Page 35 of Soulless Saint

“Oh. No, I mean, not fasting like that. I’m—”

“Not single?”

“Right,” I agreed, leaning into the lie. “I’m already seeing someone.”

“Lucky guy.”

“Becca, we’re going to be late for class.”

Kate made no secret of openly gawking at Aodhán, her blue eyes darting between us with brows raised so high they vanished beneath her blonde curls.

“Right, I have to go. Thanks again… for the ride the other night.”

You already said that, idiot.

“As I said, anytime, love.”

Aodhán tipped his head, his caramel hair falling forward to cover his eyes as he fingered the four leaf clover charm from beneath his shirt to flip it over his fingers.

I couldn’t leave fast enough, almost knocking into another table on my way to the door when Kate waited with two large smoothies in her hands. She leaned into my side as we exited. “Okay, who is that?”

“I was hoping you could tell me,” I admitted, taking the smoothie from her and drinking several gulps of the cool liquid to calm the angry flush in my cheeks and the heat that’d built elsewhere, too. “He’s not part of the Saints, is he?”

Kate shook her head, stopping where the curving walkway split off into two separate directions. One way leading to my class, the other to hers. “Don’t think so,” she said. “I’ve never seen him before.”

Not that it mattered. I wasn’t interested. Not even a little.

If I wanted a real dick, I’d find myself a nice dress-shirt-and-slacks, tattoo free fuckboy. No more bad boys for this girl. No fucking sir.

“Oh.”

I bit my lower lip.

“But I’d like to see a little more of him though if you know what I mean…” she continued and I let out a little laugh. “I mean, as long as you aren’t calling dibs.”

“Off the market, remember? besides , he’s not my type,” I lied.

“Well, maybe if you see him again you can introduce me?”

Kate already started backing away down the path to her ceramics class, not waiting for my reply, skipping as she went.

The sunshine to my fucking raincloud.

I waved with my best impression of a smile, still feeling uneasy after the exchange in the snack shop with Aodhán ó Súilleabháin.

Three days.

Three fucking days and I could still taste her in my mouth. Her scent still clung to me like a bad aura, as irrevocably fused to me as my own black shadow.

I knew what the therapist Ma made me see when I was thirteen would say. She’d used words like ‘obsession’ and ‘unhealthy’ and ‘control.’

She’d tell me to try to shift my focus to something else, something important. Except I’d been trying to do exactly that since the first moment I felt the shift within—the hyperfixation lifting its ugly head after a long nap—and failing spectacularly.

I needed to be on my fucking game tonight. We were meeting with The Warden in fifteen minutes for our arms deal: the one we desperately needed to replenish our stock after a raid last month that couldn’t be bought out.

A raid I suspected only happened because of a tip off. All of our storage locations were kept under tight lock and even tighter lips. The only way one of them could’ve been found was if we had a leak. And the only idiots dumb enough to mess with us were the new players in town.

The Sons of O’Sullivan.

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