He was on the other side of the bushes, in the narrow pathway between the Science building and the forest that bracketed the left side of the property. At first, I thought he was just leaning against the wall smoking, looking like a modern day James Dean with his worn black leather jacket shrugged on over his school uniform, the curl of smoke escaping from his lips like a white scarf lifted in the cold wind. His hair was down and chaotic even though I’d noticed over the last few weeks that he liked to harness it with a little bit of leather cord he kept tied to his right wrist. He looked like a poster child for the original bad boy.
I was startled out of staring at him by the arrival of the same hulking man from the parking lot at Mac’s Grocer that had acted as his sidekick. He approached King with a chin lift, and then they did that ultra-masculine hand-clasp back-slap thing that I’d only seen people do in movies.
“Don’t like this,” King muttered as he threw his cigarette to the ground and crushed it with his boot.
“Bro,” was the only thing his friend said, yet it seemed to convey more.
King’s shoulders were hitched to his ears, his hands in his pockets as he kicked at the grass. “I know it’s gotta be done. Don’t like this shit at EBA, just sayin’. I worked fuckin’ hard to get in here, Mute.”
Mute. Appropriate name. He grunted in response.
“I mean, fuck, I get it. No one messes with The Fallen. But doin’ this at school is sketchy,” King griped, his hands in his hair making it even messier.
“Might not come to anything,” Mute suggested but King slanted him a ‘get real’ look and even he didn’t look too convinced.
“King, my man!”
All of our eyes shot to Carson Gentry. He was by far and away the richest boy at Entrance Bay Academy, and also one of the prettiest. As in, his eyelashes got caught in his eyebrows and his irises were a golden brown so deep a girl could fall into them like molasses. He had good hair, good teeth and a body honed by endless soccer practices. The EBA girls loved him more than they loved anyone. Or they had, until King Kyle Garro showed up in his leather jacket with all that golden hair and corruptible grin.
As one, King and Mute jerked their chins at him.
It wasn’t a practiced move but it screamed cool in a way that had Carson Gentry’s rich guy arrogance wilting.
“So, ugh, you got the good stuff?” he asked them.
Adrenaline coursed through me until the hair on the back of my neck stood on end.
Oh, my God.
Was I witnessing what I thought I was witnessing?
I frantically looked for a way out of the situation. If I could sneak away before I truly heard anything, I didn’t have to report it, right?
But there was no way to slide by undetected in the narrow pathway or slip unseen between the bushes by the wall. I was skinny but I wasn’t that tiny.
“Maybe. Depends on what information you got for me,” King rumbled.
His voice was octaves lower than his normal charming tones, almost always filled with laughter even when he wasn’t being funny or amused. Now, it was dark and forceful. A shudder ripped up my spine, leaving behind a tangible ache.
“What are you talking about, my man?” Carson said with an uneasy smile.
“Not your man, Carson. Heard you’ve been getting your shit from some other dealer. What’s up with that?” King questioned.
“Don’t know where you heard that, man, but it’s not true,” Carson repeated, but he shifted his weight from foot to foot uncomfortably.
I hated that one of my students was asking for drugs but I hated particularly that it was Carson. He was a bright kid with sad eyes, probably because of the bruises that he often claimed were from football practice but that the coach and his teachers knew better were from his wildly unpopular in town father.
King and his friend shared a brief look that was merely a flicker of eye contact before Mute took one large menacing step forward. With his enormous bulk, a six-foot miniature Hulk with severely buzzed black hair and a huge neck tattoo of some kind of red reptile, it didn’t surprise me that Carson’s shaky grin disappeared to be replaced with an ‘oh my goodness, I’m going to crap my pants’ expression.
He held up his hands beseechingly. “Dude, one time I get product from someone else and you’re flipping out?”
King stood up from his lean against the wall and uncrossed his arms as he turned fully away from me to face Carson. “Flippin’ out? If you think this is me ‘flippin’ out’ then you better brace yourself because if you don’t tell me in two fuckin’ seconds who supplied you, I’m gonna show you what it actually looks like when I flip the fuck out on your ass.”
“Whoa, whoa, fuck, okay!” he practically yelled as Mute slowly moved towards him, hemming him into the wall. “I got some mediocre weed from this guy named Hector.”
“Mexican,” Mute grunted.
King ignored him, his entire body stiff and radiating fury, but I had a feeling this was a significant insight.
“Where’d you hear about ‘im?” King asked.
“Dude,” Carson whined.
King stepped closer and calmly hoisted Carson by his dress shirt into the air before he thrust him hard against the wall.
My gasp was drowned out by Carson’s warbled whimper. I knew it was well beyond time to do something about what was taking place but I couldn’t bring myself to move. It wasn’t so much that I was scared, though I was. The problem was, I was only scared just enough to ignite the desire at the base of my belly. The monster that slumbered like Sleeping Beauty’s dragon inside my gut was rumbling, stretching and yawning as it had when I’d viewed a similar scene with King in the grocery store parking lot. Just like then, she wanted in on the action, to laugh in the face of the scared punk who dared to fuck with such a beautiful King. She wanted to revel in their power, bathe in Carson’s fear and try her own hand at manipulation.
It was totally and completely fucked up.
The Cressida I was didn’t live to scare people, she didn’t even live to intimidate people. I helped old ladies cross the street, I baked cookies for my neighbors and sat with students when they needed a good cry. I did this because I was a good person.
Only, King made me want to be not such a great person.
He made me want to indulge in all things that had tempted Eve: sex, gluttony and larceny. King was my apple, my Satan, my ultimate fall from grace.
And as I stood there riveted by his cruel power, I hated myself.
“Fuck, okay, I didn’t hear about him, all right? He found me at Evergreen Gas Station. Said if I wanted to find him again, that’s where he would be. But I didn’t, okay? His shit is nowhere near as good as yours,” Carson was babbling.
But I was done, on fire with shame and scrambling to put out the flames.
So, I made a rash decision.
I stormed out of the bushes.
Or, at least, I tried to storm.
But I was wearing impractical but utterly beautiful high-heeled leather boots that made my legs in their olive green riding pants look awesome, so I tripped. Badly. I fell through the bushes and onto my hands and knees just behind the trio who all turned their heads to witness my disgrace.
“Mrs. Irons?” Carson croaked, half mortified and half thrilled because he recognized that I was his savior even if I was doing a really terrible job of it.
Embarrassment lit my skin like a second-degree burn but I righted myself with minimal awkwardness and fisted my hands on my hips. “Yes, Carson, Mrs. Irons. The same Mrs. Irons who has just witnessed a drug deal and an attack against another student on school grounds.”
Carson’s hope drained from his face as he realized that he too was in trouble. King and Mute didn’t move.
“Drop your arm from Mr. Gentry’s throat, Mr. Garro and you both come with me. As for you,” I turned to Mute, “I’d get out of here before I have to find out who you are and what you’re doing here and then call your parents.”
I watched through my indignity fury as Mute’s mean face relaxed enough to twitch just barely into a smile. “Sure thing, Miss Irons.”
My mouth fell open as he turned on his heel, jerked his chin at King and ambled out of sight around the building. Rage built even brighter inside me as I realized that King had told his friend about me.
“Gentlemen,” I practically screeched. “Follow me to the Headmaster’s Office.”
Entrance Bay Academy was one of the top ten prep schools in the country and as such, it was ludicrously expensive to attend and boasted a gorgeous campus. Headmaster Adams’ office was probably the nicest office I had ever seen in my life, and William was a lawyer so I’d seen a lot of them. The lower half of the walls were paneled in deep mahogany wood with navy blue paint on the rest, the other school colors reflected in the yellow accent pillows on the leather couch and the emerald green curtains and lush grey green rugs. Adams himself sat in an enormous wing-backed, tufted leather chair with, I kid you not, a pipe growing cold in its placeholder on his empirical desk.
He suited the room. It was more than just his grey and green tweed blazer with the elbow patches and his beautifully maintained moustache. He oozed authority and social elegance. He was large, having once been young and fit whereas now he was old and soft over a layer of lingering muscle. His great big cloud of white hair was parted to reveal his florid scalp and he was taken with crossing his hands over his chest like some kind of academic Santa Claus.
I quite liked him. He was easy for me to read and even easier for me to please because he was the type of man my father and William had been.
I did not like him at the moment, as he scowled at me from under his fuzzy eyebrows.
“You’ve put me in quite the position, Mrs. Irons,” he said finally, after studying me for several moments.
I didn’t understand how it had come to this. I’d arrived, irate, with a terrified Carson and an unflappable King in tow, explained how things had unfolded to the Headmaster then I had been promptly ordered to wait in the reception while he spoke first with both of them, and then individually to each.
Now, he had beckoned me back into his office and I felt very much like a naughty child once more called into my father’s study.
“You see,” Adams continued, “Carson Gentry’s mother is sisters with Mayor Lafayette’s wife and his father owns half of this town. It would be unfortunate if I had to telephone them about this little mishap as they contribute annually and generously to this school.”
“Headmaster—” I started.
He lifted a single finger and wagged it. “Now, I agree there must be something done about Mr. Garro. Normally, I would suspend him at the very least but his father has made it quite clear that he expects Kyle to be treated with above normal reverence.”
“’S not above normal anything,” the deepest voice I’d ever heard sounded from over my shoulder. “My boy fucked up, fine. Strike one. You want ‘im out of your prissy little school because you think my boy is beneath you when the truth is, he’s fuckin’ better than us all.”
I swiveled in my seat, eager beyond belief to match the voice to the name.
Zeus Garro filled the doorway the way I knew he would and still he took my breath away. Not like King did, with his sheer beauty, but because Zeus was the biggest, scariest man I’d ever laid eyes on.
He was at least six-foot-five, quilted with muscles so dense that I’d break my finger if I poked him, I was certain of it. Like his son, he had a riot of curly, wavy hair but it was longer and darker, brown at the roots lightening to sun soaked golden at the ends. It was touchable hair that gave him a ‘just fucked’ quality that didn’t help dampen his incredible sexual charisma. He had a lush mouth surrounded by a short, well-groomed beard, and thick lashed eyes just a shade more silver than King’s. He should have been beautiful, a kind of gorgeous that you could have cried over. Instead, the hard set of his jaw, the bumps in his strong nose that denoted it at least twice or thrice broken, and the hard glint in those icy eyes turned me to stone with fear.
Zeus Garro was not someone you fucked with.
And it was clear as he moved his enormous, tattooed bulk through the elegant room to stand before the desk with crossed arms that he felt Headmaster Adams was trying to fuck with him.
Adrenaline kicked into gear through my blood and brought me to that dark place of joy as I waited for him to rip into Adams.
I wasn’t disappointed.
“Mr. Garro, you have to understand that Kyle was trying to sell drugs to a student,” Adams began righteously.
“The fuck he was,” Zeus growled. He tipped his head my way without looking at me. “She tell you that?”
“Well, of course!”
Zeus swiveled his head my way in a move so smooth and menacing that it made goose bumps break out over my skin. “You tell him that?”
I swallowed. “Technically, I told him that Carson was trying to buy drugs but King didn’t seem to be selling any.”
This appeared to be the right thing to say. I was grateful for this for two reasons. One was that as soon as I’d been told to wait in the reception, I regretted turning King in. He was clearly doing something he shouldn’t have been but I really didn’t believe he deserved to be expelled for it. Not just because I’d grown accustomed to wearing his gaze like a crown or because I lived for his apple poems or because no one else had ever made me feel so alive. Truly, King deserved to be at EBA because he was incredibly smart and gifted, capable of going to one of the best universities and away from his criminal family. He deserved that opportunity and I couldn’t stand the thought of being the one to take it away from him.
The other reason I was grateful for my quick thinking response, was that, as I’d said, Zeus terrified me and I very much did not want him to kill me (something that I was certain he was capable of meting out with his bare hands).
Zeus squinted at me before his face relaxed slightly and I noticed that the crow’s feet beside his eyes radiated in pale lines, saved from his deep tan because he spent all his considerable time outdoors squinting into the sun. It was a surprisingly attractive detail, and one that made him more human to me. I wasn’t sure if I liked him or not, could one like the President of a known criminal enterprise? But I loved that he was going to bat for his son and I loved that he was flustering the normally imperturbable Headmaster Adams.
“Right. As I understand it, Adams, my boy was merely trying to stop the spread of drug use at this school. That Gentry bastard approached him lookin’ to score just because King rides a bike and King was tryin’ to turn the kid to the right path.”
I tried, with all my might, not to burst out laughing at the load of crock he was spewing. Somehow, even though my belly ached with the effort, I succeeded.
“He was bein’ a social justice warrior,” Zeus added for effect.
I covered my snort with a cough.
Zeus clapped me helpfully on the back.
Headmaster Adams, it seemed, didn’t know what to do with this information. He sat with his mouth open and his brow furrowed, staring at the MC President as if he had two heads.
So, I jumped into the fray, leaning forward to smile softly at him. “Be that as it may, there was the matter of King being rough with Carson, which is inexcusable at EBA. Therefore, I suggest that King be given detention for the rest of the trimester to pay penance and learn from his mistakes.”
“Fuck that,” Zeus barked, but it was just that, all bark and no bite.
He shot me a look out of the corner of his eyes that I knew meant he was pleased with me, that we had somehow ended up on the same team protecting King.
“Excellent idea, Mrs. Irons,” Adams declared, recovering enough to slam his fist on the desk with authority. “Kyle needs to understand that he is at EBA now, a school of higher education and decorum. Rough housing and violence will not be tolerated. So, detention with Mrs. Irons every day after school for the next four weeks of the semester.”
“What?” I squeaked even as Zeus slammed his own palm down on Adams’ desk, jolting both the Headmaster and myself in our seats, “Done.”
“But Headmaster Adams, I don’t oversee detention,” I pointed out.
“You don’t,” he agreed. “But I know you could use the extra money and you are already here until five every day at least, helping the other students. Kyle may complete his homework silently while you conduct your study sessions.”
No, no, no.
How did this happen?
Zeus stared at me out of the corner of his gaze, assessing me with that eye more thorough than anyone ever had out of two. I held still, barely breathing under his scrutiny and at the thought of having even more time with King, especially if it was one on one.
“From what I hear, Miss Irons, you’ll set my boy straight about his behavior and have him actin’ like a gentleman in no time.”
I swallowed thickly as Zeus nodded curtly at the Headmaster and swaggered (that really was the only word for it) out the doors.
