Perhaps noting a kindred spirit in Anna’s heavy black makeup and torn-up tights, Rakel strikes up a conversation about the concerts she attended over the summer. Anna enthusiastically responds with her own tales of outdoor venues, raging mosh pits, and outrageous prices for shit beer.
“How are you doing?” Leo asks me kindly.
“I’m fine!” I lie instinctively.
Has anyone in the history of the world actually been “fine” when they responded that way?
I’m a people-pleaser. Like Zoe, I’ve never felt free to share my burdens with others. Especially not someone as handsome and intimidating as Leo Gallo.
I sink down on a pile of coiled rope, joined by Ares Cirillo, who sits by me in companionable silence, watching the sailors work. I know he owns a little skiff that he sails around his tiny Greek island. He looks quite at home on the ocean, with his turquoise eyes and streaks of sun in his hair.
As the ship pulls out of the harbor, the breeze picks up and a pleasant salt spray blows in our faces. However, the sun beats down on our heads, and soon students are shedding every possible article of clothing, including academy jackets, stockings, and even shirts.
Dean Yenin leans against the ship’s railing, stripping off his white dress shirt. The skin beneath is barely darker than the shirt, rippled with muscle hard-won through countless hours in our school gym. As he turns to lay his shirt over the railing, I see the Siberian tiger crawling up his back. Dean reminds me of a white tiger himself—pale and vicious, composed of lean, hard muscle and the desire to rip flesh from bone.
Bram Van Der Berg is rubbing tanning oil on his swarthy skin, apparently determined to darken himself another shade before reaching the island.
“Give me that,” Dean mutters, swiping the oil from Bram’s hand.
He strides over to me, a smirk already spreading across his face.
“Cat!” he barks, making me jump. “Rub this on my back.”
Anna laughs derisively.
“Get Bram to do it,” she says. “Cat’s busy.”
Dean ignores her, his pale purplish eyes fixed on my face.
“Now,” he says quietly.
I feel myself jumping up from my position on the pile of ropes, snapping to attention before I’ve even formulated a thought.
“Okay,” I murmur, my face flaming pink.
Anna frowns. “You don’t have to listen to him,” she says to me.
Anna and Dean dated briefly in their first year of school, but I know that’s not why she’s defending me. Anna is the sort of feminist who always protects her sisters, whether she knows the man in question or not.
Dean is watching me, his face darkening as I fail to obey his order.
“I really don’t mind,” I stammer, stumbling over my own feet as I hurry across the pitching deck.
Anna, Leo, Ares, and Rakel watch me with identical expressions of confusion while I take the oil from Dean and squirt it into my hands.
“Rub it on my back,” he says. “Slowly. And don’t spill one fucking drop.”
My hands shake and my face burns as more students watch the bizarre performance of me, a shy little nobody, oiling up the back of one of the most vicious boys at school.
Dean’s skin is smooth and sun-warmed, the muscle beneath the flesh iron-hard.
“Rub out those knots,” he orders.
I try to obey, but my small hands are no match for the tough muscle. I can’t sink my fingers in at all.
Dean makes me rub his back and shoulders, then all the way down his arms.
“Now the chest,” he says, smirking.
He turns to face me, looking down into my face while I spread oil across his pectoral muscles. I can’t meet his eye. I feel utterly humiliated, forced to do this in front of hundreds of watching eyes. Dean is so much taller than me that I have to stretch up on tiptoe just to reach the top of his shoulders.
Standing in such close proximity to him makes my whole body shake. I feel like a mouse forced to dance around within the confines of a tiger’s claws. I’m trembling, my brain telling me that this is much too close, that I need to flee immediately.
I can smell Dean’s skin beneath the coconut oil. He smells clean and freshly showered, but as the sun beats down on us both, I get a hint of his actual scent, an intense and titillating aroma like the green-tinged fumes of absinthe. It makes me weak and wobbly.