Page 18 of The Ones We Hate

His heart freefell from his chest, his hopes and dreams sailing into hell with it. Leo frantically reached out to touch her arm, and when she stiffened against his fingertips, he ripped his hand back. “Isn’t there something I could give you in return?”

“Now you’re prostituting yourself out to me? You’re going to do wonders in the entertainment business,” Piper said scornfully.

Leo let the smirk spread across his lips. He couldn’t help it. “I meant like a favor, princesita, but it’s very interesting that your mind immediately went to sex. Do you think of me naked often?”

“I don’t think of you at all,” she hissed.

Leo had to admit the jab stung a little considering the sheer amount of mental space Piper seemed to occupy in his head. Even he wasn’t delusional enough to continue pretending that it wasn’t her he had been imagining when he’d gotten carried away the other night. It annoyed him to no end how she was always there in the back of his mind. He constantly replayed her comments on a loop like a never-ending movie. The number of times he had pictured her plump, pink lips parted…

Leo groaned. “Piper, I’m serious. What do I need to do to get you to agree to this?” He was practically taking Moreno’s suggestion to beg at this point, and he didn’t even care. Desperate times called for desperate measures.

“There’s nothing you can do,” Piper bit off. “Go find someone else to torment.”

Before Leo could offer up his actual body (as a blood sacrifice rather than a sexual sacrifice, since Piper was clearly repulsed by the latter), Professor Hornbill strode his way over to the center of the room and leaned back against the whiteboard, arms folded over his chest as he surveyed the classroom. Leo liked the majority of his professors, but Hornbill was the emphatic exception to that rule. The guy was classically handsome, with a chiseled jawline, sandy hair, and stormy gray eyes, so most of his classmates had dubbed him ‘Professor Horny,’ which, while not the most original of nicknames, got the point across. General physique aside, there was something off about Hornbill, something that set off every alarm bell in Leo’s head. If his father had taught Leo anything, it was to always trust his gut, and his spidey senses tingled every time Hornbill was around.

“In the front row today?” Hornbill made eye contact with Leo, sending a sideways glance at Piper. If there was any implication behind Hornbill’s observation, it wasn’t obvious, but Leo couldn’t help but think it had nothing to do with him and everything to do with the pretty blonde beside him.

“I’m just very excited about ethics,” Leo said smoothly.

“Please.” Hornbill smiled humorlessly. “No one is excited about ethics. Not even me.” The class laughed at this, but Leo kept his mouth in a flat line. A glance over at Piper confirmed that she, too, wasn’t laughing. Leo offhandedly wondered if Piper got the same vibe from Hornbill that he did.

As the class proceeded and Hornbill started to discuss the material for their next exam, Leo pulled a pen from his bag, ripped a sheet from his notebook, and scrawled one word on it before sliding it over to Piper.

Please?

Ten

PIPER

Please?

The word ran through Piper’s mind like an earworm song all day. She could almost hear it in Leo’s voice, soft and pleading, even though she had never heard him speak it aloud. It invigorated her to see such an overconfident guy reduced to someone who had to beg to get what he wanted. The power she felt from that single word made her wonder what else he would beg for. It was a ridiculous thought, but she had lied when she said she never thought about Leo, naked or otherwise. Most of the time, when her brain conjured up anything Leo, it was because he’d pissed her off, but there was still the rare occasion when her thoughts ran away with illicit images of Leo underneath her—solely to teach him a lesson, of course.

Leo’s chicken scratch handwriting seared a hole in the back pocket of Piper’s jeans as she made her way to the campus library. Her fingers itched to take out the note and look at it again, but the compulsion was getting a little out of hand. The fact that she had even brought the stupid slip of paper with her was pure insanity. Even with the note living rent-free in her head, there was no way she would step foot on stage as Leo’s pet. The only person gaining anything from the agreement would be him. She couldn’t think of anything Leo could give her in return that would even out the playing field. If he wanted her to play nice, then he should have thought about that long before he continually used the word “nice” in association with her name as an insult.

“Hey, Piper!”

Piper smiled as she approached the brunette girl wearing heavy eyeliner, fishnets, and ripped black jeans who was sitting casually atop a table with a Best Business Practices textbook perched in her hand. Emma Planter was way cooler than Piper would ever be, which was why Piper had never really interacted with her. Once, in high school, Piper had tried out the whole goth vibe, even dyeing the tips of her hair black. In the end, she had only been doing it to appease her boyfriend at the time and quickly reverted back to her colorful dresses and sweaters. Emma radiated confidence and bad bitch energy, so Piper was shocked when Emma approached her after class to request a study session for their ethics exam.

“Hey, Emma.” Piper slid into a seat at the table.

“Thanks for meeting me.” Emma clicked her pen. “My grade in this class is fighting to climb out of a pit right now. I’ve been meeting with Professor Hornbill once a week, but he said that you and Leo have the highest grades in the class, so I figured I could weasel my way into studying with you.”

Piper fought the urge to cringe, and surprisingly enough, it wasn’t on Leo’s behalf. Professor Hornbill gave her the creeps. No one else seemed to have that impression of him, though, and she had no real reason to dislike him other than the occasional glance at her that lingered a little too long. The man was married and had children, so Piper had told herself about a billion times that there was no way he was anything other than a man with an occasional wandering eye.

“Thanks for saving me from having to talk to Leo at the end of class, by the way.” Piper pulled her ethics textbook and notebook out of her backpack and set them on the table. When she reached back into the bag for her highlighters, her fingertips brushed over a small wooden box with a metal clasp on the front that was tucked safely away at the bottom. After a silent deliberation, she set the box in her lap.

To anyone else, the contents of the box Piper carried with her everywhere would look like nothing but a random assortment of objects, but to her, they felt like pieces of her soul, catalysts to her dreams. Each piece represented something. When her anxiety got the best of her, she’d pull something from the box and use it as a talisman for strength. The small apatite stone she pulled out now was one of her favorites, the vibrant blue of its smooth surface soothing her senses. Also inside the box were a collection of peachy paint swatches in warm and inviting colors, a tiny sunflower encased in glass, and a piece of square-cut, gray cashmere fabric that represented Piper’s soft side. Her mother used to say the color felt like storm clouds, too, a testament to the wicked temper Piper had when she was little. Her thumb brushed over the cool surface of the blue apatite stone several times before she put it back, reclasped the box, and gently set it on the table.

“So, I take it you don’t like him?” Emma asked.

“Can’t stand him,” Piper affirmed and flipped to a clean page of her notebook.

“I am so sorry for this.” Emma scrunched her eyes shut like she was in pain, and Piper looked up from uncapping her pen.

“Why?”

“What’s all this?” Leo’s voice asked abruptly.

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