Page 10 of Degrees of Control

“Okay, Little Miss Secretive—my party, the man draft, spill.”

“Now,” Jordan added before wrinkling her nose. “Dear God, your backpack smells like weed.”

That was a parting gift from her roommate, who had woken up with a very non-metaphorical hangover, one that required chemical assistance to get over.

“Yeah, sorry, Belinda was using her bong again. I’ll air it out later.”

Jordan gave her an irritated look. “Why are you still sharing a slum with that junkie, Charlotte?”

Charlie shrugged. “You know why, because I’m poor as hell. Besides, Belinda’s not a junkie, she’s a pill enthusiast slash stoner.”

“She’s human garbage.”

“Lighten up. The rent’s cheap.”

Jordan arched a perfectly plucked eyebrow. “Because your apartment stinks like pot and broken dreams. You’re terrible roommates.”

“That’s true.”

Belinda resented living with a “hippy yoga weirdo” whowasn’tinto pot, and Charlie resented the stoners who showed up at the apartment at all hours of the night to get high and eat her coconut muesli.

“So are you going to move out?” Jordan demanded.

“Um…”

Jordan huffed out a noise of frustration and swept her shining black hair across one shoulder. She was Korean-American and easily the most glamorous person Charlie had ever seen up close.

“Fine, enough about your trash bag of a roommate, we’ve got more important things to discuss, like Sophia’s hot cousin and whether or not you put his dick in your mouth.”

Sophia clicked her tongue. “Okay, if we’re going to talk about this, you cannot refer to James as ‘Sophia’s hot cousin.’”

Jordan rolled her eyes. “Fine. What the hell happened with the guy who is tall and blond and southern and his last name is Hunter but who is barely related to Sophia, Charlie? One minute the whole team was doing victory shots and the next you’d vanished and the guy was feeling up some redhead.”

Charlie winced. It shouldn’t hurt that James had hooked up with someone else. He was a gorgeous, hyper-masculine guy and she’d left him high and dry at a party where girls were taking their tops off on the dance floor.Get your shit together, Bell.

“It wasn’t Hayley,” Sophia said. “The redhead. She made out with a few guys but none of them were James. She planned on being here by the way but she passed out near my lawn statue at six in the morning.”

Charlie forced a laugh as she fiddled with the honey pot. “It wouldn’t have mattered if James hooked up with Hayley, I get the feeling when it comes to him you’re either the quick or the dead.”

Jordan smirked. “Well before you deny anything happened, we saw you two heading into a darkened corridor. Did something go down?”

“Yeah,” Charlie said, knowing it was pointless to deny it.

Sophia and Jordan exchanged significant glances.

“Was he interested in your particularinclinations?” Jordan asked.

Charlie felt her face burn. “You’re making me sound like a whackadoodle, but yes, he was into being rough and…all the rest of it.”

Jordan slapped the table. “Ha, knew it. I saw you two dancing. He looked like he wanted to eat you alive.”

Charlie squirmed in her seat. “What we did was pretty incredible. Until it wasn’t.”

Sophia’s eyes narrowed. “So what went wrong? Did James push too hard?”

“No, we clicked. We were leaving together, actually. Then right at the door we ran into some drunk buttholes who just had tocongratulateJames on landing a prize salmon such as myself.”

Charlie was trying her best to be light-hearted but she knew her cringe was giving her away. Every time she felt threatened, she hunched over to hide her breasts. The move didn’t work, it merely made her look like Quasimodo with massive tits.

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