are guys like Atticus Caswell who don’t have the balls to go after what they want when their mommy tells them to stay away from a girl, no matter how much he likes her.”
I looked over my shoulder at a guy who looked as though he wouldn’t have a problem with tossing stacks of cash into a fireplace if he was cold. I could practically smell the wealth radiating off him from over here—which was saying a lot, considering I was surrounded by guys who’d grown up with silver spoons in their mouths. He was seated a few tables down, and now that Chuck had pointed him out to me, I realized he was sneaking looks at Emmeline.
Ignoring the other shit he’d said, I focused on the one thing that had the potential to get in my way. “He likes Emmeline?”
“Yeah, but you don’t need to worry about him asking her out or anything,” he assured me.
I slid another look at Atticus. “Just because his mom doesn’t approve?”
“Yeah, he can’t access his trust until he turns twenty-one, and his mom controls the purse strings until then,” he explained.
“I don’t get it.” I shook my head, my brow wrinkling. “Emmeline comes from money. From what I can tell, she’s pretty, smart, and kind. Isn’t she exactly the kind of girl a trust fund kid’s mom would want him to date?”
“Normally, yes,” Chuck agreed. I was even more confused until he added, “But his mom doesn’t want to run the risk of Emmeline’s mother getting her claws into their family.”
“What’s up with her mom?” I asked, sending another glance Emmeline’s way and grinning when I caught her looking right at me again.
“She takes social climbing to the extreme.” He lifted his hand and rubbed his fingers against the pad of his thumb. “If Emmeline started dating a guy who came from one of the big families in Black Mountain like the Caswells, I wouldn’t put it past Mrs. Cushing to give Emmeline a box of condoms with holes poked in them. The woman is a world-class user. All she sees in people is what they can do for her or even her daughter. Being the baby daddy for her grandchild would fucking suck.”
The thought of one of the rich pricks I went to school with having sex with Emmeline, let alone knocking her up, made my blood boil. Chuck’s explanation sounded lame as fuck to me, but I wasn’t going to try to explain to him how ridiculous their logic was. The last thing I wanted was to give one of the guys a reason to make a move on the only girl at BMA who I was interested in. The idea of some dude named Atticus swooping in and claiming her lit a fire in my veins.
Nothing Chuck had said lessened my attraction for Emmeline. Her mom sounded awful, but I wasn’t going to judge someone based on their parents. And it wasn’t as though I had an inheritance that would make her mother want to push us together. If anything, she’d probably be pissed as fuck if her daughter got involved with a guy like me. I didn’t even have enough money to hold the social ladder she wanted to climb so badly.
“I feel kind of bad for her. She’s a nice girl and doesn’t really deserve the crap some of the popular crowd shovel her way.” He looked over at a table of cheerleaders who had been a pain in my ass more times than I could count over the past week. They were the kind of girls I was determined to avoid because they acted as though the world revolved around them. I’d barely said two words to anyone in the bunch, but a few seemed determined as fuck to get me to bang them. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had a bet of some kind on who bagged one of the new guys first. They sure as shit didn’t give a damn about me as a person.
Most guys would’ve taken them up on the offer. Sex with a hot chick who wasn’t interested in anything long term should have sounded like a dream come true. But those chicks wouldn’t think twice about fucking up my life on a whim. No way was I going to give one of them any power over me. Especially not when my dick was only interested in a beautiful girl who’d been as sweet as fuck when we’d talked. If I