Page 27 of Fall From Grace
“Oh, no. I just like to watch.” Not really. I could go the rest of my life never seeing another round of beer pong, but a little white lie every now and then never hurt anybody. That’s what I’ll tell myself tonight, anyway.
“That’s no fun.” He flashes me a grin, but that grin does absolutely nothing for me. It doesn’t make my stomach flutter or my heart rate increase. It’s just… there, its power on me next to nil, and that tells me this guy, whoever he is, has an uphill battle with me if he wants to keep talking to me.
I shrug, and I open my mouth to say something along the lines of ‘Maybe I am no fun,’ but before I have the chance to, I spot someone else across the room, someone I most definitely didn’t notice before now. Someone who must’ve just arrived to the party.
How am I so sure of that? I would’ve seen him. I would have noticed.
My ex. Mike. He’s in the far corner, a good twenty or thirty feet away, chatting away to a group of three guys, totally unaware of my existence.
The world stops, just for a second. All of the good times, all of the good memories, none of it matters anymore. No, the only thing that rises inside me is the pain, the hurt, the betrayal. Everything good we may have had is soured, and now I can’t look back at any of it in a good light. For all I know, he lied to me our whole relationship. Maybe Meghan wasn’t the only girl he cheated on me with.
But just as quickly as the world stopped, it starts back up again—only it moves faster, so fast the room around me spins, and I feel like throwing up. I stand, mumble something incoherent to the guy who was trying to talk to me, and stumble out of the room, wanting only to get away from Mike. I don’t want him to see me. I don’t want to talk to him. I unfriended him, blocked him and his number.
Sloane sees me retreat into the hall, crawling off Elias’s lap to come with me. She grabs my arm and stops me, and thankfully we’re far enough out of the room that Mike is no longer in view. “What’s wrong?” she asks.
I don’t want to talk about my ex, plus I kind of worry that she or Elias would say or do something if I mention my ex is here. Neither of them strike me as the kind of people who sit back and let jerks be. Elias definitely is the type who’d get into a fight—and probably be happy about it—and Sloane would be cheering him on while standing in the sidelines, thinking it’s sexy or something.
So, another white lie comes from me: “It’s loud in there. I need some air. I’m going to go outside for a bit.”
Her blond brows furrow in concern. “You want to go home?”
With a shake of my head, I say, “No. I just need a moment. Go back to Elias.”
I can tell she doesn’t believe me, but after a moment, she relents: “All right, but if you change your mind, we can go.” She pulls away from me, returning to the living room, to the lap of her handsy boyfriend, and I watch her go before I zigzag through the people in the hallway to get outside. I go out back.
The house has a small paved patio in its backyard. The air is cool, but it’s anything but fresh thanks to the skunk-like stench that permeates through it.
I take a single step outside and groan, wrinkling my nose as the disgust hits me and I look at the person smoking a few feet away. A tall guy, his back to me, but with the light coming from the house’s windows, I can see the squareness of his shoulders, the blackness of his hair.
No way. No freaking way. I head outside with the intent of clearing my head and avoiding my ex, only to run into this guy? My luck must be terrible.
It’s like he senses me, because he tosses a glance over his shoulder and spots me a few feet away. If he’s surprised to see me, his face doesn’t show it, but he does take a long puff from his homemade cigarette that, based on the smell, isn’t tobacco. “Of fucking course,” he grumbles.
I debate on retreating, but all things considered I’m not ready to go back inside just yet, so I fold my arms over my chest and say, “I didn’t know you were here.”
Logan is slow in turning to face me, and his eyes drop to my feet. That gaze of his examines me, his green eyes checking me out much like he did in the club last week, like he wants to take his time in memorizing everything about me, like he has nowhere else to be. “Here I thought a frat party would be the one place you’d never be caught dead,” he mutters.
All I do is sigh and go toward one of the metal chairs arranged around a rectangular glass table. I make it a point not to say anything else to him, hoping he’ll get the hint to leave me alone, but to my dismay, he comes to sit in the chair beside mine. Lucky me.
“The little miss perfect nerd looks stressed,” he says as he sits down. He then extends his hand and the cigarette toward me. “Want to share? It’ll help you relax.” The grossed-out look on my face must tell him enough, because he laughs and brings it to his mouth, taking another puff.
“It doesn’t look like it’s relaxing you.”
He smirks at that, but that smirk is half-dead at arrival. There isn’t any heart behind it. “I don’t think I’m capable of relaxing anymore.” He fiddles with the joint in his fingers as he stares off into space. “You can only chase the high so much before you start to get numb, and you need more and more. Nothing relaxes me anymore.” He must think on it, remembering something. He glances at me. “Well, maybe one thing.”
He might not say it, but I know what he means: sex.
“Problem is,” Logan goes on with a hard frown, “I can’t seem to get there anymore. It’s gotta be your fucking fault, somehow.” The next time he puffs from his joint, he blows it in my direction, and I gag and wave the air between us.
“Can’t you go smoke that somewhere else?” When he only stares at me, I add, “And what do you mean it’s my fault? How is it my fault you can’t relax?” We barely know each other. It doesn’t make sense. “Man, that smells so bad. How can you relax while breathing in that stuff?”
He groans and makes a big show of dropping the joint to the concrete below and stamping it out with his shoe. “There, happy? You know, I had to pay out the ass for that shit—and I mean shit. I’ve had way better stuff—”
Of course he has. He seems like someone who likes to drink and do drugs and sleep with random strangers all the time. Messing around is probably the only thing Logan is good at. Hey, to each his or her own, I guess, but that could never be me.
“—and it has to be your fault. It sure as shit ain’t mine. I came to this school because I heard the party scene was big. I thought it’d be an easy ride.”
I shake my head. “You can’t blame me for things being harder than you thought they’d be.”
