Claiming Serenity(10)

“I heard your cousin placed in the CrossFit regionals. A buddy of mine told me he was training him.” Donovan nodded, but didn’t really hear the Marine when he began explaining the program that Donovan’s cousin would have to endure for competition.

Donovan’s mind was too full of memory, of sensation—of Layla’s skin sweaty and shining in the low light of his bedroom; her stomach muscles flexing as Donovan kissed her navel. He’d been drunk, he’d been careless, but he’d wanted Layla. He wanted her again. But she was an infuriating brat. She was the nuisance that complicated everything, that had his best friend staring at him across the patio, a silent warning working across his face.

Layla was a splinter underneath Donovan’s fingernail, throbbing, bothering him daily, for years, ever since he could remember. He’d only gotten a break from her after their fathers had their falling out when Donovan was eighteen, back when his father was still a damn drunk fucking up everyone’s lives. But then Layla’s friend Autumn had hooked up with his best friend Declan and, well, her irritating presence had been forced back into his life. And like all irritations, Layla needed handling. Donovan thought a conversation about her dumb excuses was a good place to start.

Oh, yes… the next time he saw that girl, they were going to have a little talk, no excuses. He wasn’t letting her off that easy.





Mondays were usually a hive of activity in Marshall Hall but today it was quiet. There were five classrooms in each of the three hallways on the first floor and the offices on the second floor hid the Business and Marketing professors as they slept through their free period. That warm August day, however, the quiet that normally came behind the snores of professors stealing naps, was broken periodically by a group of freshmen foreign exchange students, all girls, who had just watched their first rugby practice. Their squealing and chatter was damn loud in the stillness.

Donovan had been the first player to lose his shirt during their weekly drills and as he waited beneath the curved, wooden staircase in the center of the lobby, shadowed from the high squeals of eighteen year olds, he thought that, perhaps that hadn’t been the best of ideas. Afterwards, they’d chased him into Marshall Hall like he was Bieber when he was fresh, before he turned into an obnoxious, party-throwing asshole. But, Donovan wasn’t hiding. Squealing freshmen, he could handle. Skittish brats who draw attention to Donovan’s business? Yeah, not so much.

He knew Layla’s schedule simply because it had taken him weeks to figure out how to get back at her for the glitter fiasco. He’d followed her, watched when she left her Marketing class, her leather fashion design sketchbook always under her arm, and how often she hurried through the lobby avoiding the over-eager T.A. who crushed on her. That day, though, Layla didn’t hurry. She didn’t try to avoid the T.A. because he was not there. Layla was, in fact, quite alone, adjusting the loose, silk turquoise tank top she wore, fiddling with her high-waist black geometric shorts, sporting a ridiculously large silver necklace, and Donovan smiled to himself in silent approval as he watched Layla duck away from the crowded lobby and back toward the hallway.

He followed immediately.

There was no warning, no preamble to his actions. Footsteps behind her, she managed a quick look over her shoulder as she adjusted her turquoise bag, and immediately scowled at him as he took her arm, slipping with her into an empty classroom before she was even able to slap his hand away.

“What exactly do you think you’re doing?”

He could tell she didn’t like him standing so close to her. Layla’s chin lifted, her eyebrows arched in an inflated Disney-villainous manner that he found almost funny. Naturally, he stepped closer.

“We need to have a discussion about how you behave around our friends.”

“Excuse me?” Her indignation was real by the tight cross of her arms and ram-rod straight posture that made her arms stiffen.

“Autumn noticed that something was up. You begged off Joe’s barbeque to work out with Mollie and Vaughn, then fake sick and you think no one would notice?”

Layla recovered, quickly, and Donovan tried not the think that her small blush was cute, tried to disregard the impulse to see if he could make her blush deeper.

“I don’t see how that’s your problem.” She pulled at that chunky necklace, then fanned herself with her hand and Donovan didn’t think her reaction had anything to do with the warm temperature in the room or the musty smell of chalk that crowded the board next to them.

“It became my problem when Autumn assumed you skipping the party was because I did something to you.”