Breathless 3 (Breathless #3)

BREATHLESS
#3

The
Breathless Series Book #3

BAD
BOY FRAT

By
Claire Adams

This
book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are
products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not
to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual
events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

Copyright
© 2015 Claire Adams

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Chapter
One

If I had thought that searching information about
Claire White was going to put my mind at ease, I had been disastrously wrong. I
didn’t sleep at all the rest of the night — or if I did, it snuck through so
many moments of heart-pounding anxiety and unease that I didn’t even notice it.
The next morning, I somehow managed to drag myself out of bed after hitting the
snooze on my alarm three times, when I knew that I couldn’t delay the
inevitable any longer. I might be terrified of what I had — somewhat, at least
— discovered about Johnny, but that didn’t mean I had an excuse not to go to
class.
Professor Grant, I can’t come in.
I just found out that my boyfriend might be a psychopath and I haven’t slept at
all.

I got dressed mindlessly, feeling like my brain itself
ached, pulling on my clothes mechanically in the pale light coming through my
dorm window. I couldn’t even process what I had read about Johnny the night
before; surely it was a complete misunderstanding. There had to be some
explanation. I tried to think, tried to remember what Johnny had told me about
the girl when we had been alone together. She had been troubled and he couldn’t
save her. I hadn’t been able to figure out just what had gone down — just that
apparently Claire had been horrifically mistreated by some boys and that
somehow Johnny had been involved.

I was haunted by the accusation against Johnny as I
stumbled my way out of the dorms and started towards the dining hall to grab
something to eat. I knew I wouldn’t have time to get a proper breakfast — my
sleepless snoozing had seen to that — but I also knew that nothing at all in my
churning stomach wouldn’t do anything to help me focus through my morning
classes.
Not that I’m going to be able to
focus anyway.
I grabbed a banana, an apple, and a travel cup of coffee as
quickly as I could, darting in and out of the dining hall and even brushing
past some people in line ahead of me without a word. Most of them were too
bleary-eyed to complain.

As I walked out towards my classes, I felt like I was
trapped underwater. Mom and Dad had taken me on a cruise once when I’d been
about ten. One of the activities they’d signed us up for had been snorkeling,
and at first I had been as eager as anyone on the ship to go along. But the sea
had been choppy, and out of the blue as I was minding my own business, staring
down into the reef through my mask, a wave crested over my snorkel and the
undertow pulled me in its wake. My snorkel filled up and I struggled under the
water, trying to find the surface even as I panicked, my mouth filling with
brackish brine.

That same feeling came over me as I walked along the
pathway to the building for my first class of the day, trying not to look at
anyone. I didn’t know what to think. Obviously, it had been too good to be true;
I had suspected that from the very beginning. But I would never in a million
years have thought that I had fallen for a total sociopath.
Maybe he’s not a sociopath. Maybe he’s
just…somehow…
My brain foundered, trying to find some justification for what
I had read, some way of making sense of what two different sources had
suggested to me.

Clearly, a group of boys had somehow been involved in
driving Claire White to her death. Even more obviously, plenty of people
thought that Johnny had been involved somehow. I had no idea what the
circumstances were.
Maybe he wasn’t
involved at all. Maybe it’s a big misunderstanding.
But if a bunch of
people thought that he had helped drive a girl to suicide, I couldn’t imagine
that they were all wrong.

Besides, I could remember how Johnny acted on the ice.
He was brutal; he had told me about the brawl during the away game I hadn’t
seen with glee in his eyes. He had never been anything but gentle with me, but
I couldn’t make myself reconcile the way that Johnny had been on the ice and
the way that the reports on his involvement with Claire White’s suicide with
the boy who had toasted marshmallows and made love to me on a blanket in the
middle of the woods. I remembered how scared I had been when he had driven his
huge truck onto the isolated trail, deeper and deeper into the park, away from
prying eyes.

I was moving more slowly than I wanted to, tired down
to my bones, my brain struggling between the adrenaline of my fear and the
fatigue of not sleeping the night before. I tried to think of something Johnny
had done that could not have been done by someone who valued life. Instead,
images of him on the ice, colliding with the other team’s players, throwing
himself into them hard enough to knock them down or into a wall flitted through
my head. I could tell how much he had enjoyed it. What kind of man had I
attached myself to? How could I have been so stupid?

I thought of the girl from the dining hall. She had
been more than happy to flash her tits at Johnny, but she had been the first
one to tell me about Claire White. It didn’t make any sense. If she really
thought that Johnny was so awful as to be involved in someone’s suicide, why
would she flirt with him? Why would she go after him? I felt a shiver work
through my spine at the thought of her going after him even if she knew for a
fact that he was some kind of vicious sociopath.

But was Johnny actually a sociopath? Could I consider
him that way? I stepped into my class and sat down heavily in the nearest seat
I could find, totally ignoring my usual place in the room as other students
started to file in. My mind was spinning, and I couldn’t quite get rid of the
feeling that I was drowning, that I couldn’t breathe. I had no idea what to
think. I had no idea what to believe. Part of me insisted that it had to be
true; after all, with so many people insisting that he was involved in that
poor girl’s suicide, how could there not be fire behind the smoke? But part of
me refused to believe it. Johnny had been so upset to talk about her. He had
told me as much as he could stand — and it was obvious that it still hurt him.
But could I believe that? Could I take it at face value that it was real?

I tried to focus in class and tried to make myself
just put the question of Johnny and his involvement in the suicide aside. But
thoughts of what he could possibly have done to the girl he had dated to
contribute to her committing suicide popped in, intruding on the lecture.
What if he abused her? What if he beat her
up — and those other boys helped? They had done something. They went to jail.
Someone said that Johnny should be in jail, too. What did he do?

I was so lost in my own thoughts that I nearly shouted
in surprise when my phone vibrated in my pocket. My heart was pounding in my
chest. I took my phone out carefully — the professor hated seeing a phone out
in her class. I breathed in deeply, trying to calm down. If my hands shook so
much that my phone fell out of them, I’d be just as doomed. The screen flashed
with Johnny’s contact ID and a message notification. I closed my eyes. Of
course it was him; it wouldn’t be anyone else, not at this time of day. Mom or
Dad would have called, they wouldn’t have texted. I looked around to make sure
no one was watching me and then opened the text message.
Hey, Becky-baby,
it read.
Can’t
wait to see you again. What are you up to tonight?
I swallowed against the
tight feeling in my throat and closed the message without responding. I had no
idea what to do or say. I couldn’t just agree to spend time with him. I
couldn’t be around Johnny again until I had figured out just what I was getting
into and what kind of crazed person he might be. And even then — did I want to
be with someone who could help drive someone to suicide and then lie about it?
Another text came in, and I cringed before I looked at it.
Let’s do dinner at least, if nothing else.
I couldn’t make myself
respond to it, even if I knew I should write something. I couldn’t think of
what I should say. I couldn’t think of what I wanted to do. I had no idea how
to feel — other than the fact that I was confused and I was deeply, deeply
afraid of the possible monster I had been dating so happily.

Chapter
Two

I went through the day, feeling alternately numb all
over and as if every nerve in my body was about to explode. I didn’t know what
to do and didn’t know how to think, and just like before, when I had been
plagued by thoughts about whether or not Johnny was interested in me and after
the stupid girl from the dining hall had brought Claire White to my attention
in the first place, I couldn’t focus. I only heard one word out of ten if I was
lucky in my lectures. I had no idea what I’d be able to make of my notes when I
went to study later or do homework. As far as I was concerned, I might as well have
not bothered going to class — except for the class participation points, which
made up part of all of my grades.

I got lunch at some point in the day, though Georgia
couldn’t meet with me; instead of sitting in the dining hall, I grabbed a
sandwich and a to-go cup of soup and retreated into the dorm. I didn’t want to
risk running into Johnny. I couldn’t deal with the idea of even seeing him, not
with everything weighing on my mind the way it was. I wouldn’t know how to tell
him what was wrong if I had to look up at his face. Everything would come
tumbling out of me.

It was like living in a nightmare. I had no idea how
to make my brain stop swirling around, how to make my heart stop pounding. Part
of me wanted to ask Johnny point blank what had happened to the girl. See if he
would tell me anything more.
But he
already gave you his story and it doesn’t match up to what everyone else is
saying about him. How can you trust what he would tell you? How well do you
really know him?
The fact that he had been talking about spending the rest
of our lives together, about getting married and having kids, when we had only
been seeing each other maybe a couple of weeks, suddenly didn’t seem charming
at all, but somehow weirdly sinister. What college-aged guy really thought
about getting married? What guy in his early twenties wanted to settle down
with someone for the rest of his life and have kids?

I went back to my room without knowing how I was going
to manage anything. I never replied to Johnny’s text, and I still didn’t know,
even after a full day of classes, what I would say to him. Georgia came into
the room as I was pretending to study, cheerful as always; for once, she didn’t
have anything to say about Johnny and me — about how envious she was that I had
nabbed the hottest guy on campus or how lucky I was to have run into him. She
had had a good time flirting with one of the guys in her Bio class and it had
turned into a date for that night. I was happy for her, and somehow managed to
avoid unloading all of the stress of what I had discovered the night before
onto her shoulders. Georgia didn’t know; she had no idea. I couldn’t ruin the
good news of her date with something like that.