“What the fuck, Wilcox!” Ben shouts, jostling him away. The other guys gripe at him too, and I take the distraction as an opportunity to get away, rushing down the steps to meet up with Georgia.
“Were you saying something before we got separated?” she asks, walking out into the lobby.
“Oh, right,” I stammer, still flustered by the altercation with Sebastian. That guy just won’t give up. “I don’t have a bathing suit.”
She grins. “Don’t worry, Sugar, I’ve got you covered.”
As it turns out, Georgia doesn’t.
Have me covered, that is.
Oh, she has bathing suits—bikinis exclusively—and none of them provide much coverage at all.
“I don’t know about this,” I say, looking at myself in the mirror. We’re in the small changing room off the pool at Reyn’s house. “I’m the biggest river rat you’ll ever meet, and this is more skin than I’ve shown in my entire life.” Even when the girls at the cliffs went swimming, we mostly just did it in our underwear.
“It’s hot,” Georgia says, tying the string of her bikini at the hip. “You look incredible.”
I look like a fucking joke, with my dark makeup and battered dog tags setting starkly against the bright, happy turquoise string-thing.
I cut my eyes at her. “Yeah, I’m not super into looking hot or incredible.” I tug at the top, making sure my tits are secure. One false move…
I’m not insecure about my body. It’s nothing special, but I’m thin and curvy in the right places. I know I could look good if I wanted to. Which, I don’t.
It’s the scars that are a problem.
I always had passable cover stories, back home. A cooking accident. A bad cliff dive. A track mishap. A fall off my bike. They were believable in their gradual deliveries. An incident here, an incident there… not super suspicious, and if it ever was?
Well, river rats don’t ask questions.
Vomiting out all of those cover stories at once is a different beast. Transparent. Not even remotely believable. Might as well say I ran into a door. I’d probably need to pass around a spreadsheet just to keep up with it all, anyway. Georgia hasn’t even seen the worst of it yet, hidden behind my long hair, and already I see her eyes tracking the strange dots on my thighs, the
slash on my ribs, the discolored skin around my collarbone.
Georgia, by contrast, has the most perfect, smooth, glowing skin. Girls at Preston are like that, all clean and flawless and pure. Kind of makes me hate them, if I’m being honest.
Vandy walks out of the bathroom just then, sporting a colorful two-piece. My eyes are instantly drawn to the first flaw I see—a spot of black ink tattooed on her inner thigh. Then they’re drawn to the second, a wicked scar that wraps from her stomach to her back. It makes the slash on my ribs look like the result of a minor scratch.
I freeze—just for a split second—long enough for her to notice me gawking. Her eyebrows raise.
“Uh, sorry,” I say, flustered. I’d heard she’d been in a bad accident, the one that left her with that limp. “I didn’t mean to stare, I was just—” I was just wrong, I don’t say.
She runs her hand over it. “It’s pretty startling the first time you see it. I used to hide it. A year ago, you wouldn’t have caught me dead in a two-piece, but now…”
“Now what?” I ask, trying to follow.
“Now that she and Reyn are boning all the time, she’s a little less insecure,” Georgia pipes in, securing the other tie. “That’s what having a boyfriend who worships the ground you walk on can do for a girl.”
“It’s not just Reyn,” Vandy says, eyes rolling, “although that’s a part of it. I’m just in a better place now. I mean, everyone knows about the accident, so why bother hiding it? And Reyn… well, yeah, he makes me feel pretty damn sexy.” She gathers her hair up to tie it back. “Plus, the scars on Reyn’s back are pretty bad, and he’s still—”
“Your boyfriend has bad scars on his back?”
She goes still, eyes jumping to mine. “Uh, yeah?”
“Are people weird and nosy about it?” I wonder, elaborating, “Like, I mean, your group of friends.”
Vandy’s expression turns shuttered and hard. When she speaks, her voice is as cold as her eyes. “Not until just now.”
I feel my head jerk back in surprise. Holy shit, the sweet little spoiled girl has some serious claws. “I didn’t mean anything by it. Just curious.”