True (True Believers #1)(32)
Author: Erin McCarthy

He seemed to know exactly the direction my thoughts had taken. “Kylie said she was coming back in like ten minutes, remember?”

Damn. “Yeah.”

“Don’t look at me like that,” he warned.

“Like what?” I asked.

He snorted. “Yeah. The innocent act isn’t working. You know exactly what you’re doing.”

I did. It made me feel sexy and powerful when his head descended, his intent clearly to kiss me.

The door flew open. “I’m back,” Kylie announced. “What are you guys doing? Gross, is that a dead guy on TV? What is he doing with that saw? Sick.”

Tyler rolled his eyes. “I don’t know how she doesn’t pass out,” he said. “Air is always leaving her mouth, but there can’t possibly be time for her to inhale between words.”

Tapping his leg in reprimand, I sat up, too content to truly be disappointed at the interruption. “Yes,” I told Kylie. “That’s a saw. He has to get through the rib cage to the heart. It’s a very extensive process and requires bone cracking.”

Ironic, wasn’t it, that the physical heart was so hard to reach, yet my emotional heart seemed to have been found with very little effort on Tyler’s part.

Chapter Eleven

“Girls Night!” Kylie shouted, arms up over her head as she dropped down low on the dance floor on orders from Flo Rida.

I wasn’t going to attempt that move, knowing I’d end up on my ass. And not in a good way. I just bounced from side to side, pretending that I knew how to dance. The reality was, I had a respectable sense of rhythm, but my arms never seemed to coordinate with my legs. I tended to look like a heron searching for a fish when I attempted dances that had choreographed moves.

Fortunately, it was a typical Saturday night at the club just off campus, and everyone was too drunk to notice what I was or wasn’t doing. I did enjoy dancing, just not when someone was recording it on a phone. Kylie, Jess, Robin, and I were out for the night, and on strict instructions from Kylie, no guys were allowed. After a week of seeing Tyler every day, I was mostly okay with that. He was working anyway, and I didn’t want to be one of those girls who started seeing a guy and then ignored her friends completely. Then when he turned out to be an ass, she called and cried on you for two hours. Then got back together with him and promptly blew you off again.

I would not be that girl.

So I was out with my friends because one, I enjoyed their company, and two, if I wound up sobbing over a bag of Doritos, which was a very real possibility, I wanted legit sympathy.

Though I would have preferred hitting the mall for some purse- and scarf-shopping or going to the movies, here we were at Republik, sharing a pitcher of beer and fending off drunken frat boys who moved in on us like a school of fish, undulating waves of them, splitting around us and honing in on a target, which was usually Kylie. Actually, there wasn’t much fending off going on. Normally the rules of a girls night were strict in that there could be nothing beyond a minute or two of casual flirting with a guy. No disappearing. No hookups. None of which had ever applied to me, but the point was, we were supposed to stay together and drive men insane with desire from our rebuffs and cumulative girl-power friendship.

That motto seemed to have left the building with Kylie and Robin’s sobriety. They were both dancing with a minimum of two guys at any given moment, and Robin had already made out with one guy and let another do a shot off her boobs. It wasn’t even eleven yet.

I was cool with all of that. I knew that Kylie was struggling to figure out what she was doing with Nathan, and we all needed to blow off steam before finals in a couple of weeks. But what I was not cool with was the fact that Jessica and Kylie were throwing random guys in my direction with encouraging nods and tongue wiggling.

On my own, I wasn’t attracting much attention, which worked just fine for me, but my roommates seemed determined to throw one hapless friend of a hot guy after another at me. I actually felt sorry for them since they were bound to be disappointed that they were stuck dancing next to the one girl in the group not wearing a miniskirt or a drunken smile of welcome. In a pair of jeans, chunky striped sweater, and ballet flats with a bow in my hair, I wasn’t exactly sex personified.

“What’s your name?” one yelled into my ear, adjusting his baseball cap and looking determined to make the best of having drawn the short stick.

“Rory,” I shouted in his direction.

“Tori?”

Sure, why not? I nodded.

“I’m Mike.” He stuck his hand out.

Which was kind of funny, considering we were packed onto a sweaty dance floor with red lights strobing over us at random pulses guaranteed to give someone a seizure. But I took his hand and quickly shook before letting him go. He was wearing a John Deere sweatshirt and giant gym shoes that landed on my foot when he moved as awkwardly as me.

“Shit. Sorry.”

Kylie came up behind me and gave me an over-the-shoulder bear hug, shouting into my ear, “He’s cute! You should totally go for it!”

Feeling like I was wearing a blond throw blanket, I ignored her, starting to get annoyed. It wasn’t that unusual for my friends to suggest I flirt with a guy. What was unusual was that they were doing it now, when they knew I was spending a ton of time with Tyler, who they had paid to de-virginize me. Which he hadn’t. Not yet, anyway. While we had found plenty of time to make out, there was always a reason it didn’t go any further, whether it was time, privacy, or lack of condoms.

So he hadn’t complied with their request, but they didn’t know that. They thought I had slept with him, was sleeping with him. Wasn’t that what they had intended? So now why were they determined to make me see the charm in a random redneck?

“Do you want a drink?” Mike asked when Kylie bounced off of me and grabbed the hand of Mike’s friend, forcing him to spin her.

I shook my head. “No, thanks. I’m actually seeing someone, and . . .”

Jessica cut me off. “It’s just a drink! And you’re f**king Tyler, not dating him. There’s a big difference.”

Okay, now that pissed me off. That was a brutal blow on the dance floor. Breath coming in anxious bursts, I apologized to Mike. “I’m sorry, I need to go.”

He looked simultaneously horrified and intrigued. I don’t think he had viewed me as a girl who would screw for the sake of screwing, and while I might have been diminished in his moral opinion, I had shot up in the ranks of his interest. Given the chance, I suspected he would double his efforts to talk to me now there was proof that I put out. “No problem. I’ll be here.”