He wore a little too much cologne, and the smell overwhelmed me with our faces this close together. There wasn’t a lot of chemistry in the kiss, but my lips moved against his with a fierce intensity anyway. I kissed him to prove a point—to myself, to the four boys watching us, to the whole damn world.
The Princes didn’t own me.
Nobody did.
And nobody got to tell me what to do.
When my lips were swollen and I was about to pass out from the strength of Oliver’s cologne, I finally pulled away from him. He blinked down at me before a pleased, satisfied smile spread across his face.
But he was the only one smiling. My heart was beating too hard, the anger in my veins burning too hot, for me to smile about anything.
And the Princes? They all stood in stony silence, gazes shifting back and forth between me and the curly-haired boy.
I had noticed before that although they often functioned almost like a single entity, there were moments when they seemed to break apart, becoming separate individuals, no longer bolstered by the group.
This was one of those times. They stared at me as I stared right back at them, and each of their expressions was distinctly different.
But none of them looked happy.
Chapter 6
We didn’t stay long at the party after that. I claimed I had a headache, and Oliver agreed to drive me back to campus. He walked me to my door and tried to kiss me again, but I ducked my head, avoiding his lips.
Honestly, I never would’ve kissed him at the party in the first place if it hadn’t been to prove a point. I liked him, but I was wary about trusting anyone, and I although he was a good looking guy and seemed nice enough, I had a hard time mustering the same attraction for him that I’d felt for all the Princes.
Still felt, even though it burned a hole in my soul to admit it.
Oliver seemed disappointed, but he rallied and asked me to go out again the next weekend.
“Sure. That would be nice.” I smiled, trying to force myself to feel something for him, to be attracted to someone who might be good for me for once.
The headache I had made up to escape the after-party was rapidly becoming real, so I made my excuses and slipped inside. As I padded up the stairs to my second-floor room, I rubbed hard at my temples, trying to banish Mason’s words from my mind.
The Princes had acted like they still had some claim to me, like I was some thing they could use, toy with, or break whenever they wanted.
I’d kissed Oliver to piss them off, to prove them wrong. But I couldn’t help but think that despite my little demonstration, there was some truth to Mason’s words.
For the two and a half months I’d been in Sand Valley before Erin Bennett showed up, not a day had gone by when I didn’t think about the Princes. I’d spent every free moment in the library researching their lives, trying to dig up dirt on them. I had a little black book with a section for each of them, and a flash drive to store incriminating evidence.
Obsession with those four boys, with the vengeance I was determined to wreak on them, had taken over my life, blotting out all other dreams and goals.
In a way, I was theirs, even though I’d never wanted to be.
To remind myself of who I was—of who I wanted to be—I threw myself back into dance on Monday.
I kept expecting Adena or someone else to invade my little sanctuary on the second floor of the gymnasium. All the Princes knew I came up here to practice during class. Hell, Finn had spent almost half the previous year hanging out with me in this little room. It was one of the few memories I allowed myself to keep, to leave untarnished by the bullshit that had followed.
The small dance studio had been our neutral ground, our Switzerland, and there was some part of me that still believed everything that’d happened in this room had been real. As if, like in a true demilitarized zone, Finn and I had both shed our weapons and armor before we stepped through the door.
As if the person I’d gotten to know inside these four walls actually existed.
Somewhere.
I shoved thoughts of Finn aside, refusing to let my gaze track to the spot near the door where he used to sit, and sank into a low plié. It would take a bit of time to get my body back into the swing of things, but nowhere near as long as it’d taken last fall. I had trained hard all last year, and although three months off was a long time—in dance terms, anyway—I was determined to reach and surpass my old level quickly.
This was the real reason I was here. To pursue the life I wanted.
Bringing down the Princes will just be a “side benefit”.
The girl in the mirror grinned evilly at me as she rose up onto the balls of her feet.
I spent the rest of the period going through drills and stretches, reawakening muscles in my body that’d started to lose tone. It felt good to be in this familiar room, with the abandoned mats and heavy bags piled in the corner, and for that single hour, I let myself focus on something besides my revenge.
The rest of the day passed without incident, but Tuesday and Wednesday were awful. I couldn’t help but wonder if it was related in any way to the party after the football game, and the anger on the Princes’ faces that night. A couple of times, Oliver stepped to my defense when people called me names or threw shit at me in the halls, though I couldn’t help but notice he only did it when it was underclassmen or people so low on the hierarchy they were basically invisible.
I couldn’t really blame him. I hadn’t asked him to stick up for me, and he was one of the only people in school who did. At least he was doing something, even if what he did made no difference at all.
On Thursday, Adena stole all my books and notebooks from my locker and burned them in a dumpster near the adjunct buildings. Every note I’d taken for half my classes was lost, and I had a sudden flare of panic that she’d burned my little black journal—but I never kept that in my locker. It stayed in my backpack, kept with me at all times.
I had to go to the registrar’s office and beg for replacement books, which I got after paying a hefty fine and enduring a lecture from the woman behind the counter. And when I went to go put the new textbooks in my locker, I found that it’d been broken into again. Someone had scratched disgusting messages all over the inside of the door and walls, and the outside was decorated with just one word.
Trash.
So fucking original.
I hated that it still got to me. The things they’d written in my locker were just words—they couldn’t actually hurt me. Couldn’t leap off the scratched paint and attack me.
But not all wounds were physical. My dad had taught me that lesson many times over before he died. And as much as I wanted to ignore them, the hissed names and scrawled notes calling me everything from a worthless slut to a thief to a disease-riddle piece of trash did hurt.
So I gathered the hurt low in my belly and let it marinate until it turned into anger. Then I unleashed that anger like bolts of lightning, an electric charge that practically jumped out of my body, making my hair stand on end from the force of it.
After Adena burned my books, I stole Finn’s homework and threw it in the Olympic-sized pool in the gym building. After two boys threw water balloons full of paint at me, I poured printer ink down the back of Finn’s neck.
But I couldn’t keep up with everything. And there were pranks I couldn’t even think about pulling without an accomplice, which I didn’t have. I was falling behind, and by the end of the week, I was an exhausted, strung out mess.