He knows it, too. He smirks at me sometimes. One time, when he was coming down the hall in a towel? God. I think I was red for an hour afterward.
I never found out what he said to my dad. I have a feeling that, whatever it was, he wasn’t defending my honor. It’s hard for me to see why he would start now.
Maybe I should be grateful, but I can’t. I don’t need guys like West Leavitt defending me. He’s infamous. Between the drug dealing and that face, that smile … pretty much everyone on campus knows who he is.
He’ll draw attention to me. My primary purpose in life at the moment is to disappear.
When I mentally come back to the table, Bridget is peeling a hard-boiled egg and watching me. She’s gotten used to my long silences. She’s fiercely loyal, endlessly supportive. The best person I could possibly have on my side.
“If people want to know what I think about what West did?” I began.
“Yeah?”
“Tell them it was all a misunderstanding. It had nothing to do with me.”
Her forehead wrinkles. “But I figured it was good. Somebody else on our side, right?”
“I don’t want to be on a side, Bridge,” I say gently. “I want people to get amnesia on this whole issue. Fighting tends to be a thing people remember.”
She bites her lip.
“I don’t need people linking me up with him, okay? I need to keep a low profile.”
“If that’s what you want me to say, that’s what I’ll say,” she assures me. “That’ll be the end of it.”
I try on a smile and push my chicken across the tray, then pull my mint brownie closer and sink my fork through the thick layer of frosting. Dark fudgy black over a green so bright it’s almost neon.
That’ll be the end of it.
I wish I could believe her, but I can’t make assumptions like that anymore. I’ve learned that when evil crawls out of a snake pit, you have to track it down and squash it. Then you have to assume it had babies and go looking for them.
I have a past to erase if I’m going to claim the future I’ve always wanted—a future that requires me to get into a good law school so I can clerk with a great judge and start making the connections my dad says I need if I want to be a judge myself someday. Which I do. I want to go even further. State office. Washington, D.C.
My dad always says the first step to getting what you want is to know what you want and what it takes to get it. There’s no shame in aiming high. For my sixth-grade History Day project, I wrote a book of presidential limericks, one for each president. By ninth grade, I was volunteering to canvass door to door, and I got on the mailing lists for the Putnam College Democrats and the Putnam Republicans before I even received my acceptance letter.
I know what I want, and I know what it takes to get it. It takes a lot of hard work and sacrifice—but it also takes a clean record. No arrests, no scandals, no sex pictures on the Internet.
I don’t need anyone going around beating people up on my behalf. I can’t chance it happening again.
I need to talk to West.
I find him on the fourth floor of the library.
It’s all journals up here, the shelves shoved together in the middle and study desks lining the outside walls, plus a Xerox machine where I spent way too much time copying literary criticism of T. S. Eliot last year.
West is standing by a cart full of books with his back to me, shelving a fat red volume of something. It takes me a minute to realize he’s him. I’d already looked all over the first three floors, and I was starting to panic that he might not be here. I’ve noticed that I often see him with his cart on Thursday afternoons, but that doesn’t mean much.
He’s got earbuds in, and I don’t think he’s seen me, so I take a second to think about what I want to say to him. I feel kind of sweaty and unkempt, even though I took time after lunch to change my shirt and slick on lip gloss.
I’ve never done this before.
I’ve never initiated a conversation with West.
It feels more intimidating than it should, not only because of who he is—the forbiddenness of him—but also because this is the fourth floor. It’s an unwritten rule of Putnam that the fourth floor of the library is a space of sacred silence.
West grabs another book. He has to reach above his head to shelve it, which means his shirt lifts and I see he’s got a thick brown leather belt holding his jeans up. It doesn’t match. His boots are black, and so is his T-shirt. It’s got this big jagged orange seam sewn across the back, as though a shark came along and bit a giant rip in it and then he handed it over to a seven-year-old to fix.
I can’t imagine how such a T-shirt even happens. Or why anyone would wear it.
West’s clothes are sometimes like that. Just … random.
I kind of like it.
When he lowers down to his heels and bends over the cart, his shirt rides up again, exposing some of his lower back.
I clear my throat, but his music must be too loud, because he doesn’t turn toward me. I step closer. He’s got his head down, his hand reaching for a book on the lower shelf.
Crap. Now I’m so close that I’m bound to startle him when he finally figures out I’m here.
There’s nothing I can do to prevent it. I reach out, meaning to touch him just long enough to get his attention, but I end up pressing my palm flat against his lower spine instead.
It’s an accident. I’m almost sure it’s an accident.
Eighty percent sure.
He doesn’t jump. He just goes completely, utterly still. So still that I can hear the music playing over his earbuds. It’s loud, with angry vocals and an insistent, pounding beat that matches the sudden pulse between my legs.
Oh, I think.
Maybe it’s not an accident, after all.
West’s back is indecently hot beneath my palm. I stare at my fingers, ordering them to move for several long seconds before they actually obey. When I pull my hand away, it feels magnetized. Like there’s this drag, this force, tugging it back toward West.
I’m pretty sure the force is called lust.
West straightens and turns around, and I know even before he does it that I’ve miscalculated, and now I’m totally at his mercy, which means I’m doomed. I’m not sure he has mercy. He sure didn’t seem like he did when he was hitting Nate hard enough to make me physically ill.
He pulls out his earbuds, and I try to think something other than the word doomed. Doomed, doomed, doomed.
I try to remember what I was going to say to him—I had a whole speech planned—but I can’t. I can’t.
I stare at his belt instead. I think about grabbing it and yanking him closer. As if this is a thing I could do. A thing I have ever done, with anyone, much less West Leavitt.
Doooooomed.
“Hey,” he says.
Which isn’t fair, because it means I have to look up.
I do, eventually.
Our eyes meet. His pupils are huge, and there’s something so intense about the way he’s looking at me, it’s kind of scary. Only scary is the wrong word. I’ve felt a lot of scary in the past few weeks, and this is different.
This is scary like pausing at the top of the steepest hill on a roller coaster, bracing yourself for the drop.
“Hey,” I say back.
“What’s up?”
“Can I talk to you?”
He considers this request. “No.”
It’s not what I was expecting him to say. All I can come up with is “Oh.”
Then it’s silent again except for his music, and there’s this … this atmosphere. I think it must be him. I think he’s making the atmosphere with his skin and his eyes, which look almost silver right now, and maybe he’s also making it with all the muscles in his forearms, which are clenching and unclenching his hands in this way that’s just—