RIOT HOUSE (Crooked Sinners #1) - Callie Hart Page 0,173

living together and there are only a few months left until we all graduate, the idea of someone new, someone more permanent, entering our official orbit is bringing him out in hives.

From the backseat, I reach through the gap into the front of the car, giving his shoulder a halfhearted punch. “It’s not the end of the world, man. Everything’s cool. You need to be cool. You make having a girlfriend sound like a fate worse than death.”

“It’s alright for you. You get regular sex out of this arrangement. What do we get? Our spots on the sofa stolen? Weird clumps of hair in the shower? Frilly fucking underwear caught up in our laundry? Tampons in medicine cabinet? Urgh.”

“She’s not moving in asshole. She’ll stay the night on the weekends. I’ll make sure she keeps her tampons to herself. And don’t worry. No one would dare steal your spot on the sofa.”

I feel like I’m counseling a traumatized child, whose father has just started dating someone new. Any second now, I half expect him to throw a tantrum and come out with the old, “I’m not gonna call her Mom!” line.

“Don’t you have anything to say about this?” Pax glares at Dashiell in the passenger seat.

Dashiell sighs, but his frustration’s all for show. “After much consideration, I’ve decided that Wren can do whatever the fuck makes him happy. Besides. Change is good. Maybe you should get yourself a girlfriend.”

Pax recoils in horror. “Absolutely not! Why would I voluntarily incarcerate myself?”

I laugh. Dash laughs. The only person who isn’t laughing is Pax. He’s taking this upheaval to his daily routine very personally. “Alright. Whatever, pricks. I’m leaving.” He gets out of the car and stalks toward the academy’s entrance, his shoulders pulled up around his ears. With the clipped gait and aggressive arm swing he’s got going on, even his walk looks pissed off.

“Don’t worry. He’ll come around,” Dash says.

“He’d better, for your sake. He’s gonna flip his shit when he realizes that you’ve got a girlfriend, too.”

“Don’t you breathe a fucking word,” Dash says in a very serious tone. “We have to ease him into this one step at a time. He’s already being difficult enough as it is. Living with Pax, mid existential crisis, would not be a fun time.”

I’m inclined to agree.

We head inside the school, and I’m weirdly nervous. I’ve done the unthinkable and faced down my father. I’ve stood in preliminary court hearing and testified against a madman. Everything else in my life should be a cakewalk at this point, but publicly announcing to the world that I’m in love with someone and I want nothing more than to make her smile on a daily basis is a terrifying fucking prospect.

Spring break’s right around the corner, so I only have to deal with the staring and the whispered comments for another couple of weeks, but even so…my palms are sweating like they’ve never sweat before.

The ‘incident,’ as the Wolf Hall faculty are calling it, is still a hot topic of conversation, and probably will be until the end of the school year. It’s not every day that a teacher loses his goddamn mind and tries to murder a handful of students. It’s not a common occurrence for a dead body to be discovered on academy grounds, either. Students chatter and gossip about the latest developments—Fitz’s face plastered all over the internet, interviews from Mara’s parents on CNN, reports that Fitz confessed to his crimes and hasn’t denied a thing—as we head towards English. There was talk that the class would be relocated to another, regular classroom after everything that’s gone down, but there was so much pushback from the students that Harcourt announced we could still study there, providing concentration levels or grades didn’t suffer because of our surroundings. Personally, I don’t give a shit where I take my classes now that Fitz is gone.

A hushed silence falls over the class when Dash and I enter the den. Damiana guns me down with a scathing stare. At some point, she’s decided that she hates me, and I am A-okay with that. Pax is already sitting in his spot on the floor underneath the window. Dash rolls his eyes at me as he crosses the room, going to take up his regular place beside our friend.

I make it halfway toward the battered leather sofa underneath the bank of windows before I veer to the left, changing direction. My ribcage pinches tightly when I see her, sitting there