Page 25 of Fall From Grace
I’m Pope. I haven’t been Logan in forever. I don’t know that I can go back to the person I used to be before fame.
Time crawls by, and I think I lay there for an hour or two before sleep finally takes me. My last conscious thought beforeI fade away into nothing is about Wren, and how I hate her for dredging up all these stupid feelings inside me.
I debate on skipping my classes the next day, but it’s the first week of classes this semester, so it’s probably smart to drag my ass to them even if I’m not all there in the end. I don’t pay attention. I’m just a warm body. That’s how it goes for me until Friday, till I stroll into my intro to psych class and see little miss perfect sitting in the front row, waiting for class to begin like the goodie two-shoes she is, her notebook and pen already in hand, ready to go.
I shouldn’t sit next to her. I should choose another seat in this auditorium—at least I’d have some peace of mind. Hell, she’d probably like that, too. She’s made it clear that she wants nothing to do with me. A challenge is all fun and good, but when the so-called challenge knows a sore spot of mine, that makes me view it a little differently.
What if she brings up my guitars again? I don’t know that I could keep my cool. Keeping my cool isn’t what I’m known for.
In the end, I head down to the front row and take up my spot beside her, dropping my bag down between my knees. “You know,” I start, eyeing up her notebook and pen, “you’d be able to take better notes on a laptop or tablet.”
“Maybe,” she says without looking at me, “but when you write things down, you use a different part of your brain. It helps you remember stuff more.”
I chuckle. “I don’t think so.”
That causes her to look sharply at me, those brown eyes of hers narrowed in my direction. “It’s a real thing.”
“No, I think you made it up to make yourself sound smarter.”
“And what would you know about being smart?” The moment the comeback comes out of her, she widens her eyesand looks away. “That was mean. I—I didn’t mean it like that.” Apologizing like she personally offended me or some shit.
Fuck. It’d be so much easier if this girl was more like the girls I was used to. I had a taste of her, so therefore I should be done. I shouldn’t care. Literally shouldn’t give a single shit, but that’s the thing: I do give a shit.
“I think you did mean it like that,” I say with a shrug. “Don’t worry. I don’t care. We can’t all be smarty pants like you.”
“I’d rather be smart than be whatever you are… no offense.”
I flash her a grin, and she averts her eyes like my smile is either blinding or the ugliest thing she’s ever seen in her life—and I know for a fact it isn’t the latter. “Miss Goody-Goody has some teeth, huh?”
Wren rolls her eyes. “I thought you’d sit somewhere else.”
“You’re not in the clear yet.”
The way she looks at me after that makes me wonder if she’s debating on bringing up what pissed me off on Wednesday, but right then Professor Scott walks down the steps and heads to the podium. She turns her attention away from me and, when the professor meets her eyes, he smiles at her and nods his head.
He’s just a professor. He’s only saying hello, just as he probably said hello to the students he passed on the way down the steps. Still, I’m not blind. He’s a good-looking guy, young for a professor, and the way Wren’s cheeks get an extra boost of color when she exchanges hellos with him makes me wonder if she likes looking at him.
It shouldn’t matter. Itdoesn’tmatter. I don’t give a shit if she thinks the professor is hot. She’s allowed to think anyone she wants is hot, just like I’m allowed to do the same… even if I always stop myself before any actual hooking up happen.
Still, even though I repeat that thought to myself, I can’t help but get a little prickly at the idea of Wren finding our professor attractive. It makes no goddamned sense.
Class begins, and Professor Scott launches into whatever lecture he has planned for the day. Beside me, Wren takes diligent notes, while I just sit there and listen—or I try to listen. Really, I can’t stop thinking about the girl next to me and how the common denominator of me feeling strange is her. It goes back to her every single time.
Thank God today is Friday, which means after this class I’ll have a good seventy-two hours away from her. Maybe it’ll be long enough to get her out of my mind.
Chapter Thirteen – Wren
Elias is practically on top of Sloane in the kitchen when I come downstairs, ready to go, but when they hear me approach, they disentangle themselves. Sloane gives me a once-over and says, “Damn, girl, you look sexy as fuck.”
I look down at myself. Sloane let me borrow some of her clothes—we’re both shorties, so we’re pretty much the same size. If anything, my hips are a little bigger than hers, so everything is a bit tighter on me than on her. “Is it too much?”
I’m wearing a sparkly dress that stops halfway to my knees, equally sparkly flats. My normally kinky brown hair has nice, even beach waves, and my eyes have a bit of makeup around them. Not too much, but I did it all myself, and I’m kind of proud of it. Makeup was never a strong suit of mine.
I picked out the whole outfit for myself, actually. Makeup, fashion; all that stuff, I never paid much attention to. I didn’t hop on the latest trends where either were concerned. I much preferred the oversized grandma clothes I typically wore; clothes like that made me feel like I could hide in them, and as an introvert, that feeling was sometimes the only thing that kept me sane.
Sloane comes over to me. She wears tight jeans and a low-cut V-neck that highlights her cleavage, along with a diamond necklace that sparkles no matter how the light hits it. Her blond hair is pin-straight, not a single tuft out of place. “No way. All eyes at this party will be on you.”
“Oh. I don’t know if I want that…” Heck, I don’t know if I even really want to go to this party. The first week of the semester was weird, and I don’t know if it was weird because of me suddenly being single and kind of depressed about it, or the fact that I hooked up with someone I thought was a stranger butwho turned out to be a guy in one of my classes… a guy who doesn’t know what taking the hint means.
