“No, not pity,” Warren says as he reaches over to hold my hand. He hesitates for a moment longer than Sterling did. “Just … the kind that means we don’t want to see you go off to that school alone.”
“Or any school alone,” Chase says, his eyes alight. “And I’m not afraid to put a word to it, even if Warren is.”
Suddenly he’s up on his knees, his hands cradling my face in his. “I love you, Aubrey. We all do. So fucking much.”
I’d wanted that to be the word that was said. I’d wanted it but didn’t let myself hope for it.
How crazy it is to think that we all hated each other not too long ago. Hated.
Or maybe we didn’t. Maybe we just hated the fact that there was something drawing us all to each other that none of us understood.
Not that I do now.
What I do know, however, is that nothing can ruin this moment right now, not even Sterling’s father.
“What are you doing?” Bridget shrieks as she stomps down the hall toward us with her heels clicking against the ground as if they are going to crack the floor wide open. “What in the hell is this?”
I was wrong.
There was one thing—one person—who could ruin it.
She stops right in front of us and glares at each of us, first each one of the boys in turn, and then lastly at me. The glare she gives me is the most vile.
“Oh, give it a rest already, Bridget,” Sterling says to her without even bothering to let her get him riled up. “Not everything has to be turned into some huge drama-filled catastrophe just to get attention for yourself.”
That succeeds in enraging her even more.
“All of you?” she shouts with her mouth hanging open.
I guess it’s pretty obvious seeing as how the four of us have our arms and legs and hands intertwined together. Maybe we could have all gotten up real fast and tried to step away from each other and pretend that we all just happened to be here at the same time by accident … but at this point I think that we’re all just pretty sick of dealing with drama.
And from the look on Warren’s face, on all their faces, I’m not the only one who’s gotten tired of hiding.
“All three of you are into Aubrey? You have got to be kidding me,” she says. She stops her scowling and scolding just long enough to make a kind of disapproving snort.
“Do you realize how pathetic it is for even one of you to want to date this girl? Talk about slumming it. She’s broke, her parents have disowned her, and she has a well-established reputation for being the reform school slut. Seriously, you could not have sunk any lower if you tried,” she says with an arrogant tilt of her chin, so she’s practically staring down her nose at us. “But for all three of you to be okay with not only sharing the same girl, which is disturbing enough as it is—but sharing this girl. God, even I am embarrassed for you.”
She turns her look solely on Warren next.
“Mom and dad are going to absolutely freak when they hear about this.” Bridget has a conniving smirk and squinted eyes that make it look as if she is thinking of some way to bribe her brother into doing everything that she wants in order to buy her silence and keep this a secret from their parents. She intends to use this to hang over his head, much like I’ve been hanging her secret over hers.
And just as she did to me.
“Tell them whatever you want to,” Warren says without so much as a moment of hesitation. “I don’t give a shit what you tell them. I don’t care if they know. Do you really want to stay tied to the leash that our parents keep us on forever, Bridget? Don’t you want to make your own life?”
“And by that I assume you think that you’re going to forge some new path here with this vagabond hooker?”
“Careful,” Sterling snarls at her.
“Or what?” Bridget spits back at him. “What are you going to do Sterling? I’ll tell you what you’re going to do—absolutely nothing. And do you know why? Because I’m going to turn you all in for breaking the rules and I’ll make sure that all three of you get expelled. Good luck getting into a good college again after getting kicked out of reform school. That sets the bar pretty damn low.”
“What rules have we broken?” Chase asks. “There’s literally nothing that you can turn us in for. We haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Oh please, there’s at least a half dozen offenses that I could report each of you for and you know it.”
Bridget laughs and I brace myself for what she’ll say next. But then I remember that I still hold the cards with Bridget. I still have her secret as leverage.
“Bridget, please,” I say, levelling her with a careful glare. “How about we all just let each other be. Surely you have better things to do here at the gala tonight than to harass the four of us.”
She looks at me for a minute and I think that I can actually see her biting the inside of her lip to keep herself from saying something else. Then, much to my surprise, she spins around on her heels and stomps away.
“Do you think she’s really going to report us?” Chase asks. “I mean, there’s a whole ton of shit that we’ve all done that could get us expelled, I’m just not sure how much of it she can actually prove.”
“I don’t think that she will,” I say, my gaze still staring after her retreating back.
“Well then you have a lot more faith in my sister than I do,” Warren says with a sigh. “I wouldn’t put anything past her.”
“Yeah, but she wouldn’t do
