“I can try and find some extra time…maybe on the weekends?” I suggested before I could stop my mouth from running away with me. I’d literally never offered a student a portion of my free time before. That was my own. But this wasn’t just about her training. It was about Saint Memphis too. That was what I cared about. And if it got her out of his clutches a little more often as a bonus then I was even more prepared to do it.
“I’d really like that,” she said, a genuine smile gracing her full lips.
She was still straddling me. We’d both caught our breath, I’d clearly lost our bout, there was no reason for us to be in this position. I should have been telling her to get up, but I didn’t.
Tatum shifted a little like she was thinking the same thing, her back arching as she pressed down on my chest through her gloves like she was about to stand. But she still didn’t. And for a moment, I didn’t feel like I was looking at a student, I was just looking at a girl. A girl with blue eyes which beckoned me to dive into their depths and full lips which were toying with a smile. A girl who was wearing a push-up sports bra that I’d been trying not to notice for the last hour and a girl who was currently sitting with her thighs spread over my hips.
I shifted forward suddenly, sitting up and sliding her back before she got a hint of where my mind had just wandered to from my dick swelling between us.
That would be just what I needed. A student telling the headmaster that I’d tried to dry hump her during a training session. Nice job, asshole.
I pushed her back until her ass hit the mat between my thighs and we were sitting looking at each other with too much expectation hanging in the air between us.
I knew what she wanted from me. She wanted some magical solution to her troubles with the Night Keepers and I really wished I could offer her that. But the only thing I could really do was support her in this plan to bring them down. And I also knew that what I was pushing for would only throw her further into their net too. But the problem with those boys was that they were like a dog with a bone. There was no way she was escaping their teeth unless she pulled them out one by one.
“Have you made any progress with them?” I asked, not needing to say who I meant.
She drew her legs back off of mine and crossed them beneath her as she thought about that.
“Maybe. It’s hard to say for sure. I can’t get anywhere with Blake anyway. He hates me with a venom so toxic it infects me even without me getting close. He’s just hurting so much that he’s blinded by it, consumed by it and I’m afraid of what will happen when all of that pain comes to a head.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen some of that myself.” Blake’s game on the football pitch had been suffering lately. He was growing hot headed, losing control and suppressing his grief. The way he was acting could only really end one way. Badly.
“The worst part about it is that I feel like such an idiot for buying into his charm before all of this. I was even warned about it. Mila told me what would happen if I hooked up with him, but I-”
“You and Blake were together?” I interrupted her, my tone sharper than I’d meant it to be. “As in, you fucked him?”
Her lips popped open as if I shouldn’t have said that. And fuck, I definitely shouldn’t have said that. But I was surprised, she seemed like a smart girl, I just hadn’t expected her to join the queue waiting to screw the Night Keepers’ fuckboy.
“Are you seriously judging me for getting laid?” she growled, those blue eyes flashing in warning.
“I’m not judging you for getting laid,” I snapped. “Everyone likes fucking, princess, it’s what we’re built to do. I’m judging you for choosing Bowman when you could have had your fucking pick.”
Her lips parted as a blush touched her cheeks beneath her freckles and the look was so fucking cute that I couldn’t quite manage to stay mad at her. When the innocent act wasn’t being faked, she really could pull it off.
“I just thought I’d be ghosted afterwards,” she managed to say, dropping her gaze to her red boxing gloves as she pulled them off. “I didn’t realise he’d turn into an actual psychopath and start acting the way he has been. I mean, Christ, when we were together that night he was funny and sweet and generous and so fucking-” She cut herself off and glanced up at me like she’d just realised she was telling her teacher about how it had felt to be screwing someone and that blush only heated beneath her freckles.
“At what point did he suddenly change then?” I asked, as my mind absolutely didn’t linger on the word generous. Because I really doubted that she meant he’d paid for her drinks all night. I was gonna guess that reference had more to do with the things he’d done to her body when they were alone together. Things that had made her pant and beg and scream- I realised she was talking again and bit down on my tongue to cut off those fucking ideas.
“The next morning…he got a phone call in the night from his dad and disappeared for hours. I fell asleep when he was gone but when he came back he was just so…hateful. I didn’t realise it at first, but after we, um…” She blushed again and I could hazard a good guess at what they’d done. Not that I gave a shit. “Anyway, afterwards he basically said thanks and can you fuck off now. So I did. I put it down to him having gotten what he wanted from me and assumed we’d leave it there and forget all about it.”
“But he didn’t?” I asked, pushing even though I could tell she didn’t really want to tell me. But I wanted to know. It didn’t really make any difference to my plans either way, but I wanted to hear it from her lips. I wanted more ammo to stoke my hatred of these spoiled, entitled pricks who thought it was alright for them to use people and throw them away like it didn’t matter at all.
“When I went to breakfast after I’d gotten changed in my dorm, he and the other Night Keepers had found out about my dad.” Tatum studied her gloves like she couldn’t bear to look at me as she told this story and my blood heated as I forced myself to listen to it. “They got all of the students to throw fish stew all over me. And Blake also…played the audio of us having sex for everyone to hear…”
I pushed myself to my feet with a snarl of rage, pacing away from her as I threw my gloves into the corner of the room.
“He filmed you without your permission?” I growled. “And he distributed it? He can be prosecuted for that, he could go to juvie, he could-”
“He didn’t distribute it,” she said, looking up at me from her spot on the floor like she was surprised to see how angry I was. “He just cut some of the audio around and played it on loudspeaker to make it sound like I’d known about my dad and the Hades Virus. I guess he’d tricked me into saying certain things he could use for that. No one else has a copy as far as I know.”
“So he didn’t actually video you?” I asked, finding some relief in that at least.
She bit her bottom lip like she didn’t want to say the next part, but I pinned her in my stare until she was forced to speak.
“He did. He just didn’t share the video publicly.” That blush was lighting her up from the inside out and my pulse tumbled over itself as I looked at her. “But he played it for me and Kyan to watch at The Temple-”