I scowled. I hated it when he looked at me like that, but I wondered right then if I’d miss it if he suddenly stopped. I had a feeling I would.
I wondered if he’d miss it if I stopped staring back.
“Do you have another class now?” Weston asked.
I pulled myself away from Donovan’s piercing gaze and found Weston holding my bag out for me. “Thank you. And nope. Break until two.” I shuffled into the aisle after him. “You?”
“I usually meet up with a friend for lunch.”
I nodded. I’d thought for a moment he was going somewhere with his questioning. Guess he was just being polite.
But then he cocked his head in my direction. “Join us?”
The friend, it turned out, was Brett Larrabee. I’d been aware of Brett from the parties at The Keep, but we’d never officially met, and I was glad for the introduction. An extremely extroverted, politically conservative, openly homosexual African American, Brett was an oxymoron, and I found him absolutely intriguing.
He was also quite a talker. He’d led us to a small Japanese café, that was surprisingly not busy considering how good the food was, and proceeded to monopolize the majority of the conversation while we ate.
I didn’t mind. I was happy just to be included on the excursion. Every few minutes I had to remind myself I was awake, that this wasn’t a dream. That I was actually sitting at a table making a fool of myself with chopsticks in front of Weston King.
“The DOW is down, the DOW is down, the DOW is down,” Brett said with weary distress as he scrolled through his financial app on his phone. Even though he talked a lot, he still managed to eat the fastest. He’d finished and had been playing on his cell for the last five minutes. “The Fed better not raise interest rates. It is not the time.”
“Dad says it’s coming soon,” Weston said, pushing away his plate.
“Oh!” Brett’s head popped up with the news of something he’d just remembered. “Did you hear about Theodore Sheridan?”
Theo. I dropped my sticks at the mention of his name. Fortunately, I’d dropped them so many times, no one noticed. Hopefully no one noticed my hands shaking as I took a sip of my water, my throat suddenly dry.
Weston considered a minute. “Nothing interesting I can think of.”
Then you didn’t hear the one where he almost raped a girl in front of your own porch? At least it was reassuring to know that Donovan hadn’t told all his roomies. Not that I’d thought he was much of the sharing type.
Brett bent over the table and lowered his voice. “He got busted with more than a kilo of coke.”
“And you’re just mentioning this now?” Weston asked, as if reading my mind. Maybe Theo wasn’t a close enough friend for him to consider it headline news, but it was to me.
That wasn’t something I cared for anyone to know, though, so I kept my head low, scooting noodles around in my bowl. I’d lost any appetite that remained the minute I’d heard his name.
“Huh,” Weston said, running his hand through his hair. “I knew he had a problem with blow, but what the fuck was he doing to draw attention to himself?”
“I don’t know, but he was charged with intent to sell.”
“Theo doesn’t need money. He got his entire trust fund at eighteen.”
“He’s saying it’s all cooked up charges or something. Whatever. Daddy Sheridan will get him off, but he’s out for the year here.”
“Crazy.”
While it was a relief to think that Theo wouldn’t be around anymore, I didn’t get too excited by the thought that he’d face any prison time. Brett was right—his money and his privilege would get him off. Whether it was drugs or rape, he had the get out of jail free card.
Brett, seeming to be done with the Theo scandal, was ready for other gossip. “Did Numbnuts teach today?” he asked, leaning his chair back onto two legs.
“Actually,” Weston said, raising a brow in my direction, “it was Fuckwaffle.”
“That’s a nice one.” Brett turned his admiration to me. “You don’t like Donovan? I have to hear this."
Did I like Donovan? What a loaded question. My emotions where Donovan was concerned were like paperclips—I couldn’t pick up one without several others coming with it. I was grateful to him and resentful. Angry and preoccupied.
It wasn’t something I could begin to explain to myself, let alone someone I’d just formally met. Tugging on my ponytail, I tried to think like a typical disgruntled student. “He’s just…you know. A pompous, egotistical know-it-all. What about you guys? You live with him.”
Weston exchanged a glance with Brett. “That we do. And like I said, I love him like a brother. But sometimes brothers are hard to love. Do you have one?”
It was a smooth change of subject, one I wasn’t about to contest. Brett went back to playing with his phone, so I focused my answer just to Weston. “I have a sister. Audrey. But she’s easy to love. She’s thirteen and awkward and adoring.”
Weston sat back in his chair, crossed his arms over his chest, and crossed his legs at his ankles. “She probably puts her eighteen-year-old sister up on a pedestal.”
“Seventeen,” I corrected.
“Seventeen?”
“I graduated high school early.”
“Kudos. That’s impressive.”
“Thank you.” I averted my eyes, embarrassed by the compliment, and sighed. “I’m still not sure I did the right thing deciding to come to school so far away from home.”
“Where are you from?” he asked and it almost felt like more than small talk, like he really wanted to know.
“Colorado, but it’s not really the distance that’s the thing. It’s that my mother died when I was twelve, and I feel bad leaving my dad and Audrey alone.” I knew he probably didn’t get it. He was from a world of nannies and chauffeurs and housekeepers and tutors. There was no such thing as alone. “What about you? Do you have siblings? Not like Donovan, but blood related?”
He’d started nodding before I’d finished the question. “I have a sister. She’s ten, and we’re in completely different worlds.” He puckered his lips as he thought, which was ridiculously unfair, since I was already on hormone overload. “I really grew up closer to Donovan, even though he’s four years older than me. We went to the same school, were on the same chess teams. We row together. Our families vacation together. I’ve always had him to look up to.” He sat up straighter, leaning in as if confiding in me. “I guess I idolized him growing up.”
“But not now?”
“It’s different now.”
He let that hang, and I searched for the right words to prod further while, at the same time, trying to understand exactly why I wanted to know more—because the answer said something about Weston? Or because it said something about Donovan?
I decided not to prod.
But then Brett said, “He’s not the same since Amanda died. I’m a sophomore, so I didn’t know him very long before that.”
“Amanda?” Okay. I was definitely interested.
“Brett—” Weston warned.