Loser: A Dark College Bully Romance (Hillcrest University Book 1) Read online

  Once we were on the road, Sawyer knew exactly where to go. Our destination was just over an hour away. A hell of a lot of time to spend in the car, especially on a first date. It would be our last, too.

  “So,” he said, driving with one hand and leaning his other arm along the open window beside him, “tell me about you, Ash.”

  I let out a short chuckle. “Me?” I echoed. “Why talk about me? I’m pretty boring, really.” Actually, I didn’t find myself too boring, but talking about myself and telling Sawyer about little old me? Not something on my bucket list. “Why don’t you tell me about yourself instead?”

  He grinned a half smile, tossing a quick look at me as he drove. “Okay. Fire away. Ask anything your heart desires.” Ugh. Such a cheesy line. I immediately wanted to cut my ears off so I’d never have to hear anything like it again.

  There were a lot of things I could’ve asked him, but what to ask him that would make me want to steer clear of him the entire date? Ooh, I know! Talking about other girls. Yes, that was not a typical subject of conversation for first dates, was it? It was perfect.

  “How many girlfriends have you had?” I asked. I bet the number was low. Someone like him didn’t date girls one-on-one, exclusively. He liked hooking up and playing around. How else would his allegedly awesome dick skills have gotten so good?

  “I assume you mean girls I’ve dated while seeing no one else, in which case, that would be zero,” Sawyer said.

  Well, I knew the number would be low, but zero? Damn. What a player. All the more reason to stay away from him and his dick.

  “Let me rephrase the question,” I said, sinking low in the seat. They were leather, so the chair stuck to my bare legs a bit. “How many girls have you slept with?” An even better topic of conversation.

  Sawyer was quiet for a moment, shooting me an annoyed look. “Why do you want to know this stuff?”

  “You said I could ask anything my heart desired. My heart desires to know how many girls you’ve had.”

  “A lot,” he relented. “I stopped keeping track in high school.”

  Wow. So the number had to be way, way up there…which then brought me to my next question, yet another winner for a first date: “When’s the last time you’ve been tested for STDs? Sleeping around like that, you’re bound to catch something.”

  “I usually wear condoms, unless I know the girl’s clean and on some kind of birth control.”

  “Yes, but sometimes condoms don’t work.” I bite my lower lip. “For some reason, the condom thing surprises me. I wouldn’t have pictured you as the condom type.” If anything, he looked like the kind of guy who complained that condoms dulled the sensation, whiny, whiny, bitch, bitch. Guys were literally so annoying when they said that.

  Sawyer’s eyes drifted off. “My parents would kill me if I got a girl pregnant.”

  I felt like most parents would, at least if it was an accidental pregnancy from a one-night stand. From what it sounded like, one-night stands were the only things Sawyer had. “Why’s that?”

  “I’m sure they have some girls picked out for me,” he muttered, the unhappiness in his voice evident. “When you have money, it matters who you’re with, who you marry. Money tends to stick by other money.”

  Words escaped me. Was Sawyer saying his parents had a selection of girls for him to marry in the future? Like some kind of modern arranged marriage? I knew rich people were weird, but that was just…well, it was fucking weird.

  I couldn’t help but wonder if that was why he played around so much. He was still in school, out of his parents’ direct control, but once he graduated, would he be forced to choose among the selected girls? Getting his dick wet by as many different pussies as he could until he was forced to settle down? I would feel bad for him, but, you know, it was Sawyer.

  I forced out a laugh. “Well, I’m sure your parents would hate all of this, then. Taking me on a date. I’m not exactly rich parent material.” I stared at my feet, at my high tops. The white bottoms were dirty, the fabric on top a bit torn. They were old shoes, nothing new and special, but I loved them all the same. People like Sawyer and his parents probably took one look at me and turned away while holding their noses.

  Sawyer’s chest rumbled with a genuine chuckle. “I should bring you home for Thanksgiving. My parents would have a fucking fit. It’d be hilarious.”

  Using me as a way to get back at his parents. Yeah, totally funny. Wouldn’t make me feel like shit at all. But hence the rich boy problem: they never thought about anyone other than themselves. Sawyer didn’t care about how something like that would make me feel.

  “Yeah,” I said, “and I could bring you home for Christmas and be the envy of the town. I could dress you up in your nice clothes and parade you through the streets with a flashing neon sign that says, property of Ash Bonds, you can look, but no touching.”

  “If we do Thanksgiving at my place, I’m okay with that,” Sawyer replied.

  As if I’d ever want to take a guy like Sawyer home to meet my mom. Helen would hate him. She didn’t like charity either, and she hated all those movies where the poor girl nabs herself a rich husband and is automatically elevated in society. She hated them with a passion, and I tended to agree with her. I mean, having money would be nice. Not struggling every month to pay the bills would be great. I could buy a shit ton of skateboards and new shoes, but eventually the newness of the money would wear off, and I’d probably donate most of it to some charity or local homeless shelter.

  Hillcrest probably didn’t even have a homeless shelter, because there were no homeless in the area. It was a rich person’s town through and through.

  We arrived at our destination in about an hour. Traffic took a bit longer because it was rush hour, so the highways were a little backed up. We parked in an empty space in a giant parking lot, one of the biggest parking lots I’d ever seen, and headed to the front gate.

  You want to know where Sawyer brought me on our date? The zoo. It wasn’t in Hillcrest, but it was still a rich person’s zoo. The signs were new and clean, and the exhibits, judging from the map I’d grabbed, had a lot of land for the animals to roam around. Honestly, it was how a zoo should be, not nestled inside a poor city with tiny cages.

  I had no idea why we were at the zoo; it wasn’t where I would’ve pegged Sawyer to take me, but I could roll with it. There were tons of other people here, so it wasn’t like we were alone. I doubted we’d be alone at all, no matter where we went.

  “Why’d you bring me to the zoo?” I asked, tensing the moment I felt his hand find mine, his fingers intertwining with mine before I could pull away. He’d gone for my hand like a fucking ninja, and he was too strong for me to yank it back.

  Ugh. Fine. I’d hold his hand, but that was it.

  He turned his head to me, giving me a lazy smile. “You’ll see in a bit, but first, let’s go see the lions.” The way he spoke about them, I was able to discern a real, sincere eagerness in him. He was excited to see the damn lions. Who knew?

  Sawyer tugged me along, knowing exactly where to go, not needing the map I’d shoved in my back pocket at all. He must come here a lot, then. He had to, if he knew the whole layout of the freaking zoo.

  The lions were in an exhibit that had both a glass window and an open one, a great gap between the lions’ enclosure and the fence that kept people from falling in. The zoo’s pride had one large male, his mane made of tan and black, and two females. All three of them looked pretty lazy, lounging on their rocks in the dying sun.

  We stood near the glass to get a better view. I stared at the lions for a while, but eventually my gaze drifted up to Sawyer. The way he watched the lions, it was…it was like I was glimpsing at a real person, not the facade he constantly put up. His mouth was drawn into a thin line, his fingers loosening on mine just a bit. It was probably enough for me to pull my hand away, but I didn’t, because I was so lost in his expression.

  So serious. So quiet. So unlike him in every way.
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  “Sabrina loved the zoo,” Sawyer whispered, his green eyes heavy on the trio of lions. His thumb brushed along my knuckles, eliciting soft tingles in my hand. “She loved all the big cats. I think she wanted to be as fierce and as beautiful as them.”

  I…I didn’t like this. Sawyer was being too serious, too solemn. This was not the Sawyer I’d come into this date prepared for. This Sawyer was…a stranger to me, one I didn’t know how to deal with. This Sawyer was one I found myself leaning into, wanting him to open up more.

  “Was she?” I asked. Though we were surrounded by other families, by kids who hurried to press their faces against the glass near us, I was able to see nothing else but Sawyer.

  His eyes fell off the lions, falling down a bit, but he didn’t look at me. It was as if he was caught in a memory, one that would not release him until he remembered it all. “Sometimes” was what he said. “Sometimes she was, but other times…other times she needed more help than she was ever willing to admit.”

  I found myself leaning my cheek on the arm holding onto my hand. I didn’t want to press him too much about Sabrina, both because it was a depressing subject and because I felt my will toward him weakening. When he showed me this side of himself, it was impossible for me to view him simply as a haughty rich guy.

  Underneath it all, under all the posturing and the half smirks and the money, Sawyer was a person. A real person with feelings he didn’t allow himself to feel.

  “She was on meds since she was nine,” Sawyer said, slowly dragging us away from the lion exhibit. If I had to guess, I’d say we were headed to the cheetah or tiger exhibit next. “My parents never told me exactly what was wrong, but she was…something in her brain wasn’t wired right. She’d be happy and strong one minute and then sullen and depressed the next. When she had her highs, she often did things without thinking them through.”

  As I listened to him go on and on about his dead sister, I couldn’t help but imagine her. Though I’d tried to avoid her picture online when I searched her name, in the recent weeks, I’d been lax. I Googled her. She’d been pretty. Blonde like me. Huge dimples in her cheeks. Perfect white teeth and eyes a similar shade to mine. I couldn’t blame Declan for thinking of her when he looked at me, but I did wonder if Sawyer felt the same. If he did…well, this was weird.

  He brought us into a building after quite the hike, stopping us in front of the snow leopards. They paced their enclosures, walking continuously in the same path, their lengthy, fluffy tails nearly as long as their entire bodies. Still he held onto my hand, and he showed no signs of letting go, and I was strangely okay with it.

  When he wasn’t acting like a supreme dick, Sawyer wasn’t too bad to be around.

  “When she and Declan broke up, I knew she was spiraling, but I didn’t do anything. I was too lost in the parties around Hillcrest. The weekend that my parents found her, I was…” Sawyer’s voice dropped to a whisper, his fingers tightening around my hand. “I was on a bender. I wasn’t in my right mind. When I came to, I saw dozens of missed calls and texts.”

  “From your parents?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine being his parents, coming home to find their youngest child had hung herself.

  “From my parents, but also from her. Sabrina had been calling me constantly that night. She left me voicemails…asking me to come home. Telling me that she needed me.” Sawyer’s eyes squeezed shut, the pain evident on his face. “But I didn’t get to her in time. I wasn’t there for her when I should’ve been.”

  I sighed, knowing there was nothing I could say to make it better. Nothing to help this horrible situation. What was done was done; there was no fixing it, no taking it back. It was an irreversible mistake, one that he’d feel for the rest of his life.

  Even though I didn’t exactly like the guy, I found myself saying, “I hope you don’t blame yourself for what happened.” I knew as I said it he did, at least partially. The way he spoke, I knew he thought if he would’ve answered his phone and come home, he could’ve saved her. And maybe he could’ve—but there was no telling that she wouldn’t try it again, or that he still would’ve been too late.

  “I blame everyone. I blame my parents, I blame myself…” Sawyer’s jaw clenched. “I blame Declan. By the time I got home, the note was already in police evidence. When it was officially ruled a suicide, my parents asked for it back. I’ve looked everywhere in that fucking house, and I couldn’t find it.”

  “Then how do you know the note was all about Declan?” I was pushing my nose into someplace it didn’t belong, but I couldn’t stop myself. This was a mystery I felt compelled to seek out the answers to, even though it wasn’t my mystery to solve.

  Sawyer’s jade eyes looked down on me. “My parents told me they didn’t want Declan anywhere near the house. They had the police look into him, but there was nothing to find. Declan might not have strung up the rope himself, but he had a hand in it.”

  He drew me away from the snow leopards, and we emerged outside. He once again knew where to go, his hand possessively holding mine. I asked, “I thought they were broken up at the time?”

  “They were.”

  “Why?”

  Sawyer’s look right then was reminiscent of his typical expression, one that told me I had no right to know. One that told me I was an ant compared to him. “That’s none of your business, Ash,” he muttered, frowning. The man could frown, but he couldn’t fully smile. Go figure.

  “Sorry,” I whispered, not really sorry at all. I wasn’t the one who brought up Sabrina. He was. He was the one who went on and on about it, about what happened, like… I came to a startling realization, and a feeling of anger coursed through me.

  Was Sawyer using his dead sister to his benefit? Was he using the story of her suicide to make me feel for him? Ugh. How despicable. How vile. How mean and cruel and awful. The seriousness he showed, the deep-seated sorrow in his voice; was it all a mask, all part of his game?

  I almost fell for it. The fucking bastard.

  Chapter Twenty – Sawyer

  I brought her to the tiger enclosure next. Sabrina always loved the tigers for their stripes and their bold color. This zoo only had the orange ones, and their coats were shiny, their bodies thick and muscular. Animals like that were beyond magnificent, but they could rip you to shreds easily if you so much as made a single wrong move. I respected them for it.

  I figured talking about Sabrina would make Ash feel more comfortable around me, remind her that I was a person, not just the tool at the party who’d stolen a kiss from her. Her lips…they were a lot softer than they looked, I’d give her that. So soft I caught myself wondering, more than once in these past few weeks, how they’d feel puckered around my cock.

  Getting Ash to give me a blow job was probably off the table, considering.

  We stood watching the tigers for a while, neither of us talking. I didn’t want to talk about Sabrina all night; talking about my dead baby sister was the worst mood killer of them all. Ash, though she tried to keep herself from me, was softening toward me.

  At least I thought so, until I gazed down at her and saw the frown on her face.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, holding onto her hand a bit harder than I was before. Her hand fit so snugly in mine, so fucking small and soft compared to mine. Details that should not have entranced me, but they did.

  “You,” she said simply, her grey eyes, two tiny storm clouds, glaring at me. “You’re what’s wrong, but that shouldn’t surprise you. You’re used to getting what you want, being the center of attention. You’re used to everyone falling for your shit.”

  I felt my blood pressure rising. This girl…God, the things I could do to her right now to make her regret those words. She’d be begging for me to stop by the time I was done with her. If we weren’t in public, I’d show her just how useless her words were. She might act tough, but no one could resist me. Not for long.

  Ash let out an ugly laugh. “I can’t believe you, honestly. Using your sister to
try to get to me. What kind of human being are you? What kind of person does that? It’s sick and wrong, and…” She groaned, though her glare remained fixed on me. “For a few minutes back there, you had me going. I thought I saw the real you, but it was just another mask.”

  I glanced around us, a few people were walking by, but beyond that, we were pretty much alone. I yanked Ash closer, pinning her between my body and the fence separating us from the tiger enclosure. I let go of her hand to grab her face with both of mine. A look of pure fire danced in her gaze, her lips parted slightly as if to egg me on further. She knew which buttons of mine to press, and she was unafraid as she stared up at the monster.

  “I’m not afraid of you, Sawyer,” she whispered, closing her eyes when I pressed my hips against her harder. I was sure my belt was digging into her stomach, but I didn’t care. With my fingers tangled in her hair, my palms on her cheeks, she wasn’t going anywhere. I had her, and I wasn’t going to let her go.

  Leaning my face down, I murmured, “I don’t believe you. Why else would you get so upset with me?” Satisfaction coursed through me when she frowned; I might’ve held onto her hair a bit harder than was necessary, might’ve ground my hips against her too indecently for a public area, but I didn’t care. She felt good caught between me and a hard place.

  If we stayed like this for long, the fence wouldn’t be the only hard thing around.

  “There’s something you still don’t understand about me,” I whispered, running my thumbs over her cheekbones, hearing her breath catch in her throat. In spite of what she’d have me believe, her body responded to mine. How could it not? “There are no masks. This is me, Ash. This is the real me. I’ve yet to meet a girl who could handle it longer than a night or two.”