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5
Tatum
At ten o’clock,I was still shaking. For the last few hours, I’d tried to focus on reading lecture notes and assignment details, but my mind kept drifting back to the disturbing messages.
Finally, I abandoned all pretenses of study and headed out into the hall. I wanted to find Mellie and talk to her about everything that was going on, see if she had any advice for me.
Her suite was just a few doors down, but it felt like I hadn’t seen or spoken to her in ages. That was weird, considering how she was my best friend here at Roden.
Come to think of it, she’d been acting quite oddly for the last two weeks. She was suddenly busy all the time, and conversations at breakfast and dinner were stilted and vague. It almost seemed as if she was avoiding me, though I couldn’t think why. I’d asked Greer and Willa about it, but they’d never been as close with Mellie as me, so they hadn’t noticed anything unusual about her behavior. They figured she was probably just stressed about assignments.
As I padded toward her door, I heard shouting coming from her suite. Not wanting to intrude, I hesitated in the hall, wondering what was going on and if she was okay.
“Shut the hell up!” I heard Mellie say. “I honestly don’t know why you bothered coming here. Just fuck off with your pack of goons. Where are they, anyway? Shouldn’t they be following you around like puppies?”
“Are you serious?” said a deep masculine voice in response. There was a brief pause before he went on, voice edged with fury. “For fuck’s sake, you really have no idea what you’re doing. At all.”
“I’m not as dumb as I look, Henry,” Mellie replied, her voice shrill and furious now. “I’m so fucking sick of you treating me like this just because I don’t have a dick! Men aren’t actually superior, you know. Are you ever going to get that?”
“You think that’s what this is about?” The man scoffed. “I guess you’re gonna get a nasty shock soon, you stupid little bitch! Just wait.”
There was a tinkling sound as something shattered. “I said get out!” Mellie yelled.
The man didn’t say anything else, and the door opened a few seconds later before slamming behind him as he strode out into the hall. I shrank back against the wall, and his brown eyes narrowed as he saw me. “You,” he said, eyes blazing.
I raised my brows. “Um… do I know you?”
He came closer and jabbed a finger toward my chest. “Stay the fuck away from my sister.”
My eyes widened incredulously. “Huh?”
He looked around us for a second, presumably making sure there was no one else to witness his threatening gestures. “Just do as I fucking say. Stay away,” he hissed.
Before I could respond, he strode away. When he reached the stairway, I finally gathered up the courage to call out after him. “Whatever, asshole!”
He didn’t turn around.
I headed over to Mellie’s door and knocked. She opened it in a huff. “I told you to fuck off! I don’t… oh, it’s you.”
“Yeah. Me. I think I just met your older brother. Everything okay?”
She chewed on her bottom lip, her eyes wide. “You saw Henry? Did he say anything to you?”
“Yeah. ‘Stay the fuck away from my sister’. Any idea what that’s about? I’ve never even met him before.”
She waved her hand and stepped aside to let me in. “Oh, who knows with him? He’s an idiot. Probably thinks you’re a bad influence on me or something,” she said as she set about cleaning up the broken glass.
Her offhand comment sliced right to my core. Because I came from a poorer family—when I was younger, at least—I’d often heard the ‘bad influence’ line from my richer school friends. Their parents would side-eye me or outright ban them from hanging out with me, as if I’d pass on ‘common’ behavior to them purely because I wasn’t rich and didn’t have the right pedigree. It made me feel lower than low, even though I knew they were just elitist assholes.
Mellie knew all that. I’d confided a lot of my insecurities and past traumas in her over the last few months.
She saw my face, and she shook her head and held out her hands, palms facing me. “Shit! I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant that he’s always been weirdly protective. He thinks everyone is a bad influence on me. It’s so annoying. It’s like he thinks because he’s a man, he automatically knows better.”
My face softened. “Oh. Right.”
“Also…” She averted her eyes. “I just remembered. He was friends with Ben Wellington. Around the same time as when you….”
She trailed off, and my stomach lurched. This was the second time last year’s incident had been brought up today. Guilt tightened my chest. I felt like I was falling, spiraling, down, down, down….