I KNEW the exact moment when Rafe saw that fucking picture, because I heard the strangled sound he let out. The noise he made crept under my bathroom door, stole across the room and curled around me on the bed. It squeezed my soul into a tight little knot in the center of my chest.
I burned with shame.
For almost twenty-four hours I’d been lying here imagining what would happen when my friends saw that photo. Everyone I’d ever been close to was destined to see it, if they hadn’t already. Pepe. Graham. Rikker. Trevi.
The hockey girlfriends who already hated me.
Coach Canning, who thought I was a nuisance.
Nobody was ever going look at me the same way again. I had fucked up too badly this time to recover.
From Lianne’s room Rafe’s voice demanded, “Who the fuck did this?”
“I don’t know, but the web host is a saas-based content management company. The editor used off-campus internet connections.”
Hell. No wonder she’d gotten miffed about sex noises from my room. It was easy to hear every word. Our bathroom was an echo chamber, apparently.
“I’m going to… FUCK! What language are you speaking?” Rafe demanded.
I could even hear Lianne’s sigh. “Nerd language. I was able to learn quite a bit about the website itself but not about who owns it. I think it’s Beta Rho, though, because Brodacious is a play on their name.”
Lianne was pretty clever for a girl who never left her room.
“Did Bella see this?” he asked her.
“I showed it to her yesterday afternoon.”
“What did she say?”
“Nothing. But she hasn’t come out since.”
Shit. I braced for impact, turning toward the wall and curling into a protective ball. Aside from closing my eyes, there was no way I could hide from Rafe. I’d left the door to the bathroom unlocked, and now I could hear it opening. The next thing I heard were his feet crossing the floor toward me.
The mattress dipped under his weight. Then a warm hand covered my elbow. “Bella,” he whispered.
I rolled my face into the pillow, imagining what he saw. It was stuffy in my room, and the place reeked of acetone. Cotton balls littered the floor. The skin on my arms looked chafed and red, and faint outlines of the marker remained.
“Bella, you’re scaring me.”
“So,” I said, the word muffled by the pillow.
“Get up, okay?”
“No.” I knew he was being nice, but I couldn’t find it in me to care. For every Rafe, there were ten Whittakers. And I didn’t want to face any of them.
“Lianne showed me the picture,” he said.
I said nothing.
“Are you going to report it?”
“No.”
He made an angry sound. “Why the hell not?”
Damn him. Couldn’t a girl be left alone to suffer her indignities in peace? I lifted my head from the pillow to glower at him. “God, do you get that I don’t want to talk about it? With anyone? Or see anyone?”
That shut him up.
“I know you’re being nice,” I whispered. “But I just can’t…” I dropped my head back onto the pillow, facing the wall. Maybe if I just ignored him, he’d go away.
For a long moment Rafe was silent. “Fine,” he said eventually. “We don’t have to talk. But you still have to get up.”
“No.”
“Yes. We’re going running.”
“What?” I was confused enough to turn my head again so I could see his face.
“Running,” he repeated. “That’s when you put shoes on and move your feet real fast, transporting yourself from one spot to another.”
“I don’t run,” I said, turning back to the wall.
“Today you do,” I said. “Or else.”
“Or else what?”
“I’m going to Dean Darling to tell him you’re having a breakdown and won’t get out of bed.”
My chin whipped around at this latest indignity. “No you will not.”
He pushed a limp curl out of my eyes. “Yeah, I will. Try me.”
I shoved his hand away. I’d had enough of his bullshit. “Get out of my face, Rafe. None of this has anything to do with you.”
“That’s not the point,” he said, those big chocolate eyes watching me closely.
“What is the point?”
“You’re not okay. And I’m the one who noticed.”
Great. Rafe was some kind of do-gooder. I sure knew how to pick ’em. “It’s none of your business,” I whispered.
He stood. “I’m going downstairs to change. That takes about five minutes. You’re already wearing sweats. Put on running shoes while I’m gone.”
“I’ll get right on that,” I lied.
He left. When he was on his way out of my room, I heard the telltale click the lock makes when it’s toggled from locked to unlocked.
I got off the bed for the first time in hours and flipped it locked again. My stomach made an angry growl when I crawled back onto the bed. I hadn’t eaten because that required leaving my room.
Whatever. I lay down again. When the knock came five minutes later, I ignored it. When Rafe tried to turn the knob, it did not budge.
“Fine,” he said from the hallway. “I’m going to knock on the house dean’s door next.”
I leapt off the bed and yanked the door open. “You can’t just order me!”
He raised one dark eyebrow. “When I’m in a major funk, exercise helps.”
“Thanks for the tip.” There was no way to stop the bitchy things that fell from my mouth. But I wasn’t sure I cared.
“Come running,” he demanded.
“Fuck no! I can’t even do that.”
“Sure you can.” He stared me down. “Either we run or we have lunch together in the dining hall.”
I felt heat on my neck just imagining it. When my eyes flicked in the direction of the dining hall, I knew I’d given myself away. But fuck it. I did not want to see a hundred pairs of on me. “I’m not going anywhere near that place.”
“Put your running shoes on,” said the most bull-headed neighbor that ever was.
For a few seconds, I wavered. But Rafe was exactly the sort of guy who would go to the dean, imagining he’d done me a favor. I did not have time for that.
Damn. It.
“I don’t even own running shoes,” I said as a last ditch effort to avoid this.
“You can borrow mine!” Lianne’s voice piped up.
I yelled toward the bathroom. “Your feet are probably a size five.”
“Nope!” she said cheerfully. “Seven and a half. Same as you.”
Fuck.
A few minutes later, I found myself stepping outside into a crisp October day. I kept my head down as I grudgingly followed Rafe out of the Beaumont courtyard.
He pointed up the street. “Come on. You set the pace.”
“I don’t run.”
“Everybody runs.”
“No, Rafe, they really don’t.”
“Really? If they were giving out free cones at Scoops to the first hundred takers, you’d just mosey over there?”
I rolled my eyes at the flagstone pathway.
“Then follow me.” He began to jog at an easy pace down the block.
This was ridiculous, but I still jogged after him. At least at this hour, most everyone was in class. I only had to swerve around a few students on the sidewalk.
The people around me were oblivious — tapping on their phones or talking to friends. What I wouldn’t give to go back in time just a few days. I wanted to be oblivious too — to walk around campus like I owned the place. But now I didn’t know what to do with my eyes whenever we approached someone. Harkness was a small school, and even the people I didn’t know looked familiar.
Every time we passed someone, I looked down at my shoes. And I couldn’t help but wonder, Have you seen the picture? Have you read the caption?
Harkness College had turned on me, and I was never going to feel the same way about it again.
Rafe didn’t try to talk as we ran, thank God. And I was grateful when he steered us toward the old Harkness graveyard, because we wouldn’t have to dodge pedestrians there.
“Never came through here before,” I panted when we ran through the gate.
“It’s cool,” he said. “On the way home I’ll show you my favorite grave.”
“Bet you say that to all the girls,” I puffed.
He chuckled, but he didn’t slow down, damn him. At the other end of the cemetery, he ran us up Science Hill, where the pedestrian traffic was also minimal. But my pace had slowed to a crawl, so he took a hint and stopped at a drinking fountain in the tiny park at the top.
“Dying here,” I groaned, bending over to lean on my knees. “Why do people do this?”
He took a drink before answering. “Just to prove they can.”
“But I don’t care if I can.”
“You’d care if you couldn’t,” he pointed out.
“That’s deep,” I scoffed.
While I took my turn at the fountain, I saw Rafe giving me the once-over. “We’ll turn back now,” he promised.
I must have looked as tired as I felt. “You go ahead. I’m walking back.”
“No way,” he said immediately. “You’re going to do this right.”
“God, why? I’m not an athlete.”
He shook his head. “An athlete isn’t a special kind of person. Anyone can be an athlete. You just do it, and then you can call yourself one.”
“Just do it, huh? Are you on Nike’s payroll?” My stream of bitchiness was on autopilot now.
“Move your ass, Bella.” He pointed back toward campus. “It’s downhill, for God’s sake. My grandma could run that.”
Was there anyone bossier in all of Harkness College? I doubted it. “You’re not my favorite person today.”
He stretched his quads. “Eh. It’s been awhile since I was your favorite person. What’s one more day in the doghouse?”
I gave him one more ornery look, then I took off down the hill.
He was startled, I think. I swear he had to hustle to catch up.
If it hadn’t been downhill, I wouldn’t have been able to make it.
When I’d told Rafe I didn’t run, I wasn’t kidding. By the time the gates of the graveyard loomed, my lungs were burning and I had a painful stitch in my side. My body was clearly stunned at this sudden demand for locomotion. What the fuck, it seemed to say as I pounded out the last hundred yards, drawing up short in the cemetery.
“We’re not back yet,” Rafe said, stopping alongside me. And that bastard wasn’t even breathing hard.
“You think?” I growled. “Where’s your favorite grave?”
He took off running, heading to the right. After twenty paces or so I saw him turn.
Crap.
With my chest burning on each inhale, I chased after him.
He didn’t go far. Half way down the row of headstones, Rafe stood just off the path, waiting for me. I’d assumed he would bring me to one of the gaudy mausoleums I had glimpsed many times from the street. But he waited in front of a simple slate stone that was rounded at the top. “This is your favorite?” I gasped, sounding like an emphysemic octogenarian.
“Yeah, because it tells a story.”
I knelt in front of the stone, both to see it better and also as a cheap way of resting. “Here lies Daniel Webber, age 14, killed by a log he made.” Yikes. “That’s your favorite? Why?”
Rafe shrugged. “I’m not sure why they bothered to put that on here. Most of the other stones just give the dates and maybe the spouse’s name.”
I shivered. “He cut down a tree, and it fell on him. It was a revenge killing.”
Rafe’s lips twitched. “That must have happened all the time back then. Or other shit like it.”
“Are you trying to say that I don’t have it so bad?”
“Nah. I just like old things. And this is one of them.” He turned to walk down the row, and I followed, grateful he wasn’t running anymore.
“How far did we go, anyway?”
He glanced over his shoulder, then down at his watch. “Probably… a mile and a half?”
“Really?” I ran a mile and a half?” That couldn’t be right.
He grinned, the way you smile at a kitten that’s done something stupid. “That’s nothing, Bella. You probably walk twice that far every day.”
“Still,” I said. He wouldn’t understand. I spent a lot of time looking after athletes who benched three hundred in the weight room and squatted six hundred. But it was never me who wore the tired, satisfied look of someone who’d just completed a workout.
“You know,” Rafe said, “the running path around the reservoir in Central Park is just a mile and a half.”
“Really?” I squeaked. “I could do that.”
“No kidding,” he said, smiling again. “My grandma could do that.”
For that he deserved the poke in the ribs I gave him. I was so bowled over by my newfound athletic prowess that I let Rafe walk me into the deli on Broad Street before I thought better of it. The place was crowded with students. “Let’s go home,” I begged. “I don’t have my wallet.”
“I do,” he said.
Great. And who said chivalry was dead?
“What’s good here?” He eyed the menu board.
“Everything.” Besides one last granola bar from my stash, I hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday. And it was probably almost two o’clock. “I like the Greek chicken wrap.”
Rafe pulled out his wallet and ordered two of them.
My stomach began to growl in earnest while we waited for our food. But it didn’t growl loud enough to cover the sounds of male laughter coming from the back of the room.
The sweat on my neck instantly cooled. Don’t look, I ordered myself. There was another swell of laughter. Goosebumps rose on my arms. What if he was back there? I gave a full body shiver. And then I couldn’t help myself. I turned to scan a group of thick-necked guys at the table in back.
One of them made eye contact with me. And his smile widened.
My knees felt trembly all of a sudden, and I reached out to grip the deli’s counter.
“You okay?” Rafe asked.
“Yeah,” I said, my voice thick. Somewhere in the depths of my suddenly spinning head I knew they could be laughing about anything. But it didn’t even matter. Because if it wasn’t those particular assholes having a chuckle at my expense, then it was another group somewhere nearby.
Another wave of laughter came from the table in back, and I just wanted to die. Rafe was so proud of himself for distracting me for an hour. But what was the point? Those fuckers at Beta Rho had framed my troubles for the whole world, and everyone at Harkness was going to see it.
And know.
My distress must have shown on my face, because now I saw Rafe eyeing the table in the corner, too. “Do you know them?” he asked softly.
I shook my head.
His dark brown eyes studied me warily. “You want to wait outside? I’ll get the food.”
He really didn’t understand. Outside wasn’t any better. There was no place to hide. “I’m good,” I lied. But then another guffaw burst forth from the dudes in the corner, and I must have stiffened. Because Rafe moved a little, changing the angle of his body, shielding me from view.
With a cold sweat breaking out on my back, I was counting the seconds until we could get away from here. In my whole life, I didn’t remember ever feeling this way — like I’d rather erase myself than hear another peal of laughter.
We’d discussed embarrassment in one of my psych classes. Embarrassment is just a construct you build for yourself. Nobody can make you feel embarrassed. Intellectually, I knew this to be true. But standing there in the deli sweating all over myself, it didn’t really matter.
My stomach was churning now. I didn’t even want a sandwich.
“So,” Rafe said, trying to distract me. “Your neighbor is a movie star. What’s up with that? I never see her coming in or out of the entryway.”
I looked up into Rafe’s calm brown eyes, and they steadied me. A little. “Lianne barely leaves her room. And she gets tetchy if I have music playing.” Or loud men in my room. Lucky for Lianne, there weren’t going to be any of those anymore. Probably forever. “Honestly, she’s a piece of work. I tried to be friendly, but it didn’t take.”
“Huh,” Rafe said. “Why doesn’t she live on Fresh Court with the other first years?”
“I think it’s a security thing. Anyone can walk into Fresh Court, but Beaumont has an extra set of locked gates, right?” I watched a guy behind the counter put two wrap sandwiches into a bag, praying that it was ours.
“That makes sense.” The man slid the bag across the stainless steel counter and Rafe took it. I turned on my heel and made for the door.
If Rafe was surprised I would be willing to run back to Beaumont, he didn’t say so. I even ran up the stairs, relaxing only when I’d made it back to the safety of my room.
Inside, Rafe opened the bag, handing me one of the sandwiches. “Drink some water while you eat this, okay?”
“Sure,” I said. I guess he wasn’t staying for lunch. I was disappointed, too, which was weird. Because I hadn’t wanted to see him at all in the first place.
“I’ve got a study session now,” he said by way of explanation. “But I’ll see you tonight?”
“Why?”
“We have to do some work on our project.”
“The one that’s due six weeks from now?” My tone practically dripped with attitude. Nobody had been nicer to me this past week than Rafe. But I couldn’t help mouthing off. Because I didn’t want his babysitting. And it bugged the shit out of me to even look like I needed help.
“I don’t do things at the last minute,” he said, his face serious. “That isn’t my style.”
I didn’t think before I spoke. “Rafe, I have proof that you sometimes act very impulsively.”
His face shut down, making me sorry I’d said it. “See you later. Maybe seven.” He left, pulling the door closed behind him.
Rafe left me alone with my sandwich and a thudding heart. He was gone so fast I didn’t get a chance to say thank you for making me go running. Or for making sure I didn’t starve to death in this room.
God, I was such a bitch.
After eating lunch I took a shower. I’d spent more time in the shower these past forty-eight hours than anywhere else. The ink markings were almost gone from my skin. But almost wasn’t good enough.
I toweled off, then dressed in a turtleneck and jeans. Not that anyone would see me. I didn’t plan on leaving my room again. I’d missed two classes already today, and the third was beginning without me.
But classes weren’t my real problem. In two hours, I was due to arrive at hockey practice, where the Brodacious photo would have already made the rounds. My friends were going to see that picture. Then they would wonder about the caption.
And talk about it.
There was no fucking way I was walking into that locker room today. Or tomorrow. Or the day after that.
I sat on the edge of my bed and pressed my fingertips into the corners of my too-hot eyes.
