Chapter 31
Hadley
I followed Savannah out of the library. She walked with purpose, and I eventually caught up.
“When’s your next class?” she asked me.
“Tomorrow.” She glanced at me. “I already missed today; I had an early class, I missed it.”
She sighed. “The tutor in me hates hearing that.” She glanced at her watch. “I have just over an hour, we need to find him quickly.”
“Should Dante be worried you know where Noah is?” I asked her, only half joking.
Savannah grinned. “I know where they are all the time,” she said with a wink. “Just don’t tell them.”
“Huh?” I didn’t know what she meant.
“I have access to their schedules.” She pointed at herself. “Tutor, remember?”
“So where is he?”
Savannah pointed to a small building behind the coffee shop. “That is the office of Dr. Phillip Waterman,” she said as we walked. “Dr. Phil, I kid you not, is on sabbatical. But in his room, he has a projector, and Noah watches old films of games in there every Thursday, for an hour, before noon.”
“That’s on his schedule?” I asked dubiously.
“Nah. He told Dante, and Dante told me.”
“Jesus, you two are nosy bastards,” I mumbled.
Savannah knew exactly where she was going, and pretty soon, we were knocking on a green door in a really old part of the college. When he didn’t answer, Savannah opened the door and popped her head around it. She looked back at me.
“Come see this.”
I followed her inside. Noah was slumped in his seat, head tipped back, sound asleep.
“Should we leave?” I asked her quietly.
“Hell no.” Savannah crept up behind him and then shouted, “Wake up!” in his ear.
Noah jumped, swung, and punched the dean’s daughter right in the face.
My hands were over my mouth, Noah looked at me in horror, and we both looked down at Savannah, who was blinking on the floor as if she couldn’t understand why she was suddenly flat on her back. It took one slow-motion second of dreadfulness, and then her nose started to bleed.
“Oh shit!” Noah crouched down. “Fuck, Savvy, I’m so fucking sorry.” He offered her a hand.
I dug in my purse for tissues, and then I was kneeling on the ground beside her. “Here, take this.” I pressed the tissue to her nose and glanced at Noah, who looked sick.
“What the fuck, Matthews?” I whispered to him. “That was insane!”
He looked at me wide-eyed. “What the hell do you expect when someone creeps up on you?”
“It’s not swing first, ask questions later.” I helped Savannah sit up. “Savvy? Are you okay?”
She had tears running down her face, but she nodded. She gripped Noah’s hand. “Not your fault.” She didn’t sound like herself; she sounded like she was underwater.
“I can’t believe you hit her,” I muttered, switching out tissues. I took the tissue away from her. “Is it broken? I don’t know if it’s broken.”
Noah leaned forward and hesitantly raised his hands. “Savvy? Can I see?” She nodded, and he lifted the tissue. “I think it’s okay, but we need ice and a towel.” He looked at me, his eyes wide. “What now?”
“Ice and towel, what are you waiting for? Go!”
When the door closed behind him, I looked back at Savannah. “Okay. You can let it out.” She sagged into my arms and started to cry.
“It hurt’th sho bad,” she mumbled. “I can’t feel my face, but it also feelth like my head ith exploding.”
I nodded. “I know, hon. I’m so sorry, I . . .” I grabbed another tissue. “Note for future you, don’t wake up Noah by screaming in his ear when he’s sleeping.” I squeezed her hand. “Or, you know, don’t wake him up at all. Ever.”
The door opened, and Noah was back with a towel and a cup of ice. “Coffee shop,” he explained.
“Did you teleport?”
“No, I ran.”
Jesus.
“I called Dante, he’s coming.”
Savannah gave him an exaggerated look as I put the cloth over her face. “He’th going to overreacth.”
I gave her a flat stare. “Mmhmm, I wonder why.” I glanced at Noah; he looked devastated. “You okay?”
“No,” he told me like I was an idiot. “I just punched my friend in the face and almost knocked her out.”
I snickered. He looked affronted. Savannah giggled at his reaction. I hit her shoulder because she was making him worse. She winced, and I giggled louder.
“Why the fuck are you both laughing?” he asked us, bewildered.
“Because apart from the blood, snot, and tears, it’s a little bit funny,” I told him. I scooted closer to Savannah. “Tip your head back.”
The three of us were still on the floor, adding more ice and trying to find non-bloody bits of the cloth for her, when the door flew open, and Dante strode in, with a disheveled Dustin behind him. Dante took one look at Savannah, and Noah was on his feet.
“It was an accident, I was asleep and—”
Dante’s fist connected before Noah finished the sentence. Noah’s head barely moved, but his eyes flashed with anger, and his jaw set.
“Fuck you,” Noah said quietly as he walked to the door. “It was an accident.” He walked out.
“Why dith you hit him?” Savannah demanded.
“Because you’re bleeding and saying ‘dith,’” Dante growled, scooting closer to her on the ground. “Why are you on the floor? Come on, let me see,” he said to her so gently and carefully, I wouldn’t have known he was the same guy who just punched Noah.
“What happened?” Dustin asked tiredly.
“Hey.” I walked over to him and settled against the table he was leaning against. “You look like shit.”
“Thanks.”
Savannah wriggled out of Dante’s hold. “At leasth you don’t look like me.”
“There’s that,” Dustin conceded. “How did it play out?”
“We wanted to ask Noah something, Savvy said he’d be here when we came in, but he was fast asleep.” I grimaced. “Savvy woke him up by screaming in his ear.”
Dustin winced. “Ouch. He woke up swinging, I take it?”
I nodded. Savannah and I shared a look. “I was a bit hard on him,” I admitted.
“Yeah, guess we all were. I think I’d have done the same if someone was screaming at me.” He didn’t look at Dante. “I’ll go find him.”
“Dust!” Dante called after him. “Are you sure?” His eyes flicked to me.
Dustin’s shoulder sagged. “Fuck, I almost had a moment to forget. Uh, Hadley, I need to talk to you.”
“Later, I’m kind of busy.” He was going to give me the whole ‘it was a one-time thing’ speech. I didn’t need to hear it.
“You need to go with Dust, Hadley.” The way Dante looked at me, I stood up straighter.
“Savannah?”
“I’m going to shout at Thante.”
I smirked. “Thante? You’re going to shout at him? Okay. Good luck with that.” I picked up my purse. “C’mon, Slater.”
We didn’t go far; he found an empty classroom and led me inside. He closed the door and leaned against it.
I waited patiently. He didn’t speak; in fact, he struggled to look at me.
Well, this was going to be excruciating.
“Okay, I know what you’re going to say. It was late, we were emotional, tired, and not thinking straight. We fucked, it’s fine. It’s not a big deal.”
His scowl was so fierce that he looked like he was squinting. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Excuse me?” My hands were on my hips.
“We fucked. It’s fine?” He looked pissed off. “Not a big deal?”
“You want me to wear a promise ring, Slater?”
“Oh, fuck off, Peterson.” He turned to leave, but stopped, his head banging against the door, his hand on the handle, knuckles white. He kept banging his head gently off the wood.
“Are you trying to make sure Savvy doesn’t feel left out if she gets two black eyes?”
His huff of laughter made me feel a tiny bit better.
“I need to talk to you,” he said, his forehead on the door. “And I have no idea how to tell you this.” He turned to me. “I need you to see something,” he said. “And you’re not going to like it.”
I ran my tongue over my top teeth as I watched him. He looked genuinely sick. “You have an STD?”
He shook his head slightly as if to clear it. “Fuck, seriously?”
I shrugged. “Dude, you’re acting as if you’ve given me something, it makes sense that I ask.”
“It makes sense that . . .” He shook his head as he watched me. “No,” he said flatly. “Just listen.”
I pressed my lips together, looking away from him. “Okay.”
“Your brain is wired weird.”
“Yeah, it’s my fault, I asked the known player if he had an STD.”
“I already fucked you!” He looked confused and angry. “You want to know that answer, you ask before I stick my dick in you.”
I held my hands up. “Wow.” I picked up my purse. “I mean, wow.”
“You can’t leave.” Dustin grabbed my elbow as I walked past. He tugged me into the side of his body. His forehead came down to rest against my temple. “Not yet.”
I held still, because as much as I wanted to lean into him, I knew that whatever he was apologizing for was going to be bad. “Tell me.”
He stepped away, and I instantly missed his warmth. He pulled his phone out. “You need to see this.”
Hesitantly, I reached out and took his phone. The breath left my body in one whoosh.
My eyes were wide as I looked at myself, on my knees, on the sidewalk, ready to swallow Dustin’s cock. “Whoa, fuck, that’s not a good pic.”
He snorted. “No, it is not.”
“Who sent this to you?” I asked him, eyes wide, handing him his phone back.
“I don’t know.” He held my stare, and I felt my fingers go numb.
“Dustin . . . that looks really bad.”
“I know.” He closed his eyes. He took a deep breath. “I don’t know who sent it, or what they want — but they dragged you into it.”
I was thinking quickly. “So it’s not out there yet?” I asked him, opening my phone and checking every social media platform I knew of.
“I don’t think so. The good thing is, you’re not clearly identified.”
I rolled my eyes as I typed into search engines. “Anyone with a brain cell will put us together. The length of my hair isn’t common.”
“Right, your hair.” He looked like he was considering cutting it.
“We can get ahead of this,” I told him. I pointed at my neck. “You gave me a hickey.”
He looked at my neck, and then at me. “Oh.”
“You’re twenty. People our age don’t go around sucking necks like high schoolers—”
“What?”
“Shut up, I’m thinking.” I put my hands behind my neck and stared at him. “Okay, we can fix this.”
“How?”
“We take their power away.”
Dustin stilled. “I need more words, Peterson.”
“Blackmail, it’s about power. It’s the knowledge that someone has something over you that you don’t want other people to know. Something scandalous. Like the wide receiver for the championship-winning Lions getting his cock out on a weeknight for a girl to suck him off in the street.”
He grimaced. “Do you want to say it louder, Hadley?” he demanded.
“Yes. I do.” I nodded as I thought it through. “At this moment in time, their threat to out you — and me by default — is their power. So we take that away.”
“You said that. How? I am not leaking that picture,” he said seriously.
“No. Obviously, Jesus, virgins everywhere will weep with fear if they think every guy is carrying a monster like that around.”
“Are you helping me, or insulting me?”
I shrugged. “Both.” I gestured to him. “Come here.” He walked forward hesitantly, and I grabbed his arm. “Say cheese.” I took a picture. “Take another one, you look terrified.” I kissed him on the cheek, and when he turned to ask me a question, I kissed him and snapped the picture.
I walked away from him. Then I adjusted the lighting, blurred out the background, and then, with a deep breath, I uploaded it to my socials.
“What have you done?” Dustin asked me.
“I just set the narrative and announced our relationship,” I told him, heart pounding.
“If we look like a couple, act like a couple, and be a couple, then the picture of me on my knees ready to service my hot boyfriend’s cock loses its power.
Is it still inappropriate? Absolutely. Is the person who took the picture morally at fault for an invasion of privacy?
Abso-fucking-lutely. But they no longer have leverage. ”
He looked confused. Maybe. Or it could be shell shock.
I smiled at him. “I took the power back. You’re welcome.”
I waited for him to correct it. He didn’t. Instead, Dustin watched me like I was some exotic animal he’d never seen before. “I don’t know whether you’re a genius or batshit crazy.”
“It’s a fine blend, depending on the weather, I think.” I gave him a smug smile. “You should be thanking me, on your knees, Slater.”
He was watching me closely. “Did you take the picture?” When I didn’t immediately answer, he realized I didn’t know what he was talking about. “The picture I just showed you. Did you set it up?”
I gave him a flat stare. Was he serious?
“No, Slater. If I’d taken it, honey, I’d have waited until those Draft dollars hit your bank account and then taken my paycheck.” I saw his eyes widen. “Oh my God, I’m joking.”
“You scare the shit out of me, Peterson.”
“Won’t it make foreplay fun, though?”
“So we’re fake dating?” He didn’t look happy.
“’Fraid so.” I laughed at the look on his face as I walked out of the classroom.
Now all I had to do was find the creepy asshole who got their rocks off watching me and Dustin make out.
No one fucked with me and thought I was the story.
I chased the story.
It sure as hell didn’t chase me.