Page 67 of A Heart of Bluestone

With a sharp breath, I drop my arms to my sides and jolt upright.

Serena stalks across the dorm room, her gaze sliding to me—and her brow arches.

I must look like the truth—that I have been caught crying.

Busted.

I swallow down, thick, then run the sleeve of my cardigan over my face. Whether it wipes away tears or snot, I don’t know. I just know that this cardigan must be burned in the fireplace.

Serena turns around the side of her bed, her lashes lowered over the gaze she aims right at me. “What has he done now?”

I peel off the cardigan, then let it slap to the floor. “What?”

“Dray.” She drops onto the edge of the bed and starts undressing from her uniform. “Why else are you crying yourself to sleep?”

“I’m not.” My face crumples. “He can’t.”

She drops her shoes to the floor. They land with a thud, then a clatter. Without looking over her shoulder at me, she just says, “Oh?”

I pick at the bundled thread on the blanket. Pilled already and I’m not even halfway through the year. I’ve got to stop rolling around this bed in my jeans and sweaters. It’s rubbing the fabric of the comforter all wrong.

Serena steps into a pair of black breeches, fitted tight. “He’s done nothing at all to you?”

I use a tissue to wipe my face clean, then blow my nose. “You know he hasn’t. Two weeks, that was the dare. It’s been one.”

Her smile is tight over her slender shoulder. “I supposed he was sicking up tar for hours the other day because he went back on the dare.”

My lips part slightly.

Then a frown furrows my brows.

“That is what Landon told me, at least.” A one-shouldered shrug on Serena is a movement of tigers in silk. “Hours,” she echoes, a dark knowing look aimed my way. “In the boys’ bathroom. Landon tried to take him to the infirmary, but you know Dray—pride and all that nonsense. It runs too deep in him.”

Still, silence keeps me.

I watch her fussy with the pearl buttons of her silk blouse, a sort of style that’s oversized but cuts off around the mid-drift.

“To pretend you aren’there,” she says with a sly smile, then fastens the clasp of her belt. The breeches cut off below her bellybutton, the tan of her latest tropical trip still deeply hued in her complexion. “To break that dare, he must have done something, right? Interacted with you in some way,” she adds, then flicks her hair over her shoulder. It whips down her back.

“He didn’t do anything.”

For the first time in ten years, those words about Dray are true. He’s always done something.

But this past week, not even a glance.

The boots she slips her feet into are black snake leather, and I think it a little ironic. She folds over herself to tug up the zips.

“To break the dare, and make himself sick for hours? He must have stopped pretending you’re not here,” she says, as though she thinks aloud, but the blasé look she gives me hasmy suspicions prickled, that she’s already given it thought and reached her conclusion, long before this chat of ours.

“But if he didn’t do anything…” With a wink, she starts across the dorm room, “…then he must have just forgotten to pretend. Maybe staring at your ass a little too long in class?”

She slips through the door, and it slams shut behind her.

I frown a while at the door.

Serena barely speaks to me at all. Not at the aristos events, the balls, the shared holidays, not in the corridors or classes or even in the dorm, unless she’s asking to borrow a pencil or to snap at me for all the clothes I kick off the bed instead of putting them away.

Now she’s chatting to me about Dray throwing up in the boys’ bathroom? Asking about the torment she turns a blind eye to? Suggesting that he’s checking me out on the regular?

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