Page 81 of Ice Bet

I sucked in my amusement and opened the doors, feeling pretty damn proud.

“Not a word, Duster.”

I pretended to zip my lips and began heading for my car with him following me. He opened the door for me and leaned over the edge when I sat down. “I’ll wait until you head home before going back inside.”

“Why are you going back in?”

He stepped back from my car door and looked down at his pants. “Because I have cum all over my pants. Imagine my roommates when I show up looking like this with you following me looking like that.”

Aasher crowded my space and ran his thumb over my swollen lips before reaching over tobuckle my seat belt.

“Get home and stay there.”

I was tempted to say,or what?

But I chose not to.

Lines had already been blurred, and the more time I spent with Aasher, the more I was going to be confused when morning came.

27

RILEY

“Areyousureyou don’t want to sit with us?” Sutton pulled on her Bexley U Wolves shirt and worked a little knot in the front to show off some of her stomach.

I scrolled over the messages on my phone, and the slimy feeling of dread weighed me down.

Mya – We can’t wait to see you!

Me- Same!

Mya – Has Gray messaged you?

Me – Yeah, he wants to see me.

Mya –That ought to be fun.

The last thing I wanted to do was sit in the Rosewood section with a group of girls who weren’t half the friend that Sutton was. Or even Taytum and Claire, which was kind of pathetic because we’d only hung out a handful of times. But if I went back on my word and didn’t sit with them, that’d only give them ammunition to start more rumors, and those rumors would follow me to the rink when we competed against one another down the road.

Sometimes being civil meant breaking your own boundaries, and not to mention, I wasn’t going to back down from Gray. He was probably knee-deep in the cologne I’d once told him I enjoyed, because he thought he was going to find me after the game.

Yeah, not happening.

He was going to learn that I wasn’t that same girl who fell into a trap of self-deprecation and allowed him to embarrass me in front of the entire Rosewood campus. I was all for putting hockey players in their place, and tonight, I’d put him in his place like I should have the night he cheated to putmein my place.

“Riley?” Sutton elbowed me, and I tried to click my phone off, but she snatched it at the last second. “If I look at this, what am I going to see?”

She was asking for my permission to snoop, and I didn’t stop her.

“Look for yourself,” I said, draping Sully’s old jersey from Rosewood on my shoulders. The number thirty made me think of all thirty reasons why I shouldn’t be wearing it, but Sully was on par with his cruel joke. It was the perfect revenge bomb to drop on Gray.

Sutton’s mouth hung open. “Gray has some fucking nerve, doesn’t he? Does he truly think you’d want him after everything he did to you?” She paused with my phone in her hand after seeing what I had on. “What are you wearing?”

“What?” I asked, turning around and eyeing the name Sullivan in the mirror. “Does this make me look as devious as I feel?”

Her nose scrunched. “Sully? Really? He’s so…ugh.”

She was right. “It’ll put Gray in his place.”

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