2 Whispering (17 page)

When we got back to the dorms, Aric had thought twice about our plan to use the payphones in the lobby to call the police.

“You said we could call the police,” I hissed. The main lobby of the dorms was never overly crowded, there were always a few students milling around, though. “We’ll just make the call and it will be over.”

Aric gave me a strange look. “People could overhear us here.”

“Take your shirt off and distract them,” I ordered. “I’ll make the call.” On second thought, that might distract me, too.

“That’s not the only reason,” Aric countered. “And I’m not taking my shirt off as a distraction. You take your shirt off as a distraction and I’ll make the phone call.”

My mouth dropped open with disdain.

“On second thought, that would probably distract me,” Aric teased.

It was like he read my mind. “What’s your other reason for us not calling the cops from here?”

“You live here,” Aric reminded me.

“So?”

“You’re already on their radar,” Aric said.

“Their radar?”

“You had a dead roommate last year and you found a body this year.”

“I didn’t find a body this year,” I corrected him. “I was with you.”

“Yeah, but that’s not going to mean a lot to them if they somehow track it back to you and your name shows up on a police report for the third time in less than six months.”

He might have a point.

“So, what do we do?”

“I’ll have someone from off campus call,” Aric said finally.

“Who?”

“Someone from my dad’s office. They can use a prepaid cell. You can’t track those.”

“You’re going to tell your dad?” I was surprised.

“I think it’s probably a good idea,” Aric met my gaze. “What?”

“Nothing, I’ve just never met anyone that purposely tells their parents anything.”

“You never tell your parents anything?”

“Just lies I’ve made up for what I was actually doing.”

“What were you actually doing?” Aric asked me curiously.

“Usually drinking in a field,” I said. “There wasn’t a lot going on in my hometown.”

“And you don’t think they knew what you were doing?”

I tilted my head as I considered the question. “Oh, they probably knew. The thing is, they didn’t want to know. They preferred me lying to them.”

“That’s some circular thinking,” Aric said.

“Get used to it,” I muttered.

Aric shook his head, but he couldn’t hide the smile that played about his lips. “You’re never dull,” he said finally. “You’ve got that going for you.”

I caught a hint of familiar motion out of the corner of my eye. I looked towards it and recognized Mark heading my way. Unfortunately, he wasn’t alone. Paris was with him.

“Hey, what are you guys doing?” Mark looked Aric up and down curiously.

“Just hanging out,” I lied.

One look at Paris and I could tell she was still furious. Her porcelain skin was flushed with something akin to rage and her brown eyes were flickering with overt anger. Time wasn’t healing any wounds for her, that was for sure.

“Out on one of your covert ops?” Paris asked.

“Covert ops?” Mark laughed. “Are you guys spies or something?”

“We like to role play,” Aric lied smoothly. “I make her dress up like a naughty school girl and then I let her try to extract information from me.”

I pursed my lips at Aric’s lie. “And then I tie him to the bedpost and make him beg for me to let him go.”

Wait a second, that was actually worse.

Paris smirked in my direction. It wasn’t a friendly gesture, though. “No, I meant that they were out doing something undercover with the other supernaturals.”

I froze in place. I could feel Aric tense beside me. “What is your problem?”

“You know what my problem is,” Paris replied coolly.

“If you have a problem with me, why don’t we take it somewhere private?” I raised an eyebrow suggestively.

“I don’t want to go anywhere private,” Paris shot back. “Especially with you.”

Aric placed a strong hand on my shoulder to still me. I think he was worried I was going to jump on her and start pulling her hair right here.

“Paris, I know you’re mad.”

“Oh, you know I’m mad?” Paris turned her attention to Aric.

“Zoe told me what happened.”

“Did Zoe tell you she betrayed me?”

“From what she told me, you were being a little unreasonable.”

Uh-oh, I didn’t think that was the tactic to take in this situation.

“Unreasonable? Unreasonable? Well, if a werewolf says it, then it must be true.”

Aric’s face, calm just seconds before, flooded with color.

“Paris!”

Mark, who had remained calm and silent for the past few minutes, looked like he was suddenly about to explode with excitement. “You’re a werewolf?”

“Keep your voice down,” I warned him, glancing around us. We were getting a few curious glances at this point, but we weren’t the center of attention. Yet. If Paris kept this up, we would be soon, and then there was going to be some definite hair pulling.

“Why? I’m not ashamed of my boyfriend,” Paris said pointedly.

“You used to date a guy who gave himself the nickname Boots,” I reminded her.

“Well, that’s neither here nor there,” Paris said stubbornly. “It’s who I’m dating now that matters.”

“You mean a monster hunter?” I whispered the threat, but Paris got my meaning. Mark had secrets that needed to be kept, too.

Paris took an involuntary step back and looked around the room. It was like she had suddenly got her bearings back. “You’re right,” she said shakily. “This is not a discussion for here.”

“You want to go upstairs?” I asked her evenly. I thought she sounded ready for a rational discussion.

Paris shook her head. “We don’t have anything to talk about. You made your decision. I’m only sorry I took it out on Aric.”

With those words, she was gone. Mark looked like he wanted to stay and ask Aric some questions but, after a few seconds of indecisiveness, he turned on his heel and followed Paris instead.

When they were out of sight, I blew out a frustrated sigh.

“You’re right,” Aric said. “She’s really pissed.”

“I told you,” I said, reaching up to my back and trying to rub the tension that was pooling there away.

Aric absentmindedly moved my hand aside and started rubbing my shoulders. “What are you going to do?”

I groaned in pleasure at the magic his hands were working. “I don’t know,” I gritted out. “She’s really mad. I don’t think she’s going to get over it by next weekend either.”

“What’s next weekend?” Aric asked curiously, his hands never stilling their motion.

“Room lottery,” I said blandly. “We’re moving to different dorms next year. Suites, actually. You have to pair with certain people and they put you in with other people. It’s supposedly some big thing.”

“Maybe she’ll be over this by then.”

“Do you think she will be?”

Aric considered it a second. “Not a chance.”

I didn’t think so either. I groaned again as his hands moved down my back.

“You know,” Aric said flirtatiously. “This would work a heck of a lot better if you were naked.”

“Just keep rubbing,” I admonished him.

“I’m just saying, I could really go at the . . . problem if you were naked,” Aric grinned.

“Now is not the time for your wolfish charm.”

“Okay,” Aric conceded. “You’re going to tell me when it’s time for my charm, right?”

Absolutely not. Well, maybe.

The battle lines had been drawn.

In one corner, you had Paris Princeton. She was 120 pounds of raw fury and anger – and she managed to go the entire week without talking to me.

In the other corner, you had, well, me. I was just tired of the whole thing. And no, I’m not telling you how much I weigh.

If I had thought there was even a remote chance of Paris and me reconciling before the room draw the following week – let’s just say, it didn’t happen. While I had once looked forward to hanging out in the dorm room with Paris, now it was pure torture to spend five minutes there.

I was actually looking forward to the end of the semester and returning home for the summer at this point. Yeah, things were that desperate.

Aric said he had placed the anonymous call to the police – I didn’t have the specifics of it, though. I had taken every chance I could get to flee from the dorms, so I had actually spent a lot of time with Aric over the past few days. We were at a comfortable place – treading water – waiting for the next catastrophe to drop from the sky.

Aric was still amused by my “girl” drama, but I was weary of it. The more belligerent Paris got, the angrier I got in return. She didn’t see anything wrong with her ultimatum – and she was sticking to it. While I agreed Laura had done something wrong, I didn’t believe that there was a reason for me to stop being friends with her.

There it is. That’s the standoff. It’s not particularly new. It’s not particularly inspiring. It’s not particularly mature. It just is what it is.

When the day of the room draw arrived, I had already made my decision. I paired up with Laura, while Paris paired up with Brittany. That left Michelle up for grabs. She was funny, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to live with her.

“We can’t just leave her out,” Laura protested.

“She’s kind of spastic.”

“So are you,” Laura said.

“I’m not spastic,” I protested. “I’m just high maintenance.”

“Is that better?”

“Don’t piss me off, Laura,” I said teasingly. “I’m about all you have left at this point.”

“You and Michelle,” Laura reminded me pointedly.

“Fine,” I blew out a sigh. “We’ll invite Michelle.”

It turned out, that wasn’t going to be a problem. When we got to the room draw – which was being held in the main lobby of the towers – Paris and Brittany were already there. They had Michelle in tow with them.

The towers were actually four dorms, all of which had one joined lobby and a shared cafeteria on the ground floor. We lived in one of the dorms – but there were three more with just as many students. The room draw lottery was for two bigger dorms in the central campus that had suite rooms. In essence, the new dorm rooms had one common room, two bedrooms and one bathroom.

Paris saw Laura and me enter the lobby and shot me a victorious grin. I don’t know what she was so happy about; she had to live with Michelle. That wasn’t exactly winning to me.

“Michelle is going to go with us,” Brittany said haltingly when she saw us.

“That’s fine,” I said airily. It was actually more than fine in my book.

Michelle turned to Laura. “I wasn’t sure you wanted to live with me, so I agreed to live with them.”

Laura smiled at Michelle. “It’s fine,” she said. “You have to do what you have to do for you. I don’t take it personally.”

“Well, that’s something new,” Paris scoffed. “Usually you enjoy making it personal.”

Laura’s cheeks flooded with color.

“Oh, let it go, Paris,” I grumbled. “You’ve beaten her down every chance you get. You broke up with Mike, remember? If you’re so happy with Mark, why are you so fixated on Mike? It’s like you don’t want him but you also don’t anyone else to have him.”

Brittany sucked in a wary breath.

Paris glared at me openly. “You don’t go after your friend’s ex.”

“She didn’t go after him,” I protested. “She got drunk and made a mistake. You should understand how getting drunk and sleeping with someone you hadn’t planned on could happen.”

Paris pinched the bridge of her nose like she was trying to ward off a migraine. “You just have to have the last word,” she said.

“Whatever.” I think I just proved her point.

A room draw isn’t exactly a scientific experiment. There are large poster boards set up with the hall design of each floor drawn on them. Each room is given a number that coincides with the actual room. Each student has a piece of paper with his or her name on it. When your name is called, you take your piece of paper up and tack it in a room you want to live in. If you’ve paired up with someone, whichever name is drawn first takes both the slips of paper and puts them in an appropriate room. The order of selection is determined by drawing names out of a hat. As the spots dwindle, you’re more apt to be separated from the people you’re paired with. Yeah, like I said, it’s not exactly scientific.

There were hundreds of students present at the room draw. Depending how quickly your name is drawn from the hat, you could be stuck there for hours. Luckily for us, Laura’s name was picked about twenty names in.

We walked up to the boards to discuss where we wanted to live. We immediately ruled out the all girls dorm and the jock dorm. That left Winters and Duggan. They were both co-ed by room – just like the dorm we currently lived in.

“Isn’t Winters named after Aric’s father?” Laura asked.

“Yeah.”

“That’s got to be kismet, right?”

“If you say so.”

Since we were so early in the draw, we had a lot of rooms to choose from. “Let’s go on the third floor,” I said finally.

“Why?”

“It’s the top floor. We won’t have to deal with people making noise on top of us.”

“Oh, good idea.”

Ultimately, we picked the room at the far end of the hall that was right across from the stairwell but a long way away from the elevators. “We’ll get more exercise this way,” Laura said pragmatically.

“And there’s only a few rooms down this little ell,” I said. “There will be fewer people around.”

When we were done, we made our way to the outskirts of the crowd. “You want to wait and see who we get paired with?”

“No, it could be hours,” I said. “The completed boards are going to be put up on the wall when they’re done. Let’s go get lunch and we’ll look at them later.”

The cafeteria was unusually empty for this time of day. Most of the students were at the room draw. Little by little people started to trickle in. Matilda and her roommate, I think her name was Kelsey, came in about an hour later. She made a beeline for me when she saw me.

“We’re with you guys,” she said breathlessly.

“What?”

“We’re with you guys,” Matilda repeated.

Great.

Matilda introduced me to Kelsey, a tiny girl with a perpetual frown on her face and an obvious reliance on a tanning bed. She had waist-length dirty blonde hair and clear blue eyes. I didn’t think she looked like a lot of fun.

I introduced the two of them to Laura. She seemed to be comfortable with both of them – at least on the surface. When they left to get their lunches – with a promise that they would rejoin us – Laura turned to me. “They seem nice.”

“I don’t know Kelsey,” I said. “I have classes with Matilda, though.”

“You don’t like her?”

“She’s fine,” I said. “She’s just a little bubbly and intense.”

“What do you mean intense?”

“She’s fixated on Rick No. 1.”

“Well, they’re not living in the dorms next year. They got an apartment.”

“How do you know that?”

“He told me.”

“How did he get around the rule that you have to live two years on campus?”

“I don’t know,” Laura shrugged.

I liked the idea of living off campus but I didn’t like the idea of giving up the food plan. Cooking for myself sounded like a disaster.

When Matilda and Kelsey rejoined us, the discussion turned to decorations. Everyone piped up with what they had to offer and we all left with a list of things to buy over the summer to fill in the holes.

When we were done, Laura and I stopped in the lobby long enough to look at the completed board. I wasn’t thrilled to see that Brittany, Michelle and Paris had claimed a room on the same floor as us – just around the corner, in fact.

“Do you think they did it on purpose?” Laura asked.

That was an interesting question. “I don’t know.” Part of me was hopeful this meant Paris thought things might thaw down the line. I could have just been fooling myself, though.

“Well, it will be an interesting year next year,” Laura said with a hollow laugh. “Let’s just hope it’s good interesting and not bad interesting.”

“That would be a nice change.”