When Sinners Play (Sinners of Hawthorne University 1)

“No. And when I found out, my mind just… I don’t know. I couldn’t imagine someone taking her place. Especially someone I actually liked. Because being glad you were here felt the same as being glad she was gone somehow. So I tried to hate you instead.” He brings his other hand to my face, brushing a knuckle over the curve of my cheekbone and the faint bruise that still sits there. “But you make it hard to hate you, Sophie. Impossible, really.”

I lean into his touch, ignoring the angry pulse of my bruise as I press my cheek against his fingers.

Dozens of thoughts and emotions are crashing around inside me, and I feel like the overwhelming one should be anger. After all, he’s just told me that he formed a personal vendetta against me because he somehow blamed me for his sister’s death, even though I had nothing to do with it.

But that’s not what I feel.

Instead, I just feel a deep sense of sadness and… understanding.

What he did was fucked up, but I understand—in a way I wish I didn’t—just how badly grief can wreck a person.

“I’d just come back from ID’ing my brother’s body at a morgue,” I say quietly. “The day we met. We weren’t biologically related or anything, but he was the closest thing I ever had to family in all my time in foster care.”

Gray is quiet for a moment, his blue-green gaze locked on mine. Then—

“How’d he die?”

“Killed himself.”

“F

uck.”

“Yeah.”

He releases his grip on my hair and palms the back of my head, tucking my face into the crook of his neck as he wraps his arms around me, squeezing so tightly it’s almost hard to breathe.

It’s the first time I think either of us have really said out loud what’s fucked us up bad.

I think it’s the first time we’ve really confronted it.

At least, I know it’s the first time I have.

It doesn’t feel quite as awkward and uncomfortable as I expected it to. I’ve avoided talking about Jared or even allowing myself to think about him for too long because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to handle the reminder of how fucking unfair life is.

But as Gray and I lie together, skin to skin, words begin to spill out of me.

I tell him about how Jared used to steal charcoals and paints from school for me so I could experiment with expensive art supplies. How he was the only man who actually loved me and the only one who never acted on his feelings for me. And I learn from Gray that Beth had a wicked sense of humor; that she was the only person who could get away with giving him shit. That they were best friends growing up, and that she wanted to be a journalist.

Eventually, our words die out and we just lie in comfortable silence for a little while, absorbing everything that’s been said.

My chest feels lighter somehow. I don’t feel numb like I used to, but my emotions don’t feel quite so overwhelming either.

I don’t feel so alone.

And when Gray finally lifts his head and leans down to kiss me before rolling me onto my back and settling between my legs, what happens next feels less like coping and more like living.

It feels… good.

27

A knocking sound drags me out of the exhausted sleep I fell into after our second round of sex.

I stir, grumbling, as Gray rolls over with a groan of his own and a voice filters in from outside the little apartment.

“Hey, Gray? You alright in there, man?”

It’s Declan. And I’d bet anything he’s not alone.