Kody rolled his eyes and leaned over to say something to the girl. Archer's face hardened, his angry-eyed gaze finding me across the room, but his show was upstaged by his girl attempting to slap Kody.
I said attempting because he caught her wrist before her palm connected. Whatever he said next had her storming out of the cafeteria with her cheeks heated and her brow drawn in a deep scowl.
Kody looked back over at me, spreading his hands out as if to say, "See? All cleaned up."
"Fuck’s sake," I muttered, looking at Bree. "Do you mind? We sort of have this thing..."
I trailed off, feeling like a total moron for admitting to a fake-but-not-actually-fake relationship with Kody. Because my feelings toward him were far from fake.
Bree grinned broadly. "Uh-huh, I can see that. I want to hear all about it too." She picked up her tray and gave me a smug smile. "Come on, then. Let's go join the kings of campus."
She strutted her sassy butt over to their table and sat down between Archer and Steele like she belonged there, leaving a seat beside Kody on the other side of the table free.
I sighed and followed. After I placed my tray down on the table, Kody's arm snaked around my waist and dragged me into his lap, rather than the chair I'd intended to sit in.
"Seriously?" Archer demanded, slamming his fork down. "First you pull that shit with the girls and now this?"
"Now what?" Kody replied with total innocence as he dragged my tray closer for me. "Oh, good choices, babe."
I snickered, but stayed where I was. If Archer was already acting like a bratty three-year-old, then that's exactly where I wanted to be. "Oh really? You're not going to berate me for my high-fat, high-sugar choices?"
"Fuck no," Kody replied, looking outraged. "Any sane man knows not to tell a woman how to eat. If pizza and chocolate gave you this banging body, I'm all fucking for it. Eat up."
I grinned because he'd just passed a test I wasn't even aware I was putting him through. Straight up common sense.
"Didn't you know, Arch?" Steele commented, eating his sandwich with a barely disguised smile. "Madison Kate and Kody are dating now. I guess whatever you said to her must have struck a chord."
Damn, I wished I had a camera to photograph the look of disbelief on his face in that moment. It was perfect.
I must have made a sound of amusement out loud because Archer's furious gaze snapped to me like a homing beacon. He shoved back from the table with a sharp scrape of his chair legs, and I wobbled slightly on Kody's lap. My foot hooked my bag on the floor and jerked it, spilling the contents on the ground.
"Ugh, thanks a fucking lot, asshole," I snapped at Archer, because clearly all of life's problems were his fault. I slid off Kody's lap and knelt down to pick everything up, and Kody helped me a second later.
"Hey," he said with a frown while I stuffed books back into my bag, "what's this?"
He held up a sealed envelope with my name—my full name—scrawled on the front in sharp, black-inked letters.
I froze, my breath halting and my skin prickling. I knew that handwriting.
"That's..." I stared at the envelope in his hand like it was a poisonous snake. "How did that get into my bag?"
"What is it?" Archer asked, coming around the table with a sneer on his face like he expected some childish prank that he could laugh at. "Oh, let me guess, a love letter? Kody, your new girlfriend isn't amazing at the whole monogamy thing."
Kody sneered back at him as he stood up. "Who said she needs to be?" he replied. "But no, you insensitive ass, that's not what this is." He ripped the envelope open, not waiting for me to do it myself. Fair call, too—I probably would have just trashed the whole thing.
I got up off the floor, as everything else was back in my bag, and peered over at the photo in Kody's hand. It was of me—obviously—but taken just that morning in the SGU parking lot. I was standing beside Steele's car, looking up at him with an expression I'd never seen on my own face. His hand was under my shirt, his palm on my stomach, and his eyes locked on mine...
It was an intensely intimate shot, one I'd kind of love if it hadn't been taken by a