“Have you made up your mind about the presidency?”
I smile then, my stomach flipping for a completely different reason. “Yeah. I’m going for it.”
“Yeah?”
I nod. “I really want to be president, to continue our family tradition. Not even for that reason, honestly. But because I think I could make a difference. And I love KKB. I want to leave a mark before I go.”
Kip kisses my neck, tickling my ribs as I giggle and kick him away. “You’ll leave one hell of a mark.”
From all my writhing, my legs are tangled around his waist, and even though we’ve been insatiable all week long, I feel him growing hard between my thighs.
I hum my approval, sucking the skin of his neck as I climb my way up to his mouth. But just as we lock into a needy kiss, my phone rings.
“It can wait,” I murmur against his lips.
But before we can even get some heavy petting going, my phone rings again.
“Okay, maybe it can’t,” I groan, rolling over until I can swipe my phone off the nightstand. I frown. “It’s Ashlei.”
“Answer it.”
I nod, hitting the green phone button and putting Ashlei on speaker. “Hey, babe. Kind of indisposed at the moment. Everything okay?”
“No.”
As soon as I hear her choked voice, her sobs, I shoot upright. “What happened?”
She cries for so long that I debate texting Jess and telling her to get her ass to wherever Ashlei is — and fast. I’m texting it out when she finally speaks.
“I fucked up. Bad, Sky. I don’t know what to do.”
“Whatever it is, we can figure it out. Take a deep breath.”
She does, but then she’s crying again. “Sophie… the intern…”
I freeze, Kip and I exchanging glances. I’d filled him in on that whole situation when I first got here. “What did she do?”
“She… she kissed me.”
“She what?”
“I shoved her off me as soon as I realized what was happening, but I can’t even believe it happened at all. And when I pushed her back, she had this shit-eating grin, like she’d won something. I have been trying to make sense of it all week, trying to figure out how to tell Brandon. And this morning…” She pauses, a sob breaking through. “This morning, I realized…”
“What, Lei?”
She sniffs. “She was interviewing me for her project. And I just forgot…”
“Forgot what?”
Another pause. “She was recording it. She had her phone set up on a tripod to record so she could pay attention to what I was saying.”
My heart tripled its pace in my chest, Kip and I sharing another look. I know what she’s going to say before she can even get the words out, and the way Kip is looking at me, he knows as well as I do that this is bad fucking news.
“She has our kiss on video, Sky.”
Ashlei lets out a long, painful sigh as I scrub a hand back through my hair, trying to think.
“What do I do?”
“It’ll be okay. I have a plan,” I lie, kicking the covers off and hopping out of Kip’s bed. “Just… call Jess. You don’t need to be alone right now. And don’t talk to Brandon yet. I’ll be home by seven tonight, and we’ll figure this out.”
“I can’t lose him,” she whispers, her voice breaking again. And I look at Kip, knowing that if I were in her shoes, I’d be ripping at the seams, too.
“You won’t.”
And I pray that that’s not a lie, too.SEASON FINALE“ALRIGHT, MY FAVORITE LITTLE redhead,” Skyler says, grabbing my toes from where they stick out from under my comforter. “What do you say we go for a walk?”
“That sounds awful.”
She chuckles. “Yeah, well, I’m sure showering does, too, but that’s next. Come on.”
Skyler rips my comforter off of me before I have the chance to grab it, and I groan, thrashing in my sheets and making a big show of my unhappiness at being forced out of bed.
“Please, just let me sulk in peace. I don’t do this often.”
“It’s been long enough, babe. I let you do nothing but go to class and then come back here and mope for over a week now. But it’s time to face the music.”
I roll over, face half buried in my pillow. “What if the music really sucks? Like a third-grade orchestra concert kind of suck?”
Skyler smiles, sitting on the edge of my bed and sweeping my messy hair off my cheek. “You just need to talk to him, Little.”
“I’ve tried.”
“Tried what, exactly?”
“I texted him after he left that night. I tried calling.”
“And then?”
I frown. “I mean, he made it pretty clear he didn’t want to talk.”
“Didn’t,” she echoes. “Past tense. It’s been over a week now. He’s had time to cool off and think. And so have you. What’s stopping you from going down Greek Row and staying in his room until y’all work this out?”