I said nothing, biting my tongue. Mostly because my mind was elsewhere, on Kelsey, on Grady, on what they’d be doing together once they reached his car in the parking lot. It was a ten-minute walk, but knowing her, with how angry she was, she probably made them walk fast. She was doing this to get back at me for what she thought was my fault, and if I told her that Dean was the man behind it, I knew I’d sound like I was just trying to set aside the blame.
Would she even believe me at this point? Would she even listen to a single word I said?
“Lovesick fools are easy to break, you know,” Dean informed me, something I already knew.
The truth? The truth was the hardest ones to crack were those who had closed themselves off to the world. Until recently, I’d thought that was me, but Kelsey came and showed me that I was wrong.
She’d broken down the walls I’d put up effortlessly, and I’d be damned if I was going to let her go and fuck Grady. No, that girl belonged to one man on this campus, and that one man was me.
Chapter Twenty – Kelsey
Grady was cute enough, I guess. He wasn’t as tall as Levi or as muscular as him, but he’d do the trick. He’d dropped his drink in their front lawn, and after I asked him where his car was, he’d told me in the front of the lot, so that’s where we went.
“Are we really going to hook up in my car?” Grady asked, obviously confused about this whole thing.
You know what? I was confused, too. I had no idea why I was hurrying along with Grady. Seeing Levi with that girl, his tongue down her throat…it made me a special type of angry, a certain kind of jealous I just couldn’t put a finger on.
Which was dumb, I knew, because Levi and I weren’t together. The bastard videotaped us having sex and released it online—there was no coming back from that.
The whole point of this night was to tell him off, but maybe telling him off and hooking up with someone else would kill two birds with one stone. Get my mind and my body off him. Grady was cute enough.
Cute enough would have to do for now.
Grady’s car was a beat-up station wagon two rows in, and he had me pressed against the passenger side door immediately, mostly because I’d thrown my arms around his neck and rammed my back against his car. No alarms went off, thankfully. We weren’t by a light pole, so nothing but cars and darkness surrounded us.
Grady kissed me. Or, well, he tried to. When his lips met mine, it was sloppy and smelled of alcohol. I had no idea how much this one had drunk before I’d showed up, but there was no way the party had been going on for that long. Though it was dark out, it was still early in the night, it being a Friday and all.
I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d be able to get it up. Alcohol tended to mess that shit up—
Ah, nope. There it is, I told myself when I started to feel a pressing hardness against my hip. We were on much more even ground than I was with Levi, so with the right angle I could grind myself against him and focus on that instead of the awful way he kissed.
At least, that was the plan, until Grady was ripped off me by a strong hand, his body slammed against the car beside us. Levi stood there, fuming. Grady’s eyes were wide, and even in the darkness, you could tell he was scared. I didn’t blame him, because as I stood there, watching Levi’s fist grab Grady’s collar, I couldn’t help but be a little scared too.
I’d never seen Levi this angry before.
No. Maybe scared wasn’t the right word. More like curious, intrigued…maybe even a bit turned on. No one had ever gotten into a fight for me before, no one had ever actually chased after me.
Levi didn’t even look at me, didn’t grace me with the glower on his face, but I heard the venom in his voice when he told Grady, “If you ever think about touching her again, I’ll rip your dick off and feed it to you.” Spoken with a level tongue, the kind of threat that wasn’t really a threat but a promise.
“Dude, you can have her,” Grady muttered, practically running away once Levi let go of him.
I watched, unashamed, as Levi turned to me. He’d kissed that girl, I kissed Grady. I mean, we weren’t together anymore. That’s what people did, right? They moved on.
It was as our eyes met in the darkness that I started to wonder if I’d ever truly be able to move on. What we had was short, whatever the hell it was, but it was nothing like I’d ever had.
“You don’t have the right to decide what I do or who I do it with.” I planned on saying more, on saying a hell of a lot more, but Levi whirled on me, pinning me against Grady’s car. My eyes were level with his chest, and I was slow to lift them, meeting his dark blue stare.
“You’re a fucking idiot,” he whispered, never one to mince words or even compliment me.
“And you were kissing a pretty blonde, in case you forgot, so I think I have every right to be whatever kind of idiot I want, whether it’s a fucking idiot or just a plain idiot,” I told him, reminding him of the
