“Whatcha lookin’ at?” Callie asks with a slight slur to her speech.
I glance down at her big, glossed-over eyes, deciding it might be time to cut her off. “Nothing.” When she starts to glance towards the door, I grab her by the shoulders. “Okay, it’s not nothing.” I sigh. “Kayden’s here… and he’s not alone.”
Her eyes widen. “He’s with a girl?”
“Yeah… maybe we should just go. You can walk out of here with your head held high and pretty much tell him to go fuck himself. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
She smashes her lips together, shakes her head, and turns around. “I want to talk to him,” she mutters before stumbling through the crowd toward Kayden.
She weaves around people and I follow her, trying to gauge Kayden’s reaction. He seems surprised to see her and, oddly, kind of relieved. I cross my fingers and toes that both girls are with Luke and Kayden came here in hopes of running into Callie.
Please, please, don’t let him be a douchebag.
When Callie reaches him, she flings her arms around his neck. “Kayden’s here,” she says, hugging him like he’s a giant teddy bear.
He puts his hand on her back, a protective gesture that calms me down a bit. “Are you drunk?”
She pulls back, bobbing her head up and down. “A little.”
“No, she’s wasted.” I roll up the sleeves of my jacket and wipe the sweat from my forehead. “And I mean fucking trashed.”
Callie rests her head on Kayden’s chest and he stiffens. “I thought she didn’t drink that much?” he asks me.
I shrug, my focus wandering to the corner of the room. Greyson is still there and a group has formed around him, something I find deeply amusing. He says he’s so awkward, yet people obviously like and gravitate toward him. I really don’t get his reservations about his personality. Even I felt comfortable around him. Well, as comfortable as can be expected around someone who makes my heart race and my palms sweat. I want to go tease him about it, and I think I might have just enough alcohol in my system to do so.
“She doesn’t, but tonight she did.” I glance back at Kayden. “Look, can you watch her for just a little bit? There’s someone I need to talk to.”
He nods, tracing his fingers down her spine. “Sure,” he says, so absorbed with Callie that he doesn’t even glance in my direction.
He almost looks like a lovesick puppy. Granted, a terrified-out-of-his-mind lovesick puppy. That doesn’t mean I fully trust him, though. He has a lot of wrongs to right if he’s going to prove he’s good enough to deserve my Callie.
“And make sure to keep your hands to yourself,” I back away with my finger pointed at him. “She’s drunk enough that she won’t remember a thing, which makes any touching on your part wrong.”
His jaw drops somewhere near his knees. “What kind of guy do you think I am?”
I stare at him pointedly, raising an eyebrow. “I have no idea.”
I turn on my heel and push my way through the crowd and over to Greyson. His eyes widen when he sees me coming.
“Hey, what’re you doing here?” he asks, gripping the cup in his hand.
With my gaze fixed on him, I try to ignore the people around us and hitch my thumb over my shoulder in Callie’s direction. “Callie wanted to have fun, so I took her out and got her drunk.”
His eyes light up as he laughs. “So that’s your idea of fun.”
I bob my head from side to side, considering. “One of many, I guess.”
He glances at Jenna, who gives him a knowing look and offers me a wave.
“Hey, Seth. How’s it going?” In her sparkling silver dress with diamonds in her hair, she looks like a bag of glitter threw up on her.
“Good. I’ve been meaning to call you so we could go shopping.”
“I totally should’ve called you the other day when I was out, but…” She trails off when Greyson gives her a pressing look. “You know what, I think I’m going to go get a drink.” She snags Ari’s arm and tugs him off toward the kitchen area.
I look at Greyson. “Did I say something wrong?”
He shakes his head, looking uneasy, and raises the cup to his lips to finish off the drink. I use the opportunity to check him out. He’s wearing a black shirt with a red logo on it, his jeans are the perfect fit—not too tight or too lose—and his hair has a sexy bedhead look to it.
He lowers the cup, crunches it in his hand, and chucks it into a nearby trashcan. When he locks his eyes on me again, I know what’s coming and prepare myself for the impact.
“So, I haven’t seen or heard from you pretty much since the carnival.” He stuffs his hands into the back pockets of his jeans and rocks back on his heels. “At first I thought maybe it was because you were avoiding me, but then I realized how self-centered believing you’d actually cut class over me seemed.” He studies me closely and I try not to get all wiggly. “Is everything okay?”
I don’t know how to respond to him. My first thought is to feed him some hyped up, overdramatic excuse because I’m good at giving those. But then I remember my revelation in the campus yard about how I need to start taking my own advice.
“Actually, I was avoiding you,” I shamefully admit.
His lips part in shock. “Wow, I didn’t expect you to be so honest.”
“Usually, I’m an honest person. Too honest sometimes. But I get where you’re coming from. I haven’t really been myself around you. Not completely, anyway.”
He swallows hard. “Is it something I’ve done or said? Because I know I can get a little weird—”
“No, it’s not you at all,” I cut him off, feeling like the biggest asshole. “It’s me.” He looks befuddled, so I add, “Some stuff happened to me in my past that makes me…” The scars on my hand throb. I feel so vulnerable standing there in front of him, trying to explain the secret I’ve kept locked inside me. “Hesitate.”
His gaze flicks to the scars on my arm. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Maybe in the future.” Once I say it, I realize how much I mean it. One day, I hope I can tell him what happened without being terrified out of my mind. “But tonight was supposed to be about fun.”
“So, you want to have fun, then?” he asks with a dare in his eyes.
I feel like I might be getting in over my head, but I’m too drunk to back down. “That all depends. What did you have in mind?”