Page 20 of Legacy Wolf: Semester One (Legacy Wolf #1)

RAWLING

Class was awful. And it wasn’t even the class itself that had been shitty.

It was all the whispering and pointing. Somehow Atticus pulling shit on me made me the target.

Or at least the target of gossip. His attempt was foiled, and from what I could tell, it worked to keep him off of my ass, but that didn’t mean it kept the rumors at bay.

This place was one big old game of telephone in a lot of ways, and it sucked.

At least Jack and I were going to have a nice night in.

Six new episodes of the vampire show dropped and we were going to binge them all.

It might not have been the typical going out with your friends and drinking beer until you couldn’t stand up that was common on many college campuses, but it worked for me.

I met Jack at the dining hall. Bardoul and Channon were already sitting at a table waiting for us when we came in. Bardoul was doing lunches this week, which was great. It meant all four of us could eat together.

We grabbed our food and joined them.

“I’m so ready for this weekend.” Channon moved his peas around on his tray. “This week has been rough. Beyond rough. That math test was the stuff of nightmares.”

It hadn’t been that bad. Not really. But I wasn’t going to correct him, not when for him it obviously was rough.

“But you did it,” Jack sing-songed. “Professor said that everyone passed.”

“Yeah, but he didn’t say if it was with a D minus or not.” Bardoul stabbed his pot roast. “I’m not so confident.”

“A test is neither hard nor easy until it is both graded and returned,” I repeated something my high school history teacher said every single exam.

“Are you a philosophy major now?” Jack threw a pea at me, and everyone at the table seemed amused, including me.

As we were laughing, Phelan walked by with his dirty tray. For about half a second I thought he was going to stop and say hello. Of course he didn’t, and it probably never crossed his mind, but that didn’t stop the butterflies from forming in my stomach and the anticipation from building.

A nudge in my ribs from Jack’s elbow ended it quickly enough. I didn’t think much of her action at the time, but we barely had the door to our room closed and she brought it up, including the reasoning behind it.

“Care to tell me what that was all about?” She formed little fists at her waist. She was pissed.

“What? The test thing? I didn’t want to make people feel bad is all. I thought it was pretty easy.”

“Don’t play dumb with me.”

So, not the math.

“You elbowing me?” I guessed.

“Yeah, what was all that drooling over Phelan about? I thought our neighbors across the hall were horrible people and I was stupid to be screwing one of them, and then you go and start panting over one at dinner?” She went over to her bed and plopped down. “I thought we were friends.”

“We are. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had.” And it was true. I felt like I could be myself around Jack in a way I never had with anyone else except Rawlins. We might’ve had a shaky start, but I was glad that out of all the people on this campus, she was my roommate.

“Funny way of showing it.” She threw her pillow at me, and I let it just hit me in the face, the guilt of hiding what I had with Phelan from her starting to weigh heavy on me. “Tell the truth, you’re fucking him, aren’t you?”

I picked up her pillow and brought it back to her, taking a seat on the edge of her bed beside her.

“It’s not like that or maybe it is. I don’t know. But I like the way he makes me feel when we are together.” I didn’t love that I was his dirty little secret, but my not telling Jack was pretty concrete proof that I was doing the same to him.

“I seem to remember someone telling me to stay away from Atticus.”

Direct hit.

“This is different. Phelan might ignore me, but he’s not a bad guy. Not like Atticus.”

“Atticus is fucking evil to you, and it’s true, he is.

But he isn’t to me. His bully behavior is directed to you, and before you say anything about it, I know that it’s wrong to bully anyone.

I do. But don’t try to make it like I’m a victim of Atticus too, because that’s not the case.

” She snatched the pillow, covered her face with it, and let out a scream.

I hated how right she was.

Jack

I hadn’t meant to get in a full-on fight with Rawling, but seeing the way Phelan gazed at him in the dining hall had me in panic mode. And it wasn’t even just because Phelan wasn’t right for him. He wasn’t, but that was secondary to my real concern.

Rawling was human, and Phelan was not. I wasn’t even sure which was going to be worse—other students discovering Rawling was human or Rawling discovering that he was the only human here and that everything he knew about this world was incorrect.

It would be easier if I could just tell him about our kind, and there was more than one occasion when I seriously thought about doing so.

Fuck the rules. It wasn’t like the rules were in my best interest. If anything, they kept me pushed down in the hierarchy of our kind and were meant to be broken.

Only how would I tell him? It wasn’t like I could just shift in front of him and show him that I wasn’t making things up or was lost in a fantasy land. I was latent, making that an impossibility.

And then if I did manage to tell him, the odds were that I would be tossed from here.

Maybe not right away, but secrets had a way of coming out.

I worked so hard to get a spot here and to throw it all away to try and convince my roommate that shifters were real and that he was the only one here who wasn’t one—yeah, that wasn’t ideal.

Why did he have to call me his best friend? It made everything a thousand times harder. It was like a bulldozer of guilt got piled on top of me.

It was best to just keep things on the down low. At least for the meanwhile. Maybe I could ask my parents over break and just leave off names. They understood about not fitting in. Their daughter was the queen of it, after all.

“Let’s not fight.” I brought the pillow down. “Tonight is vampire binge night. Let’s take out the junk food and just do what we planned.”

“I don’t like fighting.” The defeat in his voice nearly broke me.

“I don’t either. How about we just keep who we are or aren’t sleeping with as a topic we avoid if at all possible.” I wasn’t going to say avoid completely. Sometimes you needed your bestie to vent to. That was law.

“Is there chocolate?”

“Yeah. I’m pretty sure there is chocolate.”

We ended up watching all of the episodes as planned and eating every stitch of junk food in the place. And by the time the final credits started to roll, everything felt like it was back the way it needed to be.

“We need to run to town and get more snacks.” Rawling shut his laptop. “We devoured what we had.”

“Sounds like a plan to me. I wonder if we should get a popcorn popper.”

“Ohh, I like that idea. Nothing like fresh popcorn.” He set his computer down on the desk. “I’m glad we aren’t fighting anymore.”

“Me too.” I still didn’t feel great about the way things were left as far as him being in the dark, but baby steps. “You want in the bathroom first?”

“Yeah. Thanks.” He padded into the bathroom, and I grabbed my pajamas and put them on, waiting my turn for teeth brushing. When he came out, we switched places. When I came back out from my turn, he was already in bed.

“Night, Rawling.” I climbed into bed.

“Night, Jack.” He flicked off his light. “Would you be mad if I asked you something?”

“Is it about Atticus’s cock?” I sassed.

“Ewww… no. We aren’t talking about that, right?”

“Right. And yeah, you can ask me anything.” I rolled onto my side.

“Is there something you’re not telling me? It feels like there is this secret between us. Not from today—but like from before. I just didn’t know how to ask earlier, and now… we kinda pulled the band-aid off, you know?”

“You think I’m hiding something from you?”

“Are you?”

Of all the things I didn’t want him to ask me.