MERRITT
CHAPTER FOUR
I am absolutely diabolical.
And I am extremely pleased about that, just to be clear.
It’s been two days since I all but ran out of the library’s study room and left Bennett Legros with his figurative dick in his mouth.
After that meeting, I am absolutely sure of two things.
One: He has no clue who I am. He doesn’t remember that night at the party. At all.
Clearly, a full-on conversation with me didn’t jog his memory.
Honestly, I’m not sure if that somehow makes it better or if it makes it even worse.
Two: He’s an even bigger pain in my ass than I imagined him to be, and I have no fucking clue how I’m going to survive two months of working with him on this project without actually losing my mind.
He just might be the thing that finally pushes me over the edge and makes me snap.
My God, he’s infuriating, and I’ve only had a total of two conversations with him.
Well, more like one since I’m not really sure you’d count dry humping and a tragically hot make-out session as “conversation.”
Forty-eight hours later, and I haven’t heard a single peep out of him.
Blessedly.
Professor Hart has made it abundantly clear that she’s not going to make any exceptions to her rules. Which means I’m stuck with him until the semester ends, and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it.
That also means that he’s going to be partially responsible for whatever we turn in at the end of these two months, and that is a truly terrifying thought.
Our next session is supposed to be on Monday, and I’m wondering if he’s even going to show up.
I told him that if he wasn’t going to read the book, not to bother.
A laugh pours out of me, and I flop back onto my bed, staring up at the ceiling as I replay the absolute look of pure horror on his face when I told him he had to read Jane Eyre.
I.e. My diabolicalness.
He was sitting there, smirking like I hadn’t just told him to get it the fuck together after strolling in late, then having the audacity to say he hadn’t even fully read the email. I was busy trying to count backward from a hundred in my head so I didn’t do anything rash, and then it hit me.
Bennett Legros wanted instructions, so I gave him some. Literally the first part of our assignment.
See why I don’t have much faith in the fact that he’s going to somehow manage to actually even read the book?
Did I think he was going to?
Ha. Absolutely the fuck not.
It’s five hundred pages of classic literature from the 1800s that’s a romance on top of the brutally hard language.
Bennett Legros isn’t even going to be able to read it, let alone understand and retain it.
See?
Diabolical.
I might have also conveniently forgotten to mention there are like four movies that would probably be much easier for him to consume. But… serves him right for being late and for trying to take the easy way out before we’ve even started the project.
I guess we’ll find out how seriously he’s going to take this if he actually shows up to the session on Monday.
Sighing, I sit up from the mattress and drag the casebook back into my lap and attempt to refocus.
I’m supposed to be briefing Mapp vs Ohio for my Constitutional Law class, but my attention has been on literally anything but the case.
Instead, it’s focusing on distractions… like Bennett Legros.
I grind my teeth together until my jaw begins to ache and start to read over the text again.
This Court has not hesitated to enforce as strictly against the States as it does against the…
The words run together in a blur of black ink, and I blink rapidly, suddenly realizing that I’ve read the same sentence at least three times and still have no clue what it said.
“Ugh. Get it the hell together, Merritt,” I mutter, pinching my eyes tightly shut and blowing out an uneven breath as I rub my eyes and then pat my cheeks. “Wake up. Focus.”
I’m so annoyed at myself for getting distracted and losing focus in the first place. I can’t afford to let my GPA fall, especially not this close to my law school application.
This is the never-ending cycle of frustration with myself, my spicy brain, and my inability to do things that come so effortlessly to most people.
I was undiagnosed for most of my childhood, until my freshman year in high school when I realized just how truly debilitating my ADHD was.
It was then that I saw how much harder I was having to work to do something as simple as staying on task in class or completing the assignment once it was assigned instead of waiting until the last minute to start it because I couldn’t focus.
How just because it seemed normal to me because I’d been doing it my entire life didn’t actually make it normal.
I always assumed that ADHD was just procrastinating and the inability to pay attention, but I learned it was so much more.
All of the little things like hyperfixating on a new hobby or a new TV series I’d discovered until I could almost recite the lines myself.
Or the endless organizational systems that I’d discover and spend hours attempting to set up and implement into my life and abandon after the first three days.
The endless cycle of starting but never finishing.
Or how I could immediately notice when something was off with one of my friends or if something was wrong with a situation…
I thought it was just intuition. My gut is trying to tell me something, but later I learned it’s something called pattern recognition.
I learned that my overstimulation and moments of high emotional sensitivity were all just a product of a neurological function that I didn’t give credence to until I discovered how much it affected my life.
It was then, when I got an official diagnosis and was put on medication, my life changed.
The medication helps a lot, but it never fully quiets my endlessly restless brain that continually has a dozen different tabs open at once.
Once it wears off, my ability to retain things drops to a nonexistent place, and then I get frustrated at myself.
It’s not like law school isn’t going to be hard enough on its own. Add in a neurodevelopmental disorder that makes you feel helpless—love that for me.
It’s without a doubt going to be the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but it’s going to be the most rewarding too. It’ll be like climbing the world’s tallest mountain when I finally have my degree in my hand and pass the bar.
I did that shit despite my brain sabotaging me at every turn.
My phone vibrates for the third time in the last five minutes, so I shut the casebook and pick it up, swiping open the notification.
Six messages.
All of them from the only person I want to see or speak to even less than the guy I’m newly forced to partner with.
DICKFACE: Come over tonight and let’s talk. I miss you.
DICKFACE: Merritt baby this is so fucking dumb, I fucked up. I know I did and I swear to god on everything I love I’ll make it right.
DICKFACE: Just give me the chance to fix it.
DICKFACE: Fuck Merritt just talk to me.
DICKFACE: Whatever. I’m so tired of this bullshit. Remember, u did this. This is all on u. Not me.
DICKFACE: I’m sorry @3 I’m drunk as fk
I resist the urge to toss my phone across the room and settle for tossing it onto the bed beside my forgotten casebook.
Jesus, he’s such a fucking dick, and I have never been more thankful that he’s my ex and no longer my problem.
Truly, I know how to pick guys. I swear, whatever intuition, or radar, or whatever the hell you want to call it that girls are supposed to have in order to choose the right guy, the good guy… yeah, mine is horribly, irrevocably broken.
Apparently, the only guys that I know how to pick are ones who don’t actually want me.
I thought he was a good guy. He was patient and understanding when I couldn’t drive up to Lafayette to see him or had to cancel last minute because of stuff at home with Elliott or my dad. He said all the right things, paid attention, and made me feel special. Until he didn’t.
Until I found out it was all a lie. He was a lie. I realized it was love bombing to get me exactly where he wanted me. He never really cared about the things I liked beyond the surface.
I hate that I gave that idiot over a year of my life just for him to cheat on me with his “best friend.”
Yep, the one he swore up and down he was a hundred percent “just friends” with. That they’d been neighbors and best friends since they were in diapers, and she was practically family.
So, not only is he a lying, cheating, massive piece of shit… he’s also into incest.
Because I walked in on him fucking her.
I thought I would surprise him at his apartment one night when he got home late from an out-of-town trip with his boys. Drove two and a half hours just to walk in on my boyfriend railing another girl.
He couldn’t even deny it because I saw it with my own eyes.
That was at the end of summer, and he’s still texting and calling and randomly showing up to my house and the bookstore like that’s going to make me magically take his cheating ass back.
He’s relentless.
Go fucking figure that he transferred from ULL to OU during our senior year. I swear he did it just to push me over the edge.
A girl can only take so much.
I have no qualms about what his obsession with me was. He didn’t love me. He never loved me.
Truthfully, I’m not even sure he’s capable of loving anyone as much as he loves himself.
I was simply a trophy to him. And now that I broke up with his stupid, egotistical ass, he suddenly wants to treat me the way I should’ve been treated and “fix our relationship.”
I thought about blocking him, but seeing how desperate he is gives me the smallest hint of satisfaction, so I don’t.
Maybe I should once and for all.
My mind is racing as I slip out of bed, grab my iPod, and walk into my bathroom.
There’s one glaring common denominator when it comes to guys who have embarrassed me and made me feel like I was less than with the way they’ve treated me.
They’re both hockey players.
Go figure.
I don’t have a “no hockey player” rule because that’s just stupid. I mean, it’s not like they’re my type. I just have a no-idiot rule, and I’m strictly abiding by it.
I think the only reason I even gave Blake a real chance in the first place is that I didn’t have to give him instructions on where to find my clit or how to make me come.
Which is shockingly something half the guys I’ve hooked up with didn’t even attempt to try. All they care about is getting off, and then it’s over.
That’s the one and only thing my ex had going for him.
Pity that he ruined it all with his stupid dick that he couldn’t keep in his pants.
I sigh as I start lighting the array of candles scattered around my bathroom one by one before turning on the hot and cold handles and adjusting them to the hottest setting to fill the bathtub.
This is my happy place.
There is literally nothing better than sinking to my chin in scalding hot water with the scent of my favorite bubble bath surrounding me. Warm amber and vanilla that makes my brain feel light and my muscles relax while my iPod is plugged into my ears, and the rest of the world disappears.
Okay, the only thing better is maybe endless orgasms, but I’m currently short on those, so this will be the second-best thing.
I quickly shed my clothes and cut the lights, then dip my toe into the water, testing it.
Perfect.
I slowly sink into the water and rest my head along the back of the tub, letting my eyes drift shut while Billy Corgan croons in my ears.
Unlike the majority of people my age from OU who are currently out partying their asses off because it’s a Saturday night, I’m completely content right here.
It’s not that I don’t like a good party. Of course I do. I love going out with my girls and having fun.
But I’m also exhausted the majority of the time from school, working two jobs, and then, of course, there’s Elliott.
Someone has to be here to feed him and take care of him.
We couldn’t afford to have Annabelle here as much as I wish we could, so usually, it’s just the two of us.
He’s usually locked away in his room playing video games on the weekends, which leaves me lots of time to study and take as many scorching baths as I want.
I sink a little further down into the water. After the day I’ve had, I have fully earned this bath.