3. Thirsty Girl

~ Kelsie ~

Mom made me go to classes the next day. Because she said it was only the fourth day and my first session in an English class, which was my major.

Villains and Anti-Heroes in Modern Fiction was technically a second-year class, but my Advisor let me take it because I’d won a President’s Award in English during my last year of high school. This class was the one I had been the most excited about for my first year. 

Yet, here I was creeping around campus, trying to get to the room without seeing anyone I knew. All while trying to ignore the tightness in my chest that had appeared yesterday when I’d talked to my very hot, but very insane neighbor.

When he came at me on the porch I thought he might actually kill me. I had fled, terrified. But even when I calmed down later that night I still couldn’t relax. I wanted to be at the windows, looking for him. In my mind I kept seeing him pull himself up and over that railing on the porch. The strength he showed, his muscles rippling under his wet shirt and the way he’d stared at me… I shivered at the memory.

Too bad he was insane.

Too bad I spent the whole night waking up from dreams about the crazy guy in which he was making my heart beat hard for reasons that had nothing to do with fear.

And when I woke for real in the morning I was flushed and flustered and feeling strangely confident for the first time since I walked into Daniel’s room.

Stupid me decided I should turn on my phone. I had turned it off when I was driving away from Daniel’s dorm and hadn’t turned it back on until this morning.

But by the time I’d been watching notifications pop on my phone for thirty seconds, mostly with messages that started “OMG!” all the false confidence I’d found in my sleep disappeared. I told the phone to clear all notifications, then threw it aside.

I knew somewhere in that mess would be a ton of text messages from Daniel. Plus, who knew how many texts and DMs from classmates and mutual friends from high school. Word was getting around.

I hadn’t opened any of them. I was terrified.

I blinked out of the memory and dropped my head because a group of girls I was walking past broke into excited giggles as I passed them. I flinched, but kept walking. No one said my name or called after me. I prayed they were laughing about something else.

I was holding my water bottle in one hand and my phone in the other. If anyone looked at me I would pretend I was interested in something on my phone and hadn’t seen them. 

As I got close to the door into the English Literature building, I took a deep breath and pushed my shoulders back to show I wasn’t ashamed. But just as I stepped inside, my phone buzzed.

When I tapped the notification it brought up a picture. And when I saw it, I almost fell over. My thumb slipped and suddenly I was stumbling down the hallway staring at my phone.

KELSIE, HAVE YOU SEEN THIS?

The image was a screenshot from pornography with all the important body parts blurred out.

But the caption read, Who knew you could be a virgin and a porn slut?

And the face of the woman riding the guy… was mine?

I stopped dead in the center of the hallway, gaping at the image.

Obviously it had been photoshopped. But the comments were full of crying-laughing emojis, and the soundtrack that played over the top that sounded like a woman gasping… over and over again.

No one would care that it was fake because they would want to believe I’d done that to get back at Daniel.

I was going to throw up.

Humiliated, terrified, and raging, I panicked. I looked up quickly, searching for an escape. But I couldn’t find one. There were people everywhere, and it seemed like they were all staring at me. I heard the sound of that woman gasping somewhere else in the hallway and almost puked.

Instead, I turned to flee out of the building, when the door opened ahead of me and that group of girls walked in.

They all saw me standing there, and their eyes went wide, and they began to laugh again.

Shit. Shit.

I wasn’t even thinking, I just turned back around, pretending to ignore them, and walked as fast as I could down the hall.

The room where my class was being held was a small one. Maybe if I got that far I could climb out of a window?

It seemed like every face jeered, and every word was a whisper or a hiss of an insult, like every single person in that hallway knew what had happened and was laughing at me.

I kept swallowing a lump in my throat, blinking rapidly, begging God just this once to let me not cry.

Then I saw room 220 and with a stifled sob, hit the bar on the door and went inside… only to find a much smaller, but eagle-eyed group of students I didn’t know sitting around in clusters, some in seats at the tables, others leaning on the tables or bookshelves around the room near their friends.

And at the back was her.

Melinda Black. The one Daniel was fucking. 

She and her friends all looked up as I stalked inside and her face went wide with delight. “Holy shit, you’ve got balls,” she laughed.

I shuddered to a halt—this couldn’t be happening. Why would God put her in my first English class!?

Everyone turned to look. The classroom went utterly silent. You could have heard a pin drop.

And in that moment I knew… if I backed down from her, I would never live it down. And I’d never forgive myself. No matter what, I couldn’t let her see that I was scared.

“Well… they’re bigger than yours,” I said lamely.

Somebody snorted, and my confidence wavered. But Melinda laughed.

“Seriously? Did you just—”

“What’s going on here?” a deep voice said from the doorway into the room behind me. But I ignored it.

I didn’t have time to plan. I just worked with what I had.

I stalked up the aisle between tables towards the back of the room where Melinda sat on a table, one leg crossed over the other, bracing with her arms so her breasts were pushed together by her elbows, grinning at me.

She raised an eyebrow when I stopped in front of her and slipped the top off my water bottle. 

Then I dumped it over her head.

“Since you’re so thirsty, maybe this will help.”

The room around us exploded with cheers and curses and laughter.

Melinda, who’d jumped up with a gasp the moment the water hit, her hair now plastered to her face on both sides, stared at me in shock.

Then her eyes narrowed and she launched herself at me.

“You bitch!”

She came straight for my hair. I ducked and threw up an elbow, then a blind fist that only glanced off her ear before sliding over her head.

She squealed and dropped to crouch, throwing her arms over her head which was satisfying.

“Pretend porn? Really?” I screeched as I grabbed her hair and sleeve and tried to throw her to the floor. But she leaped to her feet again, her lips peeled back from her teeth and hooked an arm around my neck.

We struggled, plowing down the aisle between the tables, the guys in the room cheering and clapping, and the girls screaming.

We were both stumbling, struggling, panting. I couldn’t get my head up to see what was happening around us because she had that arm around my neck and if I raised my head she could get it around my throat.

So we turned and bumped into stuff, something fell over—a chair, I think—and then, just as I got a fistful of her hair, and she got her nails into my chin, we ran smack up against something hard and unyielding.

“Enough!”

The voice resonated in my chest. Somehow even though it didn’t seem very loud, it cut across all the noise in the room and it was like my body heard it and obeyed.

I froze. And so did she.

A huge male body that smelled divine was standing to me. Massive, warm hands appeared on my shoulder and her arm, and suddenly all of the fight went out of me. We were being pried apart and my heart was beating too hard. Melinda was spitting like a cat. I swore at her, and a few strands of her hair tore as she yanked away from me, but that hand on my shoulder didn’t let me throw myself back at her. And for some reason all I wanted was to sink into that grip.

But I wasn’t taking my eyes off her. He held us facing each other, those thick, masculine arms with the sleeves rolled up to just below the elbow, keeping us just out of each other’s reach as we glared and panted.

“I don’t know what the fuck just happened, but this ends here. There’s no fighting in my class, period.” 

It was a bit naughty of him to swear, but I didn’t care. His deep voice hummed in my ribs. 

“You live on campus?” he said. Melinda reluctantly looked up at him and nodded. He huffed.  “You write your name and student ID number on that paper on my desk, then go back to your room and cool the fuck off. Now.” Her eyes went wide, then she kind of deflated. She blinked a couple times, then turned and started for the door, her steps getting faster the further she went. 

“And you…”

Now that I was sure she was gone, I finally turned, ready to tell him exactly what she’d done, but the words died in my throat…

Standing over me in a collared shirt that was open at the throat, his dark brows pinched over his nose, and those ice-blue eyes now stunningly cold, was Cain. His jaw flexed when our eyes met and my breath rushed out of me.

“What are you doing here?” I breathed.

“This is my classroom. The question is… why the fuck are you in it?”

Cain. My sexy, scary, weird neighbor that I couldn’t stop thinking about… was my teacher?