Page 117 of The Chase

Me, I’m sprawled on my back, buck-naked, and my body is still on fire. I tend to run hot.

“Okay, you have to promise not to tell anyone.” I don’t miss the chord of embarrassment in her voice. “The only people I’ve told are my parents.”

“What about Dean? And your other brother?”

“Nicky and Dicky think I got drunk at a toga party and knocked over a candle,” she admits.

“And that’s not what happened?”

Summer shakes her head.

The plot thickens… “So what did happen?”

“You have to promise, Fitz.”

Her green eyes are more serious than I’ve ever seen them. “I promise.”

She brings her hand to her mouth and begins chewing on her thumbnail. First time I’ve ever seen her bite her nails. It’s alarming, and I don’t like it. Gently, I reach up and capture her hand. I bring it down to my chest, where I cover it with my palm.

“There was a toga party,” she finally says. “That part is true. And I was drunk, but not as drunk as my brothers believe. The Kappa house has a huge enclosed porch, right off the sitting room. Actually, I guess it wasn’t really a porch. More like a sunroom. It was an addition to the mansion, and there was this massive wall of windows, with thick drapes.” She shrugs wryly. “Highly flammable drapes, as it turned out.”

“Oh boy.”

“Yup.” She tries to chew on her other thumb, so I steal that hand too and clasp it to my chest. “I’m pretty much the only one who used the sunroom. It wasn’t well insulated, so it was usually super cold. I’d go and sit out there, mostly when I was in a crappy mood and needed to be alone. Anyway, there was a toga party. We were cohosting it with the Alpha Phi frat, and a few of the frat members were in my Sociology class. The TA gave our midterm papers back that morning, so the guys were talking about their grades and I overheard them.” Her tone turns bleak. “I guess they all aced it. Meanwhile, I got an F.”

I swallow a sigh. “Ah, babe. I’m sorry.” The term of endearment slips out before I can stop it, but I’m not sure Summer even notices.

Shame darkens her eyes. “I plagiarized it.”

The revelation stuns me. “Are you serious?”

“Yeah.” Her voice cracks. “I didn’t realize it was considered plagiarism, though. I paraphrased from a bunch of websites and didn’t source them properly. Anything with a direct quote, I cited. But not the other references. I stuck them in the bibliography, but I guess I didn’t do it right.” She rubs her eyes, and when she looks at me, there’s misery clouding her expression. “I was already having so much trouble with that paper, Fitz. It was a mess. I went in for extra help, but it wasn’t enough. I emailed the TA and asked for more help, but he was a total dick and told me he’d accommodated me as much as he could. And, well, you saw what happens when I get overwhelmed.”

Sympathy fills my chest. “I’m sorry.”

“I turned in the paper knowing I’d get a shitty grade, but I didn’t expect an F. And when I tried to talk to the TA after class and explain that I hadn’t intentionally plagiarized, he gave me the ‘too bad, so sad’ speech and said I could appeal the grade with the college if I wanted, but that he doubted they’d overturn it.”

When I let go of her hands, Summer cinches the blanket tighter to her body. “Fast forward to the party. The frat boys were bragging about their grades, and I was standing there in a ridiculous toga feeling like a complete moron. I was…” She groans softly. “I was so frigging tired of being the village idiot, you know? Just knowing that my paper was upstairs on my desk, with that big red F and the word ‘plagiarism’ written on it in capital letters. I was pissed. And I just wanted to, I don’t know, eliminate all the evidence of my stupidity.”

My heart splinters at her stricken tone, then cracks intwo when I see her eyes. Jesus. She actually believes what she’s saying. She truly thinks of herself as stupid.

“So I went upstairs and grabbed the midterm, and then went down to the sunroom and lit a match. There was a big ceramic bowl on a table under one of the windows. I tossed the burning essay into it.” She sighs. “I honestly thought it would burn itself out. It probably would’ve, if it weren’t for the drapes and the fact that someone left the window open.” She shakes her head in amazement. “Of all the nights for someone other than me to be in there, right?”

I have to chuckle.

“So,” she continues, “the breeze fanned the flames and the drapes caught fire and the sunroom was no more.”

“Did it seriously burn to the ground?”

“No. I mean, the outer wall was completely destroyed and needs to be rebuilt, but the part that was attached to the actual mansion remained intact.” She hangs her head in shame. “When the fire department came, I lied and said I knocked over a candle when I was dancing on the table. Like, ‘Oops, I’m just a drunk sorority girl in a toga!’ They labeled it an accident, my parents wrote hefty checks to the sorority and the school, and I was very nicely asked to leave.”

“Wow.” I sit up against the headboard and pull her toward me. She’s cocooned in fleece, so I run a comforting hand over her scalp. “Let me get this straight,” I say gently. “You’d rather people think you’re a drunk party girl than know that you got an F on a term paper?”

“Pretty much.” She tips her head so she can meet my eyes. “But it sounds really ridiculous when you say it out loud.”

I cup her cheek, sweeping my thumb over her lower lip. It trembles when I make contact with it. “You’re notstupid, Summer. You have a learning disability. There’s a difference.”

“I know that.” The lack of conviction in her tone thoroughly troubles me, but she doesn’t give me a chance to probe any deeper. “There. Now you know something truly embarrassing about me. It’s your turn.”

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