His cold eyes met mine. “She’s drunk. I’m taking her back to her dorm.”
“Like hell you are! And her dorm isn’t in that direction. What are you doing?” I pushed against him, and he stumbled slightly. Great. Still drunk. Freaking awesome.
Trace’s eyes were unfocused as she looked at me then back at Phoenix.
“I’m doing her a favor, doing us a favor. Back off. You’re already on Nixon’s shit-list. I’m making everything better. You’ll see.”
He was right about that. Nixon was pissed I was getting too close to his territory, not that it would be a problem anymore. Liar.
Trace moved her hand, almost like she was trying to reach me. Shit. This was bad, and it was going to get worse.
“I’ll take her,” I mumbled, knowing exactly what Phoenix was doing. For the past few years we’d bullied and drugged both guys and girls that were pushing us too far. But they’d always deserved it. We’d never picked on the weak. We’d never, and I do mean never, made the innocent look as bad as Trace was about to look.
“You’re going to do it? Really?”
“Just let me do it.” I held out my arms. “And this comes straight from Nixon? He said to do this?”
Phoenix snorted. “You think I would actually do this on my own? Nixon wants to teach her one final lesson, and he can’t make it, so we do the dirty work. Story of our lives, right?”
“But she didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Oh, but I think she did.” Phoenix grinned. “She does… After all, she has you and Bossman fighting to keep your pants on, and she refuses to bend to our rules even after she’s been warned. We can’t have the rest of the campus thinking we’ve lost our touch. She makes us look weak. Nixon knows it, Tex knows it — hell, I’m wasted, and even I know it. We have to make an example out of the cowgirl.”
In a twisted really dysfunctional way, he was right. I nodded my head and slowly made my way toward the guys dorm, cursing Nixon the entire time.
Had he finally snapped? Clearly, killing his father had done something to him, because we were about to make an innocent girl look like the devil. And look who was carrying her? Me.
I glanced up at the sky. It was a clear night. You could see thousands of stars, and I thought again about the astronaut-thing. Yeah, even dying in space would be better than taking the girl I liked into the guys’ dorms and putting her in bed with the quarterback.
I was already reaching for her, already making the choice I knew would change the course of our lives forever. But I couldn’t bring myself to let Phoenix do it. Something in his eyes told me that I couldn’t trust him. They were empty — they’d been that way for a while, as if his soul no longer possessed his body but had long ago given up on him, leaving him damned for eternity.
“You’re going to do it?” he snarled. “Really?”
“It’s not like I haven’t done it before,” I whispered so Trace, if she was still conscious, wouldn’t hear me. We’d done this prank more times than I could count, but it had always been to people who’d deserved it. Girls who’d whored themselves around and made fun of others… bullies. Basically, we took care of the bullies in the only way we knew how: take it too far and hope that when they woke up in someone else’s bed without any recollection of what had happened, they change their ways or leave the school.
Trace screamed innocence.
So I was doing it — not because she was a slut.
But because I knew it was what was best. We needed her to leave school because things hadn’t been the same since she’d arrived. Nixon was more pissed than ever, and he’d invited her into our group, into our lives.
“Just let me do it.”
Her body fell into my arms, and I almost winced. She was so light, so soft. In another time, maybe another world, she’d be mine. I’d carry her to my dorm, take care of her, tell her that all guys weren’t like that, they weren’t like us. I’d tell her that one day a guy would earn her… not take what wasn’t his to take.
“It’s what Nixon wants,” Phoenix said slowly. “He just doesn’t know it. You know it’s divided us too much already. When was the last time you went against him, Chase?”
I said nothing.
“That’s what I thought. Deal with it in your way, or I’ll deal with it in mine.” Phoenix’s eyes greedily took her in, and then he placed a kiss on her forehead. “It’s a pity. She really is beautiful.”
Not a chance in hell. I pulled her away, walked back to the SUV, and placed her in the front seat.