Chapter 21 Bennett
Bennett
“She’s fucking fine,” I mutter to myself before turning my phone face down on the bed. She has Briar with her and that girl is a Rottweiler.
I pace for about an hour, the textbook in hand, as I find myself reading the same paragraphs over and over.
When I check my phone again, her dot hasn’t moved. I wouldn’t find this weird except that it never moves. At all.
The decision is already made. I’m too impatient to wait for the elevator and run down the four flights, taking the steps two at a time and peeling out of the student parking lot.
I’d rather Clover hate me for the rest of the semester than for her to end up as just another body on their disgusting scoreboard.
I follow the route she took to the house and slam on my brakes at an intersection when a girl in a foil skirt spins out in front of me followed by a tall and slightly irritated redhead.
Immediately, I roll down my window and yell out to them. “Hey! Daisy! Briar!”
Daisy skips over to my window and her whole face lights up when she sees it’s me. “See, Briar! I told you he would come for her.”
“Come for who?” I ask, the blood in my veins pumping twice as hard. “Clover? Where is she?”
Daisy gives me a far-off smile before clasping my cheeks with both hands and kissing me on the forehead. “It’s cold!” she declares, and then opens the door to my back seat and lets herself in.
Briar strolls over to the window too slowly.
“Where is she?” I ask. “You just left her there?”
“We were literally on our way home and I was going to tell you to go pick her up. Chill, okay? She was fine. Just a little tipsy.”
“Get in the damn car,” I say, and hit my forehead against the steering wheel. “Isn’t there some kind of girl code that says not to ditch a girl at a party?”
Briar slides into the back seat beside Daisy. “Obviously, but the girl code doesn’t really have a decision tree that explains what to do when one friend is happily dancing at a party and the other is puking in an antique vase.”
I grab a plastic bag I stuffed under my seat the other day and pass it to Daisy. “Here.” I look in the rearview mirror at Briar. “You’re just going to sit in the back seat while I drive you both around like an Uber?”
“That’s the idea,” she says. “Better get to driving if you want that five-star rating, buddy.”
Daisy laughs like that’s the funniest thing she’s ever heard.
The two of them were only about a mile out from the house when I picked them up. I’d bet that Clover has been alone for thirty minutes or so.
I didn’t want to bring Tate up earlier tonight since he was the source of our explosive fight earlier this semester, but I guarantee that once he saw us fighting outside that house party, he decided that she would be on his hit list.
The guy is a patient fucker. He did this last year too.
He sets the trap early in the semester and does some harmless flirting.
He gets in a girl’s head and then he invites them to the house, and no one passes up the chance for an invite to 1919 Hemphill.
The girls with cards get marked with X’s and most assume it’s to denote partygoers under the age of twenty-one.
It’s a fair assumption because most of the girls who get a card are first-years.
“Show me your hands,” I say to Briar and Daisy.
Briar holds hers up and Daisy flings her body on top of the center console to show off her hands. Both girls are decorated with black X’s.
“Shit,” I mutter.
Each guy has their own color. Tate’s is black.
“Stay in the car,” I tell them as we turn down Hemphill.
“Yes, Dad,” Daisy says, and slumps against the back seat with her lids half closed.
I slam on the brakes in front of the house and don’t bother to check if I’ve parked legally. My phone is outstretched in my hand like a metal detector as I call Clover on speaker phone.
After a few seconds, a muffled ringtone leads me to a flower box under one of the windows where Clover’s phone is sticking out upside down.
Once I yank it out of the soil, I feel a little thrill at the fact that I am listed as husband .
I do take offense to the fact that my photo is a picture of Joffrey from Game of Thrones.
I know the layout of the place, as well as most of the guys who live here. There are the Rocco twins. Tate “Shitbag” Farris. One of the Garcia brothers and not the smart one. And then a few others who moved in this year that I have yet to meet.
It’s late. Nearly three. People are starting to pour out of the house, and there’s no one at the door to stop me. As if they could.
I make a lap around the first floor and then a nauseating thought occurs to me. What if Clover is in the basement?
The door leading downstairs is just off the kitchen. The smell hits me as soon as I take the first step. Weed and sex.
The basement of 1919 Hemphill is known as the Den of Misdeeds.
It is also home to the legendary scoreboard.
In a logical sense, I know that what Clover does with her body is none of my business.
Maybe I wish it was my business or maybe it’s archaic or maybe I’m just a bad person, but I can’t stand the thought of anyone else’s hands on her, especially Tate’s.
I can’t stand the thought of her down here in this basement with the kind of guys who always get exactly what they want.
It’s dark and hazy. An old Wexley Bears baseball scoreboard rests against the main wall, and where the innings would be listed are six names, two of which I don’t recognize. Beneath each name is a number, and Tate seems to be in the lead.
There are people on couches in half stages of undress.
The Garcia kid watches two drunk girls wrapped in caution tape make out with a hand gripping his crotch, and just beyond him is Tate with a girl straddling his lap while another is passed out beside them both.
I’m relieved to see that the girl’s hair is long, dark, and curly.
“Hey,” he says upon noticing me, the girl in his lap lazily licking at his neck. “Bennett Andrew Graves. I thought you were too good for 1919 Hemphill these days.”
“I’m looking for someone who came here tonight.”
“Lots of people in and out this evening,” he tells me as he bats the girl’s hand away from his chest. “Got a name? A picture?”
“You know who I’m here for. Clover. Where is she?”
The way his grin turns wolfish makes my stomach drop.
My hands clench into fists at my side. “You fucking shitbag. Has anyone ever told you how punchable your face is?” I ask him as I take a few steps closer. “Where is she?”
“Clover? She’s a real sweet one,” he tells me. “I’d never had a fat chick before and she’s pretty cute.”
I lunge toward him, and the girl on his lap clumsily slithers off just in time for me to gather his collar in my fist and yank him toward me.
He grins down at my left hand. “I thought her yappy little friend was kidding about the marriage thing. But look at you. A married man. I gotta admit, I’m shocked. You keep her on a pretty long leash, don’t you?”
I let go of his shirt with enough force to throw him back against the sofa. Tossing him around should make me feel better, but it does nothing to stop the anxiety clawing up my throat.
Tate makes a move to stand up, but I’m too close and towering over him.
If I put a hand on him again, I can’t promise I won’t do something that will require legal representation.
He leans back into the couch with his arms spread out across the tops of the cushions.
“Does your little wifey know that you’ve slept around on campus so many times your dick might as well be communal property? ”
He’s trying to bait me, but I’m not falling for it. “I swear to god, if you touched her, I will ruin you. Don’t think I won’t. The kind of money I have to play with makes your mother’s Silicon Valley divorce settlements look like pocket change. Now, where is she?”
He rolls his eyes. “Upstairs in my room.”
I leave him there and race up the steps, dodging a few lazy drunk bodies on the ground floor, and then up the dramatic staircase at the center of the house.
Tate’s room is the third on the left and when I open the door, I find Clover sleeping on her stomach.
Her foil outfit is in poor shape and it’s hard to say if that’s from wear or from Tate’s grubby-ass hands.
She’s wearing a pink set with little red cherries, and because I have absolute perversion for her, I can’t help but catalog that fact.
“Chill out, man,” Tate says from behind me. “She passed out up here like thirty minutes ago. I was going to let her sleep it off for a while.”
I turn on him and slam his body against the wall just outside his door with my forearm pressing into his neck.
He tries to roll his eyes, but he can hardly mask his panic as he sputters, his cheeks turning red, and so I push even harder into his throat. “We danced,” he coughs out. “Probably would have gotten further if I’d had more time with her.”
“That won’t be happening again.” I pin him with a grunt, the back of his head cracking against the wall, before letting him fall. “How did you meet her?”
He rings a hand around his neck while he catches his breath. “We have pottery together.”
“Not anymore. Drop the class. Get into another section. I don’t fucking care.”
“Yeah, not gonna happen.”
“Listen, you fucking piece of shit, I’m sure you plan on applying for the Bailey & Parsons prelaw internship next summer.”
He says nothing, which tells me all I need to know.
The Bailey & Parsons internship is the ultimate get for Wexley prelaw students, and the Graves family also keeps them on retainer.
“Should I call Bailey or Parsons?” I ask, holding my phone up.
“I have both of them right here in my contacts. Or you know what? I could just wait to see them at my mother’s New Year’s Eve party. ”
His lips purse, and he’s unable to hide that he’s seething.
“You think I’m bluffing?” I ask. “Try me. I would fucking love that.”
He gives the faintest of nods, and I leave him there while I go back into his room and slam the door shut behind me.