frustrated. Did she really think us fucking that night meant we were back together? She couldn’t have: even she admitted to that being a mistake when I flew back from Brick’s funeral.
“We’re seniors. This school year shouldn’t be so damn stressful—”
“Then don’t let it be—”
“From lying!” I finished my statement. “It didn’t work!” I spoke of our relationship. “So fuckin’ what? You think we’re the only couple to come to that conclusion in their senior year.”
“We’re different, Ashton! We have—had—plans for this spring, and the summer. We were solid.”
“We were never solid!” I shouted. “We started out with fucking lies. It was so unnecessary, but you made it that way. You!”
“I made one mistake and it’s costing me my future? Ashton, that’s bullshit!” Tears welled in her eyes.
I shook my head. “We’re beyond the one mistake now. It’s not about that. It’s about the details surrounding that mistake.”
Pettiford still rode my ass about fucking my future fiancée before I did. That’s what his every harassment was about, not about the fact that when he damn near killed me during hazing, he lost his role as Dean of Pledges, but the BSU chapter almost got expelled. Wanda wanted the head of every Alpha Omega Psi on the planet, which put pressure on the school. It took me crying crocodile tears to her, the AOPsi grand chapter and its board, and BSU at a hearing for them to not suspend the chapter, not cut that year’s line, and for me to finish with my line. The shit was stressful as hell, causing me to have to repeat two classes that summer to be back on track the following fall.
Deciding to be an AOPsi did not happen when I showed up on Blakewood’s campus. I’d been planning it since seventh grade. I’d worked damn hard to make it to bid day. I would have never gotten my letters if we’d gotten expelled—anywhere or at any later date. I would’ve been marked. That could have ended the dreams of everyone on my damn line. Wanda Lee was a raving bitch when offended. She wanted blood.
All of this, Aivery knew, because she was my confidant when pledging made us all tender. While I couldn’t share most of the shit we went through, I did articulate what I felt about it. And all the while I was sharing—crying on her shoulder while she preferred we wait for sex—she was fulfilling a childhood fantasy with Benjamin Pettiford. They’d known each other forever and had finally linked up at BSU. Pettiford’s father was the CFO of Aivery’s father’s peanut farm. He’d had access to her all those years, but oddly waited until she arrived on his campus and was dating little ol’ me. It was all fucked up. When I allowed myself to recount those painful months, the shit still burned my fucking soul.
But here she stood, wanting to cry about one mistake she made. Not the consequential domino effect it had on my life and others. She was right, though. I did plan to start our “forever” in a few months. But that image had been fading since last spring when I learned of the one mistake.
I shook my head, shrugging with my lips, having nothing more to say.
“So that’s it?”
I repeated the act, shrugging, and not being an asshole either. It was because there was nothing to say.
“On her birthday?” I heard a deep voice beyond Aivery’s wavy hair. “Real grand, Spence.”
I blinked a few times, unable to trust my eyes. In my peripheral, Aivery turned to see Pettiford in the middle of her hallway, having just come out of her bedroom.
“What the fuck are you doing in my room?” she trilled.
The bright colors of a bouquet from the corner of my eye had me gazing all around the small common area. These weren’t a collective group of bouquets sent by several people. They were all roses—a romantic gesture. Pettiford was here wooing Aivery on her birthday. They’d both taken this “friendship” too far.
He wouldn’t address her, his heated eyes were on me. “You’re a real asshole, you know that?” His short frame, which was short to me considering my height versus his five feet, ten-inch frame, ambled toward me. “You can’t grow the fuck up about her life before you with a real man, and you expect her to explain for it?”
“I expect for you not to sniff up her ass, you fuckin’ alumni-employee.” I scoffed, seeing red. “What the fuck are you, one of