I know I should be careful, guard myself and all that—but I can’t seem to do that lately. Not with these three.
“Forget it,” Sterling says, shaking his head.
Sterling seems more stressed than usual, and not just because of Bridget or me.
“You know,” Warren teases, “if it bothers you that Aubrey is with Chase and me, you could always go be with my sister. You know how much she still has the hots for you.”
Sterling stands up from the table abruptly. Everyone knows that Warren is just joking, but Sterling doesn’t seem to be taking it in jest today. He shoves his chair against the table and walks off. Bridget tries to smile sweetly at him as he walks by her table, but he just ignores her and keeps right on walking. Not even three seconds after he has left the lunchroom, I can see Bridget excuse herself from her friends at the table and follow him out.
“It makes my skin crawl how she follows him around like a creepy stalker,” I say, with literal goosebumps on my skin.
But it’s more than that. As much as I like Sterling, I don’t trust him.
Not with girls. Not with me. And certainly not with the way each glance from him makes my heart skip just one too many beats.
“Who, Bridget?” Warren asks as he slides his hand under the table to place it on my thigh, any worries vanishing as I become completely unable to focus on anything else.
I like that.
It takes a couple minutes of Warren staring at me for me to finally formulate actual words to come out of my mouth.
“Yeah, your sister uses literally every chance she can get to try and cozy up to Sterling, even though he has made it painfully obvious to her that he isn’t interested,” I answer.
“Please don’t tell me that you’re jealous,” Warren says with a sigh.
“No, I’m not jealous of Bridget.” I slide my hand beneath the table too and wrap my fingers around his. “I just think it’s pathetic and annoying.”
But come on, anyone with ears would know that’s a lie. I am jealous. Extremely jealous.
“It is pathetic and annoying,” Warren agrees, and I know he’s not just talking about Bridget. “But trust me when I say that it’s easiest to just let my sister do what she’s going to do without trying to interfere. She hates interference.”
“Obviously,” I say, remembering all the times last semester that Bridget made me suffer.
“If you ask me,” Chase interjects. “It’s Sterling who is being the truly pathetic and annoying one here. I mean, he has two girls that are into him and yet somehow he still finds a way to be moody?”
Chase’s remark might have been delivered a bit crassly, but the point is still there.
Sterling is acting much more on-edge than normal. I guess he isn’t as comfortable with the fact that I kissed the other two guys too, not that his reaction is surprising to me.
It’s understandable, I guess. I forget, sometimes, that Warren’s hold over the other two is only so much—at least when Sterling I concerned. I know in the end Warren will get what Warren wants, but that doesn’t mean Sterling won’t fight him every step of the way.
It’s a thought that doesn’t exactly sit easy with me.
I don’t want Sterling to fight. Not when he’s fighting whether or not he can be with me the way I’d like him to be.
This was supposed to be easier. But like all things, it’s turning out to be more complicated than I’d hoped.
Either way, there are only a few more days left until the gala. I need to focus on passing my exams so that I can get the hell out of here and into a real college instead of this stupid reform school.
And away from them; from Warren, from Chase, from Sterling.
It’s a thought that makes my drive to get out of Ridgecrest dwindle just a little bit each passing day … until I remember they’re going to the gala too.
They’ll get out of here early if they can, so why shouldn’t … wouldn’t I do the same?
But even though I have these very important things to work out—or maybe especially because I have so much on my mind—I want to make sure that I have time with each of the boys alone. It’s when we’re alone that I can get a little more intimate with each of them. I need to sort out my feelings for them, and what better way to do that than some incognito make out sessions.
I mean, better to kill two birds with one stone, am I right?
Chapter Eighteen
“God, can we just stay in here and do this all day long?” Sterling asks when he pulls his lips just far enough from mine to be able to talk.
We’re inside one of the empty classrooms that doesn’t get used anymore. I think it’s essentially just a storage room for old textbooks at this point. Being one of the smaller rooms there aren’t any windows, and the coolest part about it is that you can lock the door from inside which has made it the perfect place to sneak away for a couple of hours.
There’s something about Sterling that makes me feel so inexplicably, irrevocably alive. I know it’s probably because he’s like the male version of the manic pixie dream girl—someone who I know could at any moment just flit out of my life and leave me forever changed.
Because try as I might to keep my distance from him, that’s a bit hard to do when his lips are pressed to mine.
“Remind me how you knew this place existed?” I ask, if for no other reason than to force my mind to clear a little bit.
I can feel my eyebrow lifting in curiosity as I genuinely wonder how Sterling just happened to know the location of an abandoned classroom on campus that
