Page 25 of Stay Toxic

I swallowed. “I should probably get out of the doorway and let my kids into the classroom.”

Sure enough, there were about ten of them loitering in the hall, not willing to interrupt us.

I knew it was because the man standing in front of me, half blocking the door, looked pretty scary.

But when I looked beyond the kids, who couldn’t care less that they were stuck outside—all of them on their phones—I saw Rupert standing in his doorway, glaring hard at Shasha’s back.

“Uh, okay,” I said as I tried to take a step back.

He caught my hip, squeezed it, and turned.

He didn’t make eye contact with Rupert, but it didn’t matter. Rupert still shrank back from him anyway.

God, he was such an asshole.

I’d been joking earlier about wanting him dead. But somewhere deep inside of me? That part wanted to harm him worse than he harmed me. I wanted to lop his dick off and feed it to him. I wanted to cut his ear off with a rusty spoon. I wanted to…

The bell rang, pulling me out of my thoughts. “Okay, class. Let’s get inside.”

Everyone filed in, and I didn’t spare Rupert another glance.

Maybe if I had, I would’ve seen the calculation in his eyes that he got when he found a puzzle that he needed to work out.

By the time I got home from work, I was ready for bed.

Getting up at the ass crack of dawn, a coffee date, and then dealing with a full day of school, on top of having to see your ex-best friend and ex-fiancé multiple times that day, would leave anyone with nothing left in the gas tank.

The moment I got to my door and relocked it, I threw everything down in the entryway, then lost my bra.

I hated bras.

They were the bane of my existence.

I had a wider ribcage that forced me to go bigger on bras than my breasts could handle, always leaving me in a weird predicament. Either I got a bra big enough around that it fit myrib cage but didn’t fit my boobs. Or I got one that fit my boobs and was tight on my ribcage.

I’d tried the whole actual bra thing a long time ago when I’d first gotten enough boobs to need one and had decided that the sports bra life was the only thing for me.

But even those bothered me by the end of the day, so yes, that was the first thing to go when I walked into the door.

The next thing to go were my pants, leaving me in my thong underwear and socks as I made my way to my bedroom.

I hated when school was in session because I was expected to wear “teacher-appropriate” attire.

In reality, all I wanted to wear were sweatpants and oversized sweatshirts.

Speaking of oversized sweatshirts, I pulled Tibbs’s hoodie off the end of the bed where I’d left it this morning and shrugged it on.

I followed it up with a pair of leggings.

Slipping my feet into my comfy leather moccasins, I headed back out to the kitchen and got dinner ready—leftover pizza from three days ago.

I really needed to go to the store.

But things happened—i.e., me freaking out over my ex-best friend coming back to work and me having to see her every day—and I’d forgotten.

Leading me to now, eating pizza that was slightly stale, sitting on my couch thankful that school had started on a Friday this year, meaning tomorrow I didn’t have to…

Fuck!

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