Jazz stood from the table slowly, running her hands down the front of her skirt, brushing away the wrinkles. She smiled up at Derek or Westley. He grinned cockily down at her. “Not that it’s not hot,” he said. “Two girls, or whatever, even if one of them is butch. I think you need to explore your options, you know?”
Nick really didn’t understand straight people. They didn’t seem to have any sense of self-preservation.
“Do you?” Jazz asked sweetly. Well, it sounded sweet, but Nick had seen one too many shows on Animal Planet about how lionesses hunt. And since lionesses hunted in groups, Derek or Westley was up to his neck in shit. “Maybe show me what I’m missing?”
He reached down and grabbed her hand. “It’d be my pleasure. And then if there’s time for it, it could be your pleasure too. I’m not selfish.”
“Oh, man,” Nick said. “You shouldn’t have said that.”
Derek or Westley glanced at Nick, eyeing him as if he were some kind of bug. “What’d you say?”
It’d been a long time since he’d heard Jazz make a near-grown man scream. Usually, she’d let them off with a warning, but Derek or Westley was grosser than most, so when she turned her hand and snapped it around two of his fingers, twisting them viciously and bringing his arm behind his back, Nick couldn’t find it in himself to feel all that bad. He took another bite of his sandwich.
Derek or Westley cried out in pain as his head fell to the lunch table right next to Jazz’s caprese salad. Gibby pulled the Tupperware away, just to be safe.
“Thank you, baby,” Jazz said. “I appreciate that.”
“You asshole,” Derek or Westley managed to say. “Let me—ow, ow ow!”
“Now, here’s how this is going to go,” Jazz said, apparently able to ignore the fact that everyone in the cafeteria was staring at her. You didn’t mess with Jasmine Kensington, especially not during lunch. And if you did, you certainly didn’t insult her friends at the same time. “You’re going to apologize. And after you apologize, I will let you go. If any of that sounds too much for you, we’ll see how far your fingers can bend before they snap.”
“You can’t—”
“That wasn’t an apology,” she said, and Nick didn’t know it was possible for fingers to be facing the direction Derek or Westley’s were. He should have paid more attention during anatomy.
“Okay! Okay! I’m sorry!”
“And you will never touch another person without their consent again.”
“I won’t.”
“Or call my friends any derogatory names. Because that’s rude.”
“So rude!” Derek or Westley cried.
“Good,” she said cheerfully. “If I find out that you do, we’ll have to see if you can live a normal life without your testicles. Do we have an understanding?”
“Yes,” he groaned.
“How wonderful. You can leave now. I’m done with you.”
He groaned again as she let him go. She shoved him away from the table before sitting back down primly, spreading the cloth napkin—which had undoubtedly been packed by one of the maids in her parents’ employ—in her lap. She picked up her fork and was about to slice into a fat tomato, when she looked around the cafeteria. “You may continue eating.”
Everyone quickly turned away from her as Derek or Westley all but ran toward his friends, who would most likely talk about how evil the queer table was.
“That’s better,” Jazz said. “I don’t like it when people interrupt my lunch. I’m hungry, and I’m going to eat all of this.”
“I love you so much,” Gibby said, sounding awed.
“As do I,” Nick said, because it was true.
Seth nodded. “Me too.”
“Eh,” Owen said, “I could go either way—what the hell, Gibby? You didn’t have to kick me!”
“Wasn’t her,” Seth said. “And you were being stupid. Ergo, you deserved to be kicked. Repeatedly. In the face.”
Owen winced as he rubbed his shin. “You wound me, Seth.”
Seth smiled at him. “Do I? I feel just awful about it.”
“Oh, I bet you do.”
“We’ll have to see about that, won’t we?”
Owen’s eyes narrowed. “I’m sure we will.”
“Are you guys flirting?” Nick asked, glancing between the two of them. Nick didn’t necessarily know how to flirt, or even really what it looked like. It had taken Owen kissing Nick for him to even understand that Owen might have liked him in the first place. He figured he’d have time to learn how to flirt at some point, but in the meantime, he couldn’t be sure what he was witnessing.