breaks the surface. He knocks on his skull. “Thick head, remember?”
Stone just smiles and shakes his head. Behind me, a sound makes me jump, but when I turn, it’s just Lucas joining the party. He takes a seat on a half-moon type bed that has a wicker sunshade overhanging half of it. He lies right down, taking up all the space just like he did in my car. He winks at me. “Have a seat, Wild Girl.”
“Wild Girl?” Stone scoffs. Then, he scrunches up his face as if he’s thinking it over. “I like it.”
“Too bad. Get another name,” Lucas says. “That one’s taken.”
I decide that Blue’s Clues is much more condescending, so if he wants to call me Wild Girl, I guess he can, even if I don’t measure up to that moniker.
“You should have a seat,” Stone says. “We need to talk about what happened.”
I eye a seat next to him and pull it over the concrete, giving us a good few feet of distance between us before I sit in it. Stone’s jaw tightens, and Lucas pretends not to smile behind his hand that just so happens to be wiping over his mouth at the right time. “Good,” I say. “I have—”
“First,” Stone says, interrupting. He glowers at me. “I thought I made it quite clear that you weren’t to have anyone else touch you but us.”
My mouth drops, hanging open like I want to catch some flies. I snap it shut. “I thought we were going to talk about the state Lucas and I found my dorm room in. The whole reason why I’m here.”
“The reason why you’re here is because you didn’t listen to simple instruction,” Stone explains. His voice is so haughty and proper. There’s no twang or velvety tenor like Lucas’s. He’s city all the way, and yet, he’s not at the same time. He knows what he’s doing up in the mountains even though the attitude he puts off would say otherwise. “Todd is a grunt, nothing more.” Anger lances Stone’s face, and he bares his teeth. “That he even thought he could touch you.”
His words hang in the air. I keep waiting for someone to explain the big deal to me, but no one does. “Oh, okay,” I say, letting how puzzled I am about all this seep through. “You’re serious about this. So, for starters, fuck you. I’ll touch who I want.”
Lucas chuckles in the corner, but it’s drowned out by Wyatt’s laugh and splashing in the pool as he kicks away from the opposite side to glide across the water and heave himself out of it. “Ah, look. Stone looks confused.”
“Fuck off, Longhorn.”
Wyatt doesn’t heed his warning. He goes to the side of the patio, rummages in a cement shelf and pulls out a towel. He rubs it over his face and then through his hair. It’s the first time I’ve seen him without his hat or without the hat hair he’s usually sporting. It’s— Who am I kidding? It doesn’t matter what Wyatt wears—or doesn’t wear—my body instinctively wants to climb him like a tree.
I catch something Stone says as I tear my gaze away from Wyatt’s abs. His voice is filled with disdain. “...you don’t need to stoop to their level.”
“Wait. Whose level?”
“Fuck boy Todd,” Lucas helpfully supplies.
“Todd isn’t—” But then I shake my head. Why does everything they say make me want to argue against it? “Yes, he’s a fuck boy, but I wasn’t going to sleep with him. Not that anyone I sleep with is any of your business.” Jesus. Just because he’s some sort of local celebrity doesn’t mean he gets to tell me what to do.
Stone’s gray-blue eyes capture mine. He’s always intense, no matter what he’s doing. I wonder how the cogs in his brain do so much overtime. It must be exhausting to be him. To want things just the way he likes but thwarted at every turn because there are mere mortals in the world who can’t easily oblige him. “It is, actually, my business,” Stone says. He puts up a hand when I start to argue with him. “Because we have a real problem on our hands, Dakota. We don’t actually know exactly where it’s coming from, so we have to be careful about who we talk to.”
“You mean you guys have a problem,” I say. “Not me.”
“The condition you found your room in would say otherwise.”