Chapter 2 #2
Tamsin nodded. “Yeah. So we hooked up that night. And no, Jasmine, you don’t need all the dirty details,” she said, flashing her a warning glance.
Jasmine returned the look with a pleading expression. “Just something small to feed my gossip obsession. I’m begging you.”
Tamsin rolled her eyes. Then her good-natured smile reappeared. “Okay, fine. Let’s just say… he got two out of three.”
“Holes?”
“Uh-huh.”
Jesse’s forehead crinkled. “You guys better not have used any props, because if I find out one of those Milky Ways was in your—”
“Oh my god, no! Stop!” Tamsin was starting to giggle now. “There were no candy bars inside me at any time. Not even my stomach, because by the time we were done, I wasn’t hungry anymore. Just worn out.”
“I really can’t believe this.” Wren slowly shook her head. “Like, I’m hearing the words come out of your mouth, but I still can’t believe it.”
“Me neither.” Jasmine arched a brow. “Seriously, why didn’t you tell us? I know we all give each other shit about our hookups, but it’s not serious.”
“Yeah, we’d never actually judge anyone,” Jesse added. “Unless they were into some truly fucked up shit. Like… shit that’s illegal for a good reason.”
Tamsin’s giggles had dried up, and her smile had dropped, replaced with a somber expression. “I guess it wasn’t so much that I thought you guys would be judgmental. I was just embarrassed.”
“Why? I mean, he’s an ass and we all hate him, but he is hot. We totally would’ve gotten it.”
Tamsin was quiet for a second. “That’s not why I was embarrassed.
It was the way he acted the next day,” she said.
“Obviously I wasn’t expecting a relationship or something.
It was just a casual hookup. But I thought he’d at least acknowledge my existence afterward.
So when I saw him the next morning, I gave him a little smile and wave. ”
“And he ignored you?” Jesse asked.
“Worse. He was with some other girl at the time. Grace, I think? Anyway, she noticed me smile and wave, and I heard her say something like, ‘Why the hell is she smiling at you?’. And then Jensen said, ‘No idea. You know how these local girls act. All desperate for the Hornbacher Hammer’. Then he walked away without a second glance. Like I was just no one.”
Jasmine blinked. “Sorry, he calls his junk the Hornbacher Hammer?”
“Holy shit.” Jesse was clearly suppressing laughter. “He’s the one who should be embarrassed. Not you.”
Tamsin nodded. “After hearing that bullshit, you’d think I’d be glad he wanted nothing to do with me, right?
” she said. “But… it just stung, you know? Like, I’m fine with one-time hookups.
But don’t act like it never happened afterwards, or go around acting like I’m some desperate loser. That’s just nasty.”
A beat of quiet fell over our little group, the loud crackling of the fire filling the gap.
“He's a dick,” Jasmine finally said. “Full stop.”
Tamsin let out a weak laugh. “Yeah, well... it is what it is. Ancient history now, I guess.”
Jasmine reached over and squeezed her arm, and Tamsin gave her a grateful half-smile before staring back into the fire. I stared into it too, feeling a sharp pang of sympathy biting at my gut.
The humiliation of being reduced to nothing by someone who had been something to you was an awful feeling, even if your only experience with them was a fleeting moment in a converted outhouse.
The experience itself wasn’t the embarrassing part.
Being treated like you were the embarrassment in the equation was the part that stung.
I knew that flavor of awful intimately, because I'd had my own version of it once. A guy at NYU in my freshman year who’d looked at me like I was the most interesting person he’d ever met, right up until the moment it was convenient for him to stop.
He had a real gift for making me feel chosen and then, without any discernible transition, making me feel like I'd made the whole thing up in my head.
I picked at the label on my beer and tried to ignore Rhys’s gaze from across the fire.
Before, it had barely registered, but now that the others had pointed it out, I could feel it every time I looked up.
Given what they'd said about him, I suspected he was probably just as bad as Jensen beneath the charm.
So no matter how hot he was, or how much some reckless part of me wanted to find out what he was really like…
that was a temptation I needed to resist.
“Ah, shit.” Jesse was looking at his watch. “Tam, it’s our turn for cabin checks. We should head off.”
“I’ll come with you,” Wren said, rising to her feet. “I need to pee.”
“Me too,” Jasmine said. She looked at me. “Do you need to go too?”
I smiled and shook my head. “I’m okay. I’ll stay back and make more s’mores for everyone.”
Jasmine whooped. “Hear that, guys? We’ve got our very own s’mores servant!” she said. She theatrically winked at me. “A sexy one, too.”
I laughed and watched as the four of them headed back to the campgrounds. The sounds of their voices and footsteps faded down the path until the forest swallowed them entirely, and then it was just me and the low murmur of the other groups around the fire.
I reached for the bag of marshmallows and loaded up my stick, settling forward on the log with my elbows on my knees. Then I rotated the stick slowly and tried to look like I was thinking about nothing in particular.
That was made somewhat difficult by the fact that I was still acutely aware of who was sitting on the other side of the fire and whether or not he was still looking at me.
Before the others left, it hadn't mattered as much, because there were enough of us that I could distribute my attention and pretend the prickling awareness on my skin was just the night air. Now, alone, I had no such cover.
Don't look up, I willed myself.
But, of course, I looked up.
Rhys had just dragged his gaze away from me, and he was saying something to the guy beside him—Zach, if I recalled correctly—and leaning forward with his forearms on his knees. The firelight moved across the planes of his face, and he laughed at something, low and brief.
I looked back at my marshmallows and focused very intently on the task at hand, decidedly not thinking about dark hair pushed back from a strong jaw, or gray eyes catching the firelight, or—
I suddenly heard the sound of boots on packed earth, and before I registered exactly what it meant, Rhys was lowering himself onto the log beside me, close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating from him above the warmth of the fire.
“Hey.” He smiled at me and shuffled even closer. “Just thought I’d come over and ask how your first day treated you.”
I swallowed my nerves and returned his smile. “It was pretty good. Although I guess tomorrow is the real first day, right?”
“Yeah, today was more about settling in,” he replied. “Tomorrow will be about ten times more hectic. But don’t worry, you’ll be able to handle it.”
Despite the warnings from the others, I thought Rhys actually seemed pretty nice. But at the same time, there was something strangely unsettling about his presence that made the hairs on my arms stand up.
It wasn't anything he'd said or done. He was being perfectly pleasant, sitting beside me with his beer and his easy conversational opener like any decent person making an effort with the new girl.
But there was something beneath that pleasantness that I couldn't quite put my finger on.
Something about the way he held himself, maybe, or something in his eyes.
I rotated my marshmallows again, wondering if what I was sensing was the thing the others had warned me about.
But their assessment of him had seemed more like ‘snobby elitist prick’, and that wasn’t what I was picking up on right now.
No, my spidey-senses were flagging something else entirely.
Something that felt less like arrogance and more like an element of danger.
Well, maybe ‘danger’ was too dramatic a word for it. But whatever it was, my nervous system had noted it, and my intuition regarding people’s underlying natures had proved to be pretty accurate in the past.
I pulled my stick back from the fire and examined it. “Ten times more hectic, huh?” I said, mostly to fill the silence that I'd awkwardly let stretch a few seconds too long. “Now I understand why you guys all spend the first night drinking.”
Rhys smiled again, and I felt it in my chest like a struck chord.
Oh, god, I thought. This is going to be a problem.
“You’re originally from Montana, right?” he asked.
I nodded, frowning ever-so-slightly as I tried to remember the details of our earlier conversation. “Did I tell you that before?”
“Nah, someone else mentioned it,” he replied, jerking a thumb vaguely toward the other side of the fire.
So the Legacies had been talking about me. Was that a good or bad thing?
I guess only time would tell.
“Anyway, how’d you end up out here for the summer?” Rhys went on, focusing his intense gaze back on me. Up close, the gray of his eyes was pale and layered, like ice with something dark lurking beneath it.
“One of my professors came here as a kid,” I said. “Turns out one of his old bunkmates owns the place now. He heard me asking around the faculty about summer jobs, and he got me a spot.”
“That was cool of him.”
“Really cool,” I said, nodding. “Although I wouldn’t have minded stacking books all summer in some dusty library if that ended up being my only option.”