“I’m going to take Bella home, but then I’ll be right back,” he said quickly.
“You don’t have to do that,” I protested. “I’ll just catch a cab to the train station. Or Uber.”
Rafe’s eyebrows lifted. “You’re going back to Harkness? Tonight?”
I locked eyes with him, wondering why he’d assume I wanted to go home to my parents’ house after that awful scene at dinner.
We had a mini stare-down, but he caved first, looking at his watch. “When’s the last train?”
“Eleven-fifteen. I’ll make it.”
He stood. “I’ll take you.”
“Grand Central is perfectly safe,” I argued, embarrassed that he’d go all that way. After everything I’d already put him through tonight.
“125th is closer,” his mother pointed out. “And pretty girls don’t go there alone at night.”
The path of least resistance was clearly to let Rafe accompany me to the train station. “All right,” I murmured. I thanked his mother one more time for the lovely meal, and then I let Rafe lead me out of the restaurant, his hand at my back. I caught his cousin Flori smirking as we passed by. Her eyes were full of romantic theories about us.
Oh, honey. If she only knew the strange truth, she wouldn’t smile like that.
Outside, it was chilly. I pulled my wrap as tightly around me as I could. Without even a thought, Rafe put an arm around me and pulled me closer to his warm body. There was nothing sexual about it. Rafe was so… sturdy. The way I used to be, too.
I leaned in, if only for tonight.
Twenty-One
Bella
Sunday evening, Lianne came through my bathroom door unannounced. “Hey!” she said breathlessly. “I have news.”
“It’s dangerous to barge in here, you know,” I said, tossing a book off my lap. “Might have been an orgy in progress.”
“Uh-huh,” she said, dismissing my ’tude with a flip of her hand. “This is worth interrupting an orgy, anyway.”
That got my attention. “What is?”
“Come here.” She beckoned, then turned on her heel and headed back through the bathroom toward her own room.
Curious, I followed her into her tiny single, which was illuminated only by the blue light emitted by three computer monitors. “Jesus. What’s all this? You could run NASA from here.”
“I got into their site,” Lianne announced without a preamble. “But I need to know how you want to play this.”
“Whose site?” I asked. I found my answer on Lianne’s monitors. Brodacious.com was displayed on one screen beside another filled with long scripts in computereze. “What do you mean, you got into it?”
“I cracked it open. Which means we can pull down that photo if you want to.”
My heart skipped a beat. “Seriously? Just like that?”
“Yes and no,” Lianne warned, her face serious. “If I take the picture down, they’ll notice. It’s right at the top of the page.”
“Still?” I gasped. I hadn’t looked at Brodacious since that first awful day. I’d been imagining my picture had already been buried under whatever other stupid things Beta Rho had to say.
“Yeah,” she sighed.
“So…” I tried to do the math. “If you take it down, they might just put it up again.”
“Or worse,” Lianne said grimly. Her flawless face was tinted blue by the light from the computer screen. “If they think you were responsible for tampering with their website, I have no clue what they’d do to get even.”
I shivered. “I didn’t think of that. Men can be assholes.”
“Most men are certified assholes,” she agreed quietly.
I sat down on Lianne’s bed. “Shit. Do I have to decide right this second?”
“Probably not. There’s only a small chance that their web host will notice my invasion.” She crossed her tiny arms. “I was pretty sneaky, though.”
Wow. I let that sink in for a second. I’d been so bowled over by this reversal of fortune that I hadn’t given enough thought to the fact that Lianne was capable of such a thing. Lianne. The neighborhood movie star and… hacker? Really? “Buddy?” I asked. “Could you get in trouble for doing this?”
“I committed a federal crime just by breaking in.” She gave me the same evil smile her sorceress princess character made on the big screen. “But I break the law every day, Bella. And nobody would prosecute this. Ever. No state’s attorney wants to slap the cuffs on an eighteen year-old college student for taking down a humiliating photo of a friend. Or neighbor,” she added quickly.
“What about school rules?” I worried. “Aren’t you on their network right now?”
“Nope.” Lianne smiled. “I’m using my cell phone hotspot and a VPN.”
“A what?”
She waved a hand. “It’s like wearing an invisibility cloak.”
“Cool. I had no idea you were a computer genius.”
Lianne shrugged. “I didn’t go to a regular high school. I don’t have friends. That leaves a lot of hours for playing with my computer.”
Yikes. “I see.”
“Do me a favor, though? Don’t tell anyone. The tabloids would be all over this.”
“All over what?” came a voice from the bathroom doorway.
We both looked up to see Rafe standing there. For the second time in ten minutes, my heart gave a little jump. He was just so fucking handsome. And I didn’t really expect to see him tonight. I was pretty sure that after the family freak show I’d treated him to yesterday, he’d steer clear of me.
“Is this, like, girl talk?” Rafe grinned. “Should I go back in the other room?”
“No, it’s okay,” Lianne said. “You wouldn’t tell anyone if I asked you not to.”
His eyes widened. “Of course I won’t. What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” I beckoned to him. “You have to see this. Lianne has been totally holding out on us.”
“Oh my God.” Rafe chuckled. “Are you going to tell me that she’s actually a sorceress?”
“That would explain a lot, I’m sure,” Lianne muttered.
“It’s so much cooler than that.” I moved out of the way so Rafe could see the screen. “Lianne is a hacker.”
“Huh,” Rafe said, peering at the long script on the screen. “I’m not sure you and I have the same definition of cool. What’s the punchline?”
“She hacked Brodacious.”
“Oh.” I saw the understanding bloom on his face. “You’re right. That is cool. But where does that leave you?”
That was the problem, wasn’t it? “I have no idea.”
Twenty-Two
Rafe
Bella thanked Lianne. “My mind is blown, okay? I need to think.”
Lianne smiled like a cat. “You know where to find me.”
We went back into Bella’s room, where she threw my notebook on the floor and lay down on the bed on her stomach. I’d come up here to work on our Urban Studies project, but now there were more important things to discuss.
“Are you going to have her take the picture down?”
“I’m not sure,” she said, hugging a pillow under her arms.
Moving a stack of books off her desk chair, I made room for my ass. Bella looked far too sexy on that bed for me to get anywhere near her.
“I want that picture down, but I need to think it over.”
“Because you’re worried about retaliation?”
She shook her head. “Not really. I’m pretty sure that the boys of Beta Rho have short little attention spans. They’ll probably just move on to the next victim. But that bothers me, too.”
“Are you thinking about reporting them?” I tried not to sound too eager, but I wanted that fucker to pay. Whoever he was.
“Nope. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to let it go. I definitely want revenge.”
That didn’t sound good. “What kind? You told me that you were a fan of revenge. It was the night that I found out Alison…”
I cleared my throat instead of finishing that sentence. The night that I found out Alison cheated, and then we stripped each other and went at it like horny rabbits.
Nice. I had to go and dredge that up. “What kind of revenge?” I asked again, moving the conversation along.
“That’s the thing,” she said slowly. “I haven’t hit on the right solution yet. I want to humiliate him.”
I would have asked “who?” if I thought she’d fall for it. “Humiliation, huh? You could ask Lianne to redirect the Brodacious website. Instead of their web content, you’d end up…” I thought about it for a second. “…on a porno, with frat boys getting spanked by a dominatrix.”
Bella began to chuckle. “‘Please, mistress. May I have another?’ I knew I liked you, Rafe. And you know why that’s a great idea? Because there’d be no way to know which of their many enemies pulled it off. There must be plenty of girls who hate Beta Rho.”
“And rival frats.”
She turned one cheek to the pillow and looked up at me. “The thing is, I want my revenge to be more personal. I want them to look ridiculous, and not just because the website didn’t go where it was supposed to. I’ve been trying to figure out how to catch them in the act of doing something stupid.”
“That sounds tricky.”
“Yes and no. The number of stupid things they do in a week probably helps my odds.” She stretched, arching her back, and I found myself admiring her butt. Which was not what I’d come upstairs to do. “I have a couple ideas. I’ve been doing some thinking.”
“Feel like sharing?”
Bella grinned. “Nope. You’d just try to talk me out of them.”
Fantástico. “So.” I cleared my throat. “Have you thought about what foodie business we want in our new commercial development?”
“Nope!” Bella said cheerfully. “I’ve been working on a paper for this women’s studies course I’m taking. It’s kicking my ass.”
Women’s studies. That sounded like what lonely guys do on freshman on move-in day. “Can’t say that I know what those classes are about. Though the topic sounds like something I’d like.” Yeah. I should really just shut up now.
“It’s politics and culture, from the feminist perspective. And I thought I’d really love it, you know? I’m interested in empowering females.”
“Sure. But you don’t like the class?”
Bella bent her knees, lifting her toes into the air — a move that immediately yanked her long legs into the center of my consciousness. My stupid brain decided to flash back to the time when I was lying on top of her in that bed, with those legs wrapped around me…
I mentally slapped myself and tried to focus on what Bella was saying. “Have you been going to class?” I asked, wondering if she’d give me a straight answer.
“That one, yeah. I figure even if I’m having trouble looking half the campus in the eye, a women’s studies lecture should be no problem, right? Since the basic premise is that men have been fucking up the world for women since the beginning of time.”
“Um…” I chuckled. “Not all of them.”
Bella waved a dismissive hand. “Fine. But we’re reading about institutionalized sexism, and wage inequality. That kind of thing.”
“Fair enough.”
“Some of it makes sense. But the professor’s big theory is that our culture defines a woman’s body as a void which needs filling. She thinks that idea is responsible for all kinds of evils: the wage gap, underrepresentation in seats of power…” Bella dropped her legs to the bed and pushed her cheek into the pillow. The girl had no idea what it did to me to see her all splayed out like that — her curvy body like a landscape on the bed.
“But you don’t think that sounds right?” I asked, still trying to stay on topic.
“I’m sure she’s right about a lot of things. But every time I lay down on this bed lately, I’m feeling a lot of sympathy for the void which needs filling.” Her eyes cut over to me. “Celibacy isn’t easy. I’m supposed to be writing a paper about female subjugation. But all I want is for someone to give me a good pounding.”
Jesucristo. I let out the world’s most strangled laugh. The picture she’d just put into my head was not very academic.
“I’m a failed feminist,” Bella complained.
“Nah. You’re your own brand of feminist. And there’s your paper topic.”
She grinned. “I’m pretty sure the professor would flunk me if she could see inside my brain. Today it’s like ninety percent sexual positions, nine percent food and one percent homework.”
Was it hot in here? I was going to have to go back downstairs to study if we didn’t talk about something else. “Let’s see if we can get that homework percentage up a little bit. Urban Studies, for example.”
Bella sat up. “Fine. Let’s talk Urban Studies. I really need to get out of my head.”
And I needed to cool off. I yanked my backpack into my lap, practically ducking for cover. I pretended to search for something inside, though all I really needed was a way to disguise the tent I was pitching in my pants.
“Your notebook is here,” Bella said, lifting it off the floor.
“Ah, right.” I grabbed it as if that had been my goal the whole time.
“Name all the food businesses you can think of. Go.”
“Dominican restaurant.”
Bella giggled. “How ever did you come up with that one?”
“Everyone’s a critic. Okay — grocery store. Wine shop. Sushi place. Bella, this isn’t going to get us anywhere. Except now I’m starving.”
She looked up from her own notebook. “Didn’t you eat dinner?”
“Of course I did. But that was hours ago.”
“Boys.” She shook her head. “They’re always hungry.”
“Pretty much,” I sighed. Though there were several kinds of hunger. And I was feeling more than one of them at the moment.
Bella smiled at me right then, and it broke my heart a little bit. Because I wanted to see her smile. And it felt really damned selfish to want other things, too.
“Is there another wine shop in that neighborhood?” she asked. “That sounds like a high-margin business. And it doesn’t need as much floor space as a grocery store.”
“I’ll look it up,” I said, reaching for my laptop.
* * *
On Monday, Alison emailed the rest of the tiny Beaumont Urban Studies team, informing us that it was time to hold a meeting. I let Bella and Dani reply to the email first, and both of them agreed to meet. So I grudgingly agreed, too.
Bella had chosen the location — the creaky little Beaumont library. So at least the commute was short. Bella knocked on my door a few minutes before the meeting. “Your girlfriend’s message said that she wanted to outline the tasks at hand and ready herself for the challenge,” Bella said. “Does she always sound that constipated?”
“Ex-girlfriend,” I corrected. Alison had always been a little formal. I didn’t really trust myself to give an opinion right now, because there was probably nothing Alison could say today that wouldn’t irritate me.
My anger at her was still fresh. Whenever I saw her across the dining hall or the Urban Studies lecture hall, it always took me back to that awful moment when Mr. Rolex appeared. I got all kinds of angry when I thought of that night — and not just at Alison. I was pissed off at myself, too. Because I knew things hadn’t been quite right with her. There had been so many little signs, and I’d ignored them all.
Next time, I’d be more careful with my trust.
“Earth to Rafe.” We were standing in front of the library, but I’d been too deep inside my head to notice. Bella put both hands on my shoulders. “Are you okay? Do you want me to tell her that you were too busy to come to her little planning session?”
“Nah,” I grumbled. “Lead on.”
Bella grabbed my elbow to tug me inside, but she happened to hit me a little too high up under my arm. And I’m very ticklish. “Shit.” I laughed, twis
ting away from her.
“What the fuck?” She dug her fingers into my inner bicep again. “Who’s ticklish there?”
“Dios.” I grabbed her arm. “You are such a pain in the ass.”
“Uh-oh!” Bella sang. “Somebody looks jealous!”
I looked through the window to see Alison staring at us.
“Eh. I doubt it.” I let go of Bella, anyway.
Luckily, when we reached the table Alison had saved for our meeting, Dani was just arriving, too. So I didn’t have to make small talk. For the next fifteen minutes, I let Bella speak for both of us.
“Jeez, you guys are doing great,” Dani said. “That’s a lot of progress.”
Bella nudged me with her elbow. “I told you we started too early.”
“I like to get a jump on things,” I mumbled.
“He always does that,” Alison said, crossing her arms. “It’s a thing with him.”
Ack. I did not want to be a topic of discussion. “So what about the, uh, design part?”
Alison and Dani rambled on for a few minutes about their ideas, while I pretended to listen.
“I don’t know about that green roof idea,” Bella argued. “That sounds expensive.”
“It’s excellent for the environment,” Alison argued.
“As long as we can pay for it,” Bella said. “Are we done for now?”
I grabbed my book bag in the hopes of making a quick getaway.
“Wait,” Alison said. “Rafe, I really need to talk to you for a minute.”
Uh-oh. “Is it about the project?”
She shook her head. I opened my mouth to argue, but she held up a hand. “Please, it will just take a second. Please.” She beckoned to me, then walked outside, where I assumed she was waiting for me.
“Dios,” I muttered.
Bella picked up her backpack. “Do you want me to rescue you in a minute? I could tell her that we’re late to a thing.”
“A thing?”
“Work with me, here.”
“Okay. Yeah. Come and get me for the thing. In three minutes.” That should be plenty of time. Because what was there to say?