“You’re dead to me, Natalie Mason!”
“Aw, I missed you, too!”
I slam my bedroom door behind me, bursting out in laughter. On the bed, Spencer’s shoulders shake and he holds a hand over his mouth to keep quiet, having heard Natalie’s entire homecoming.
In a hushed tone, I giggle, “I don’t know why you’re laughing. Guess who’s climbing out the window now.”
24
Spencer
“What are you doing?” Rowe asks when he comes home from a tutoring shift at the library and finds me on the couch.
I nod at the national basketball semifinals on the TV, since it’s pretty fucking obvious what I’m doing.
Gray drops his bag on the floor. “It’s Thursday.”
I raise an eyebrow in question.
“And you’re home.”
I grunt.
He squints, pushes up his glasses, and sends a perplexed glance to the other person in the room. Sprawled on an armchair, Hart shrugs, eyes on his phone. “Don’t look at me, Gray. When I asked, he told me to mind my own fucking business.”
Sinking slowly into the other armchair, Gray takes his laptop out. Sets it up on the coffee table, and, with one last confused glance at me, starts typing.
“You’re not fucking taking notes on me again, are you?” I ask.
“…No.”
“Stop being fucking weird, Gray,” Hart says. Then, he holds out his phone screen. “Check out what Rylie sent me.”
I keep my eyes on the game. “If it’s another fucking cat video, I’m shoving that phone up your ass.”
I might still be pissed that earlier in the week, on April Fool’s, he and his girlfriend had changed all the contacts in my phone to photos of cats. And switched all the ringtones to cat noises.
Half of me suspects Kennedy had been in on it. She’d asked to borrow my phone in Kellermann’s, claiming hers had died. I’d grudgingly, and unsuspectingly, handed it over. The moment she gave it back, my phone meowed with a new text alert.
“I’m telling my girlfriend you don’t want to see her pussy, Spence,” and he writes out the message.
“Did you pull a muscle training?” Gray pipes up.
“No.”
He types away.
A moment later, Hart’s phone dings. “Rylie says ‘Why don’t you want to see my pussy, Spence?’”
I growl, not bringing up that technically, it’s nothing any of us hadn’t seen, since Stone streaked across the football field last semester.
“Are there no parties tonight?”
“She wants to know if you think she’s purr-ty.”
“Can’t be that. It’s statistically impossible there’s no parties tonight.”
“Get it? Purr-ty?”
I count to five. Snap the hair tie around my wrist. But when Gray asks, “Did you eat undercooked food?”, I surge to my feet.
“I’m allowed to be in my own fucking house on a fucking Thursday night. Fucking hell, you fucking assholes.”
Damn, I need a drink. I stomp to the kitchen, leaving them tittering like schoolgirls as I grab a beer from the fridge. I pop the cap off on the counter edge, sending out a text as I take a gulp.
This is all your fault.
The phone purrs with a reply, sending my roommates into more hysterics.
I don’t know what you mean, the person on the other end, marked only as KFW, responds.
I grin with a shake of my head. She fucking knows. Kennedy’s hanging with Rylie tonight, who no doubt is telling her all about how she and Hart are messing with me.
“A-ha! I knew it,” Natalie’s voice interrupts me from replying. I glance up, and Mason shuts the door to the basement, which leads to Morris’s room.
“Knew what?” I ask, taking another drink.
“Don’t pretend you’re not happy with yourself, Armstrong,” she pouts, jabbing a finger in my side, her bracelets jingling. “I bet that was your plan all along. Get sick from a girl you saw on spring break, then bring your nasty cold home and get Theo sick, too. All so you can get smashed as much as you want.”
I smack her hand away.
Gray yells from the living room, “Are you still sick?”
“Fuck off,” I shout back.
It’s sort of the truth. I did see a girl during spring break. And Kennedy did get me sick. Because not a day after everyone returned to campus, I’d woken up feeling like total shit with a runny nose and a headache and shivers. That crap laid me out flat all last week. Kennedy profusely apologized over text for passing on her cold. Several times, she’d wanted to stop by and make sure I was okay. I’d told her no, since I didn’t want to get her sick again. And my friends had made sure I’d gotten better. Though their bedside manners left something to be desired.
I never intended for Morris to catch it. That’s just his shitty luck. Because, of course, he’d had to get sick the same week his father and the football scout were supposed to come into town. As it is now, they have to reschedule their visit. Which is fine by me. I’m using this week to catch up on classes I missed, and I’d had to lighten my training until my body felt well enough to go any harder.
“This is my first, and only, beer tonight,” I tell Natalie. And I only decided to have one because the other guys were bugging the hell out of me. “The fuck’s your problem?”
Natalie pouts, opening the fridge and grabbing a beer of her own. “I’m just cranky because Rylie and Kennedy are having a girls night without me, and Theo’s being a big baby.”
I shrug, and we sip our drinks in peace, listening to Rowe and Hart react to the game. Natalie glances at the basement door, her expression more concerned than cranky. I nudge her shoulder with mine. “Morris will be fine.”
After a moment, she nods. I nudge her again. “Invite them over.”
“Who—Rylie and Kennedy?”
I grunt into my beer bottle. Natalie’s eyes narrow in suspicion. “Spencer… are you being nice?”
“Fuck no. Hart’s being annoying as shit. Get Stone
