Page 33 of Foolish Games

“Are you crazy?” Chiclet demands. “I told you, you can’t sit with us. You’re his ex.”

“This is my table,” Viv says. “Where am I supposed to sit?”

“I don’t know, why don’t you sit over there with your brother?” Chiclet says. “Since you’re apparently sleeping with Sebastian Swift now. Shouldn’t you be sitting with him?”

My eyes meet Viv’s, and I shrug and give her a smirk. She could have pretended we were dating, but she chose to take the high road. I never take the high road, so she’s all by her lonesome up there.

“We’re not together,” she mumbles, so quiet I have to strain to hear.

“What?” Robert demands beside me, and I turn to see him glaring at me with a murderous expression. That’s the Delacroix I should have been watching, not Vivienne. Apparently my instinct for self-preservation goes right out the window when a girl that fine is within sight.

“Or hey, maybe you can sit over there with the Slut Club,” Chiclet says, pointing to the table where Lexi and her friends sit. “Since you’re apparently such a pro.”

Everyone is turning from me to the nerds to the skanks, and a murmur of excitement goes up. Yep, I definitely shouldn’t have let my curiosity get the better of me and made sure my table could hear them. I’m officially as dumb as Viv thinks I am. Also officially dead now that Rob thinks I nailed his sister, but hey, I had a good run. Eighteen years isn’t nothing.

“Come on, dude,” I say, shoving back from the table. “You know me. That chick’s lying.”

My chair leg catches on Maddox’s, and he grunts as he’s pushed backwards from the table. But he stands to let me up before Robert can knock my teeth in. I jump up, and Rob grabs the front of my shirt.

“What did I fucking tell you?” he demands.

“It’s not like that,” I say, holding both his arms and giving him a warning look. “Come on, let’s not do this in front of the whole room.”

“I can’t think of a better time to do it,” he snarls, his face twisted with rage.

The whole room is buzzing now, everyone waiting for a real fight to break out.

“I didn’t fuck your sister,” I say quietly, so only he can hear me over the din. “I just said it to mess with Nerd Boy Chad over there.”

“Why the fuck would you make that up?” he asks, shaking me.

I hold up both hands, refusing to fight back. “Dude, you’re my best friend. I’d never do that to you. That loser over there—who you apparently gave the stamp of approval—was trying to humiliate Viv. I was just looking out for her, the same way you’d look out for Mel if you saw someone giving her shit. You can ask her.”

Robert’s nostrils flare, and he works his jaw back and forth. “What did you do?”

“I just told them we hooked up at the party, to help her save face, since apparently Chad was cheating on her. You know where I was the other night. I was at the party with you, man. You saw her leave, and you know I stayed.”

He shoves me away from him at last, releasing my shirt. A few “boos” ring out in the room, and some ketchup packets fly our way when we fail to deliver the anticipated brawl. Not that Robert Ambrose Delacroix IV would ever get his hands dirty in a brawl. He’s a hot head and he’ll tussle a little, but at his core, he’s as much a blueblood as Vivienne. They’re not the kind of family that fights with fists.

While our attention was on each other, Vivienne apparently won her squabble with Chiclet, as she’s now sitting at her usual table with the rest of the nerd herd. Rob is still watching me with suspicion, so I ignore his sister for the rest of lunch and go on as usual. She had her chance with me, after all. She wasn’t interested.

And now that she’s established she’s not leaving her group just because she got dumped, I can concentrate on figuring out how to come up with five hundred dollars in the next month. There’s no way I can go through with the stupid bet now.

I can’t do that to Rob, can’t ruin two years of friendship and shit all over the bro code. He’s my boy, someone who’s been there for me on the field and off. I’m not going to fuck that up because I can’t keep my dick in my pants, no matter how tempting it is. I’ll just have to find some other odd jobs around town that pay ridiculous amounts of cash in a short period of time.

Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s a big market for gigolos in Faulkner.

I’m more fucked than if there were, though.

I’m on my way to class after lunch when Vivienne appears out of nowhere and grabs my arm. “Come here,” she says, dragging me toward the library.

“If you’re going to have your way with me, we can just do it in a bathroom stall like regular people,” I say as she pushes open the door. Her face is set in determination as she drags me past the checkout desk and into the stacks. When we reach the back of the library, she passes the tables where we sit during tutoring and pulls me into the AV room beyond them.

“Oh, Ms. Delacroix, we can’t keep meeting like this,” I say, grinning down at her as she closes the door.

“Let’s do it,” she says firmly.

“Right now?” I ask, looking around the tiny room cramped with rectangular tables, a computer on each one. Shelves line two walls, each one crammed with overhead projectors, extension cords, boxes of floppy disks, VHS tapes, and other random school crap I can barely see past the TV carts that teachers check out to show movies when they’re too hungover to teach class that day.

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