Chapter 9 Asch
ASCH
I stop short when I see Pandora waiting outside the classroom. She smiles and waves when she spots me.
“Hey, boyfriend,” Pandora says, stepping closer to me. “You’re done for the day, right?”
Boyfriend.
“Is that what you think I am?” I ask her with an ugly laugh. “Keep walking, Pandora. I’m not in the mood for your bullshit today.”
Or any day, for that matter.
She’s only going to try to get under my skin, and with the way I’m already feeling, it wouldn’t even be difficult.
As always, Pandora ignores me. She hooks her arm around mine, and I tense. Before I can pull away, she says, “If you don’t want all your secrets posted online, you probably should hear me out.”
I scoff at her. “What secrets?” I ask. “I’m an open book.”
Pandora watches a few people trail out of the classroom. “Hmm. An open erotica book? One full of somnophiliac rape fantasies?”
My heart drops into my stomach.
I yank away from her with so much force that I almost stumble. “What the actual fuck, Pandora?” I snarl at her.
How the fuck could she possibly know about that?
Only one person knows, and that person is nowhere near the school. Unless Zayden had seen the recordings, and she tortured our secrets out of him before she killed him… Well, that would track, wouldn’t it?
Pandora smiles at me. “What the actual fuck, Asch?” she mimics. “You’re so much dirtier than I thought you were. But do you really want to keep discussing this here?” She motions around us, at the students walking through the halls to their classrooms.
I can’t quite catch my breath. The idea of Pandora knowing the only secret I’d kill to keep has a vise grip on my chest. She’s right, though. I don’t want to have this conversation out in public.
I don’t want to have this discussion anywhere.
No one was supposed to know.
The problem was that I’ve lived on the straight and narrow so much that I hadn’t had many real secrets to share, least of all any that was “good enough” to get me into Kappa Alpha. I’d tried others, but Zayden hadn’t accepted them.
Maybe if I hadn’t been the scholarship student, he’d have let it go with something tamer, but no.
“Fine,” I growl at her. “Your dorm room, then.” I grab her arm, hard enough to leave bruises, and I start forcing her in that direction.
“You know I have a roommate, right?” Pandora says, not sounding at all put out. “We’d probably be safer at your place.”
“Blaze and River also live at my place,” I tell her.
The last thing I need is for Blaze to hear this conversation.
He’d do worse than drop me if he found out what I’d done to him.
I’d be six feet deep before I knew what was happening — if I was lucky.
“River’s got boxing right now,” Pandora says.
“He’s getting all sweaty and half-naked with some other guys.
And Blaze has a group meeting with his marketing class, with that desperate girl who wants to hop on his cock.
” She pauses and sighs. “That’s mean of me.
I know she doesn’t have a chance, and she doesn’t know that Blaze is a raging dick. He charms well.”
I huff out another dark laugh. Oh, yeah. He knows how to charm them.
He knows how to charm everyone.
But her words give me pause. “How do you know our schedules?”
Pandora gives me one of her infuriating smiles. “I don’t know. How did River know mine? I bet Blaze knows my schedule too.”
The only person whose schedule I know is Blaze’s.
The only schedule I knew, at least. These days, I don’t know anything he’s doing when he’s not being a dick to me through River.
“Fine,” I tell her. “We’ll have to take the bus.” I don’t want to take the bus with her. I don’t want to take her home. I don’t want to go anywhere with her.
I stop short, realizing it means I’m going to have to take her into my room.
It’s nowhere near as bad as my room at the frat house was, but there’s still crap strewn everywhere. It’s not like I can borrow Blaze’s room, and I’m not having this conversation in the living room.
Fuck.
I don’t have a choice. I need to know what exactly she knows… and what she wants from me to keep it from getting out. I have to believe that if she wanted to tell anyone, she already would have.
It’s just a matter of the price for her silence.
“Let’s go,” I say, starting to walk again.
Pandora takes my hand and follows along.
I try to let go, but she holds on tight, even squeezing as if in warning.
“This is going to be so much fun! I’ve been wondering about your bachelor pad.
Blaze is covering it all, right? Is the interior modern, or one of those run down student housing places where the landlord gives zero shits? ”
I don’t want to talk about it.
I don’t want to talk about anything.
All I can think about is the sight etched permanently into my memory of an unconscious Blaze, my hand stroking his cock until it came all over my hand.
And Pandora knows.
Pandora fucking knows.
“Modern,” I tell her, my voice flat. “I really don’t want to chat right now, Pandora. Or, how about this? Tell me about your snake.”
That has to interest her, right? Enough to get her off topic long enough for us to get back home, enough to distract me until we have this inevitable conversation.
“You want to know about Echo?” Pandora reaches into her hoodie pocket and pulls out a phone.
It’s a new phone, I realize, not the one she’d had that night. The case is also neon pink, but the design on it is different. Still a snake, but this time coiled around a skull instead of simply coiled into itself.
It’s a new phone, because we’d taken her old one. Nobody had ever returned it to her.
That, or River’s finger bones.
Pandora taps on the screen—angled away so I can’t see her inputting her password—then pulls up pictures of the snake. “Here we go. Look at my baby danger noodle. She looks fat, but that’s just how blood pythons are. They are the curvaceous beauties of the snake world.”
I glance at the street, both hoping that the bus arrives to end this sooner and dreading getting to that point, then look back down at her phone. “Danger noodle?” I ask. “Really?”
“Yeah. Papa calls them that, but he says he got it from an internet meme back when he was a young person, so like, a billion years ago.” Pandora’s eyes crinkle. “I tell him that to make him feel old.”
“Uh huh,” I tell her.
Her Papa is, from what I’ve learned, the head of the Pavone Family, and it’s strange to hear about him as Pandora sees him instead of how Blaze described him.
The bus arrives, and I swipe my bus pass against the card reader. Pandora has to fumble to use her credit card to pay, because of course she wouldn’t have something as plebeian as a bus pass.
I’m pretty sure she has a car here, like Blaze and River do, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be trapped in a car with her anyway.
I sit down at an empty seat in the middle, and Pandora slides in next to me, trapping me between her and the window. She scoots as close as physically possible, our thighs pressing against each other.
“You don’t have to sit right on top of me,” I mutter.
She doesn’t back off, of course. But then, why would she?
“I’m serious,” I tell her. “Move over.”
“No.” Pandora scoots even closer, going so far as to lay one thigh over mine. “What are you gonna do about it, boyfriend?”
“You only wish I’d do something about it,” I mutter. “But fine. I guess someone like you wouldn’t know about basic bus etiquette.”
A few weeks ago, I’d gone from wanting to strangle her to wanting to kiss her — and cut her up, a small voice reminds me — and now I’ve gone back to the former.
I can’t deny she’s beautiful, or sexy, but that doesn’t make her any less deadly.
Literally.
I don’t know how she subdued Zayden, especially long enough to chop his fucking head off, and I don’t want to find out for myself.
“Someone like me?” Pandora repeats. “What does that mean?”
“I mean, it’s not like you need to take public transportation,” I tell her. “Blaze wouldn’t be caught dead on a bus.”
I can’t imagine she’s much different.
“Huh. No, I take the bus a lot in NB. I used to drag River and… well, the three of us would take the bus all over the city and check out different stuff. Or the subway. It’s actually kind of weird how much the public transpo sucks here in Harmony.”
I cast a sidelong glance at her. As skeptical as I am of her declaration, I find that I’m more curious about what she’s nearly dropped: the three of us.
Does that include the mysterious Rachel that River wanted us to find out more information about?
“Yeah,” I say noncommittally.
Pandora rests her head against my shoulder and taps her fingers along my arm. Every single touch sears my skin. I imagine she has little blades hidden in her fingers, waiting to stab me when I least expect it.
We hadn’t given her knife back to her, but I have no doubt she’s gotten a new one by now.
The bus announces the next stop, and I press the button to signal that we want to get off. Pandora glances up at the digital sign board, like she’s memorizing the stop. Not that she needs to, since she already has the address, somehow.
I have to wait for Pandora to get off me before I can stand up. I freeze when I recognize one of my classmates sitting near the front. He notices Pandora clinging to me, and he gives me a thumbs up.
Pandora catches the move and gives him a thumbs up back. “I’m getting laid tonight,” she says to him, loud enough that the entire bus can hear.
I sigh, which is probably not the expected reaction from someone who’s about to get laid by a gorgeous woman like Pandora, but I can’t help it. I head off of the bus, and I lead her down the block to the house we’re renting.
The house Blaze is renting.
The house I need to get out of as soon as I can figure out an alternative.
Fuck.
That’s going to be the least of my problems if Blaze finds out what I did.