in months,” Andreas asks casually, not even glancing in my direction.
He knows he’s not allowed to get near my sister or entertain any ideas about her. She’s still in high school, for starters. Also, she doesn’t need to get her heart broken by the most notorious manwhore on campus.
“Jane is fine,” I reply through clenched teeth.
“Whoa. You don’t need to bite my head off. I was just asking.”
“You look pissed,” Danny pipes up. “Are you still sour about your talk with the coach?”
“Nah. I’m over that,” I lie. I hate that I screwed up, but wallowing in it won’t help either. “He had the right to chew my ass. My current mood is in part to blame on a fucking nosy reporter from the school paper.”
“Wait. I thought Ludwig was a buddy of yours.” Andreas arches his eyebrows.
“He couldn’t make it, and his replacement was a fucking bitch. She dared to ask when I stopped giving a fuck about football.”
“Wow. That’s savage.” Danny chuckles. “Your charming skills didn’t work on her?”
“I wasn’t myself.”
“Please tell me you put the bitch back in her place,” Andreas retorts angrily.
I take Danny’s spot on the bench. “That’s what I should have done. Instead, I left.”
Andreas whistles. “Troy Alexander avoiding a confrontation. That’s new. Are you sure you didn’t sleep with her and forget to call the next day?”
“Unlike yours, my bedroom doesn’t have a revolving door. I remember my hookups.”
He shrugs. “If you say so.”
“Can we drop the subject? I didn’t come here to gossip like a fucking sorority girl.”
A wicked grin appears on Andreas’s face. “Speaking of sorority girls….”
He proceeds to tell us about his latest sexual escapade, not sparing us any details, but I tune him out. No matter how much I want to forget what happened in the coffee shop, I can’t get the Lois Lane wannabe out of my head.
Damn it.
2
CHARLIE
I’m in the zone, my fingers flying over the keyboard, when Blake sits on the edge of my desk. I ignore him. It took forever for me to get a good flow going, and he’s not going to mess it up.
Wishful thinking.
Blake is a pest and clears his throat, as if his butt occupying precious space on my workstation wasn’t obvious enough.
With a sigh, I lean back in my chair and glance at him. “What?”
“What the hell did you just send me?”
I fake an air of innocence. “You have to be more specific than that.”
“Cut the bullshit, Charlie. You know I can’t publish that article about Troy. You destroyed him. Shit, I’ve seen movie critics be kinder to The Phantom Menace.”
“I only wrote what was presented to me. It’s not my fault Troy bailed from the interview when I asked the tough questions.”
“Come on, Charlie. I know you. You can’t fool me with your angelic face. I’ve seen your dark side, and it’s mean as fuck. You got mad at Troy because he was late, and you decided to get revenge. You can do that on your own time, not in my paper.” He jumps off the desk, fixing his tweed jacket in the process.
Blake is the poster child for the dress-for-the-job-you-want mentality, hence the stupid jacket and slacks. His dark hair is combed back, highlighting his widow’s peak and pale complexion. It’s not by chance that he plays a vampire in our ongoing LARP game.
We’ve known each other since kindergarten, and we dated in high school. Most exes can’t remain friends, but Blake and I had a solid friendship before, which helped. And the decision to break up was mutual.
“Whatever. I’m not rewriting it.” I turn to my screen.
“We can’t simply not run the interview!”
I shrug. “Get Ludwig to write one for you. He’s buddies with Troy. I’m sure he can come up with a bullshit article that highlights all of Troy’s assets.”
“You can be such a bitch sometimes,” he mumbles.
“Heinous bitch. That’s what Troy said.” I smirk.
“Did he really call you that?”
I look at Blake, noticing the deep frown. He can call me names—sometimes, when I deserve it—but we have the relationship for that. He won’t tolerate any jerk disrespecting me.
“Chill, okay? Technically, he said I was pulling the heinous bitch card, which, to be fair, I was. You can put away your knight in shining armor outfit for now.”
He clamps his jaw shut, but he’ll ruminate on that for hours. “If you were trying to get me to publish your interview, it won’t work. I’ll think of something to fill that spot.”