“What?”
When Thomas looked at her, the disgust and pity were clear in his eyes.
“Nothing. I can’t find anything. Let’s get out of here.”
Thomas started to lower the screen, but she reached over and blocked him. Her heart pounded an erratic beat. There was something on that screen.
“Give it to me,” she said, wrenching the computer from his hands.
Thomas made a futile grab for it. “Ariana—”
She blinked at the glowing screen in confusion. The spreadsheet Daniel used to keep track of his lacrosse stats was open. She scanned the familiar columns: goals, attempts, assists. A second tab, titled
scores
, was attached to the spreadsheet.
“It’s his lacrosse stats. Big deal,” she said, hovering the cursor over the
scores
tab.
“I wouldn’t click that,” Thomas said, scratching the back of his neck.
So, of course, Ariana had to click it. Instantly a new spreadsheet filled the screen, but it wasn’t the spreadsheet she was expecting. The left column was filled with girls’ names. Some she recognized, and some she didn’t. The right column was filled with dates, the first in August of Daniel’s freshman year, four years before.
“I don’t understand. What . . .”
Then she saw the final name in the column.
Ariana Osgood
. The entry next to it read,
Senior year Christmas break.
All of the oxygen was sucked right out of Ariana’s lungs. Her chest tightened. This was a list of girls that Daniel had slept with, and she was next in line. He wasn’t a virgin. He had been sleeping with every girl on campus and then some since he arrived at Easton. Even worse, everyone must have known it. Everyone knew what a naïve idiot she was. The guy who said he loved her, said he wanted her to be his first, had humiliated her in front of the entire school. Lied to her for the entire year they’d been together. She checked the dates again. He’d slept with two other girls
while they were dating.
I’m such a loser. Such a stupid, stupid, loser. He used me. I let him use me.
“Ariana? Are you okay?”
They’re all laughing at me. All of them. Laughing at me behind my back.
Ariana started to tremble again. The computer shook in her hands. She was nothing but a number on a spreadsheet. A nothing. A blip. She was worthless. She grabbed her arm, her nails cutting deep grooves in her sweater.
I may as well just kill myself now.
No one would miss me. No one would care.
“He’s a jackass,” Thomas said quietly. “He doesn’t deserve you.”
Ariana looked up at Thomas and everything seemed to snap into place. Someone would care. Thomas would care. He’d just said it himself. She was too good for Daniel.
Thomas
thought she was worth something.
Ariana dropped the computer. It slammed on the floor and died
with a sickening
zip
and a flash of the screen, but she didn’t even care. She grabbed Thomas’s coat and pulled him toward her, pressing her lips, her body against his. Nothing that had stood between them before mattered now. She felt a weight lifting from her shoulders as he kissed her back.
Daniel didn’t deserve her. . . . He didn’t deserve her. . . . She was done belonging to him.
Ariana grabbed Thomas by the collar and stripped his coat down his arms. He flung it to the floor as her hands moved to his shirt. They were no longer trembling. As her fingers unbuttoned his shirt, she was moving with a steady purpose.
Screw Daniel Ryan. Screw him and his perfect family and his perfect life.
“You sure?” Thomas murmured as she pushed his shirt off his bare shoulders. His body was perfect. Taut and lean and tan.
“A bet’s a bet,” she smiled, kissing his neck, running her fingers over his chest. “And I’m not a sore loser.”
“We should get out of here,” Thomas breathed. “Go back to my room.”
He picked up his coat and started for the door, holding her hand in his.
“I want to do it here.” She pointed meaningfully to Daniel’s unmade bed and pulled her sweater off over her head. “He deserves it.”
Thomas smiled and dropped his coat back on the floor. He moved on top of her quickly, leaning her back into the familiar pillows. He would die if he knew what she was doing right now. He would just die.
“I like the way you think, naughty girl,” Thomas said, hovering over her.
With a grin, Ariana pulled Thomas’s warm body down on top of her. And even though she’d sworn to Daniel Ryan that she would never lose her virginity in his dorm room, that’s exactly what she did.
It almost felt like a dream, like it hadn’t really happened. Ariana relaxed into Thomas’s strong chest and closed her eyes, replaying the series of images in her mind like a silent movie on a projector screen. After their first go in Daniel’s room, they had sneaked back to Thomas’s room and started all over again. This time, it had been more romantic. More tender. Wearing nothing but his boxers, Thomas had kissed her in front of his door, then let her inside before pulling her sweater off over her head. She was naked underneath, but in the dim light of his room, she felt totally safe. Secure. They had made love again, more slowly this time, and Ariana had recorded every detail in her mind. Every touch, every kiss, every inch of him.
This was monumental. It was a day she would never forget. She wanted to remember every single thing.
Now the sun had set outside and the room was dark save for the light from the candles Thomas had lit before drifting off to sleep.
Behind her, he shifted slightly and she sank back toward him on his bed, smiling at the intimacy of it all. Thomas was nothing like Daniel. He would never leave her feeling vulnerable like Daniel had. Her mother would understand that. After what Daniel had done, she would have to.
Shifting uncomfortably in Thomas’s single bed, she realized her fleur-de-lis necklace was digging into her collarbone. She brought her fingers to her chest. The necklace had left a deep imprint of the flower in her skin.
“You okay?” Thomas said groggily. He kissed the top of her head, and she raised her face to his. Flickering light from the candles on his desk bathed them in warmth.
“Better than okay.” She smiled, tracing the outline of his arm with her fingertip. The sound of her own voice surprised her. There wasn’t a trace of self-consciousness, of worry, in her words. Or her body.
Ariana Osgood was finally calm. Perfectly, blissfully calm.
“Me too,” he murmured, stroking her hair. He looked into her eyes with a fixed gaze, concentrating only on her. As if nothing else in the world could possibly matter to him more. As if nothing could tear him away from her. Not Daniel, or the threat of being expelled, or their dysfunctional families. He wanted to be there with her. Completely.
She felt herself melting into him. The tension that had built up inside her over the past hours—over the past several years, really—had vanished, leaving her weightless. Free. Her breathing slow and even. She wondered if this was what happy felt like.
“Pretty quiet,” Thomas observed, his fingers trailing down her bare back. Goosebumps rose along her skin.
“Just thinking,” Ariana said softly, resting in the crook of his arm. She had imagined what this moment would be like for so long that she could hardly believe it actually happened. She had always fantasized about meeting the perfect guy, about falling perfectly in love. Being the heroine of her own novel. Living Happily Ever After.
But Thomas wasn’t perfect at all. He was sarcastic and messy and he said the wrong things. But he knew what it was like to grow up the way she had. And he didn’t fault her for it.
“Thinking about?” Thomas prompted her.
“About how this is what I need.” It was exactly what she meant, and she felt safe enough to say it. No masks, no pretending.
She kissed him lightly on the lips, then on the nose. He tasted like maple syrup. “Mmm, breakfast,” she laughed, pulling away from him and licking her lips.
Thomas grinned. “You taste pretty good too.”
He showered her with a series of quick, biting kisses that trailed from her lips to her neck. She pushed him away, and he fought back, pressing his hand against the back of her neck and pulling her into him.
“Don’t think you can get away so easy,” he said into her ear. “Now that I’ve got you, I’m not letting go of you anytime soon.”
A pleasant warmth engulfed Ariana’s heart. He loved her. She knew he loved her.
“You better not.”
Sitting up, she tried to flash him a menacing stare, but the amused glint in his eyes just made her burst out laughing all over again.
“Oh, yeah?” he challenged her, slipping his hands around her waist. “What are you gonna do?”
“You don’t want to find out,” she warned him playfully. “Believe me.”
“Ooh,” he laughed. “I’m so scared of big, bad Ariana.”
He wrapped his arms tighter around her and pulled her into him. Ariana smiled and drifted off to sleep. Perfectly, blissfully calm. Seconds later, the loud shriek of a siren yanked her right out of a shapeless dream.
“What the fuck?” Thomas shouted.
Ariana’s heart was in her throat. “It’s the fire alarm!”
Thomas tripped out of bed, fished a sweatshirt out of his laundry hamper, and pulled it on. Somehow, Ariana found her jeans underneath the bed. The damp denim clung to her skin, and her heart raced as she struggled to zip them up. She shoved her feet into her boots, yanked her coat from Thomas’s desk chair, and quickly blew out all the candles.
“We have to get out of here.” Thomas reached for her hand and pulled her toward the door. “Come on!”
“No!” She pulled back. “We can’t go out that way. They’ll be coming to check the dorm any second. By the time we get through the snowdrifts outside they’ll see us!” Her head was starting to throb. She couldn’t think with the sound of that alarm blaring in her head.
“We don’t have a choice!” Thomas yelled. “If we stay here, they’ll
catch us anyway. I can’t get expelled, Ariana, I can’t!” His eyes were wild, his voice hoarse over the screeching alarm.
“I know!” she screamed. He was right. They couldn’t leave, and they couldn’t stay.
They were trapped.
“We have to take the window.”
“Are you crazy?” Ariana blurted. “We’re on the second floor!”
“So what are we gonna do? Just give up?” Thomas demanded.
“No,” Ariana said. If there was one thing she would never do, it was give up. Her mother had given up. And as much as Ariana loved her, she had promised herself she would never be like her mother.
“Then help me,” Thomas said.
He slipped his fingers into the grooves at the bottom of the window and Ariana did the same. With a deep breath, they threw their weight against it. The warped wood stayed frozen in place.
“Shit.” Thomas turned around and eyed the doorway nervously.
“Come on! Let’s try it again.”
He rejoined Ariana. “Okay. One, two, three!” he shouted.
Together they strained at the window. Ariana held her breath and pulled until she felt as if her fingers were going to break off backward.
Then, just when she thought she couldn’t take anymore, the window finally gave.
“Let’s go!” Thomas turned away as a blast of cold air swept into the room.
Ariana moved cautiously to the window. The blizzard had almost subsided, and only a light, translucent curtain of snowflakes tumbled to the ground below. The snow-capped evergreens at the edge of the woods loomed thick not far from the back door of Ketlar. She took a step back, nearly tripping over Thomas. The icy ground below her looked far, far away.
“I can’t.” She shook her head. “It’s too much of a drop. We have to get out some other way.”
“There isn’t another way,” Thomas said harshly. He gripped her wrist so tightly she winced. “And there’s all that snow to break our fall.” He straddled the windowsill, bending at the waist to fit through the small opening. “I’ll go first.”
“Thomas! Don’t!”
But he pushed away from the building and fell. Ariana stared after him, imagining his body lying broken and dead on the ground below. But instead, he landed in the soft cushion of snow piled beneath the window. He was fine.
“Come on! You can do it!” he whisper-shouted up to her.
Body trembling, Ariana sat on the edge of the windowsill, her feet still planted on Thomas’s floor. One leg at a time, she drew her knees up to her chest. She pivoted her body and lowered her legs outside the window. The sight of Thomas on the ground blurred beneath her.
“I can’t.” The thought of her body free-falling from the window made her skin prickle with fear.
“I’m right here. Come on, Ariana,” he pleaded. “Jump.”
She screwed her eyes shut and hesitated.
I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I can’t—
“I won’t let anything happen to you,” Thomas said.
Ariana’s heart flipped in her chest. Right. He would protect her. He loved her. She looked down at him, took a deep breath, and shoved away from the window. Icy wind slipped past her and she landed, hard, against Thomas’s body. The sound of bone on bone cracked in the air as they both hit the snow.
“You okay?” Thomas winced. His face was contorted in pain. Ariana struggled her way off of him and knelt next to his body in the snow.
“You’re hurt.”
“I’m fine,” he said through gritted teeth. “Really.”
Guilt seeped into her skin faster than the wet snow. “You’re not. And it’s my fault,” she insisted. She lowered her numb fingers to his ankle, and he tensed in pain. “We have to—”
“Right now what we have to do is get out of here,” he interrupted. He scanned the back edge of Ketlar and nodded at a huge evergreen that loomed over the far corner of the dorm, at a diagonal from the back door. “Over there,” he said tersely.
Silently, she pulled his arm over her shoulder and helped him to his feet. He dropped his head toward her neck, his jaw tensed. The weight of his body scared her. If he couldn’t take care of himself, he definitely couldn’t take care of her.
Thomas lifted one foot off the ground and they moved quickly along the dorm to the tree, about thirty feet from the rear of Ketlar. She helped him around the thick trunk, and they leaned against the jagged bark on the side facing the woods.