaction has half scared her and half turned her on. She recovers quickly and sighs in an exaggerated, extremely put-upon way. “I guess this is what happens when your mom decides to marry a social climber. Everybody wants a piece of you. Excuse me, hoes.”
22
Ridley
Pissed off Crosby is hot.
He has me by the hand, dragging me down the hall and outside. The grounds are not exactly choked with students but it’s not abandoned either. Someone will see us, surely.
He doesn’t let go until we reach the greenhouses.
I don’t think he even knows where he’s going.
“Hey, gamer boy, if you’re looking for a secluded spot to make out with me, we can go to the theater building. It’s practically abandoned in January until they start auditioning for the spring—“
Crosby interrupts. “I’m not going to take you there to make out with you.”
“Oh?”
He turns and now drags me toward the auditorium. “Through there, back stage, down the stairs, prop room. That’s where everyone goes to—”
He cuts me off again. “And I sure as fuck don’t want to know how you know where the make out spots are in this school,” he growls.
“Well you said you weren’t going to make out with me so why do you care?”
Like he knows where he’s going now, like he has a homing device, Crosby pulls me down into the bowels of the auditorium, and finds the prop room, door ajar.
“Careful,” I say with a smirk. “You never know who you’re going to run into down here.”
“This school is so fuckin’ weird.”