swooning or desperately trying to squeeze out some gossip. Probably both.
“Sure.”
I didn’t miss the eyes that followed us as we navigated the crowd, or the way our peers parted as we walked down the hallway side by side. I kept hearing snippets of conversation around us.
“Who’s that? Besides Will with the—”
“—I wonder where they’re going? Did she arrive with him this morning?”
“Where did she get those boots?”
“I heard she hooked up with him at the party. Do you think they’re an—”
“What did you do at lunchtime?” I asked William once we cut through the bottleneck of students and strode across campus, still the focus of several curious glances.
“I disappeared,” he replied.
“You didn’t mention me?” I asked. Wasn’t the whole point of this to get my name into the mouths of Level One?
“No,” William said, frustration bordering the edge of his tone. “That would make them suspicious in the wrong way. Like I’ve said before, permanent fixture. I need to bring you in slow. It would be weird if I automatically started dating someone and pulled them in straightaway.”
“Right.”
“You still don’t trust me?”
“This isn’t about trust. It’s about you keeping up your end of the deal,” I reminded him.
“I forgot it’s all about pulling puppet strings for you. Do you even have feelings?”
I clamped my lips against each other in a bid to stop myself from telling him to back off. We were just entering the parking lot, and I was thankful our cars were a fair distance away from one another. “I’ll see you at my house.”
As soon as I fell back into the leather of my car seat, I let out a huff. Partly because I was pissed at William for making this more difficult than it needed to be, and partly because I really needed to take my shoes off.
William must have been going way over the speed limit because he beat me to my house. I pulled into the family garage and stepped inside quickly to grab a smaller purse.
“Let’s get this over with,” I muttered to myself. As much as this would be a huge stride forward in my plan, it was also going to take a lot of energy.
“Okay, we need to sort out details,” William said after I slid into his car. “So to them, we’re dating. And I have the right to publicly dump you if you do anything to embarrass me or play any games. I’m safe, remember?”
“Fine,” I said. By the time I got to William, I wouldn’t need the protection of his status anyway. “But it has to be serious for you to resort to that.”
“And if you really want to feed them this dating line, we need some PDA,” he said next. His confidence was admirable. “What are your limits?”
I snorted. “If I didn’t know any better I’d say you were trying to get with me, Bishop.”
His knuckles whitened over the steering wheel. “You’re really not my type.”
“Whatever,” I said. I knew I shouldn’t be offended that I wasn’t the type for the guy I was blackmailing, but it was hard not to feel stung. “Hand-holding is fine. I guess we could hug. But that’s it. Nothing more.”
“That should be fine for a few weeks. As long as we keep up the act and people don’t ask questions. How long is this going to last?”
I thought about it. I needed the infiltration and collection phases to be relatively quick, but who knows how long it’d take to earn their trust. “A few months, tops.”
His eyes flickered from the road to me. “You’re saying I might have to pretend to date you for months?”
“Well, yeah.” He was the one who suggested me being a permanent fixture, after all.
He sighed heavily as he hit the brake pedal for a red light.
“Is there a problem?”
“Loose ends more like.”
“Oh, right.” Suddenly it made sense. “I’ll be stopping you from getting some.”
William didn’t say anything, his jawbone pulsing.
“Well, as long as people don’t know you’re cheating on me, it’s fine.” That was how relationships worked for Level One, wasn’t it?
“I think you’ll discover it’s more difficult than that,” he said.
“How so?”
He took a left, swinging into the parking lot beside a hidden building, decorated with overgrown potted plants in golden baskets. Across its front door was a wooden sign painted to spell Jermaine’s.
William inhaled deeply before killing the ignition. “You’re probably about to find out.”
Five
Monica,
Remember when bathroom stalls were our headquarters? I feel like we spent a million hours in them. You let me