Page 27 of Framed

Winter was there, for once. She normally ate at the apartment, but tonight, she’d mentioned she was going to meet some friends. Maybe that’s why the excuse had come to mind.

Even as I talked my way out of eating with him, a little voice in the back of my head piped up, in Athena’s familiar accent:Learn to accept help. Not everyone is operating at an angle.

Meanwhile, Kane had burst into laughter again.

“What?” I demanded, resisting the urge to pat my hair and make sure it hadn’t escaped its ponytail to stick up weirdly or something.

He grabbed my shoulder and bodily spun me around in the opposite direction. I tried not to think about how warm and strong his hands felt through the fabric of my T-shirt. “You’re going the wrong way,” he said, pointing.

Now that he mentioned it, I could see the familiar spires of the building that housed the upperclassmen dining hall. My cheeks flared, and I raised my chin in the hopes of disguising my embarrassment. “I knew that,” I declared breezily. “I was just testing you.”

“Uh huh.” To judge by the way Kane’s eyes bored into the side of my face, I very much doubted he was buying this. But, to his credit, he didn’t say anything more about it. He just fell into step beside me, both of us now heading in the correct direction.

“So,” he said, once we’d crossed half the quad and we were approaching the broad front doors of the dining hall. “Come here often?”

I snorted. “For a big football heartthrob, you are full of dad jokes.”

Kane’s footsteps stuttered. After a moment, he fell into step with me again. “Been looking me up, huh, Scarlett?”

I avoided his eye. “Hard not to hear about you, Kane.” That was true, at least. It seemed like every girl in every class I’d taken had whispered something about that hottie Kane at some point or another. It hadn’t been difficult to put the pieces together.

And, okay, yes, I had searched his name on the school’s website. Sue me. It wasn’t my fault that the only news this campus allowed to be printed about it was all about the sports teams. He was practically the first hit that came up when you searched for this school. And right underneath the header of the article had been a photo of Kane with his arm slung around another player, both of them cheering for something out of view of the lens.

When I stole another glance at him, he was grinning. I resisted the urge to groan. I knew about football players—I’d seen my fair share of them at my old high school. Maybe some guys mellowed out in college, but in general, the number one thing I remember about the players was they all had egos the size of the field they played on.

Hopefully I hadn’t just helped Kane’s grow a few more yards.

But when he turned that grin on me, it looked surprisingly self-deprecating. “I looked you up too,” he said. “Or at least, I tried to.”

I held my breath, hoping my startled worry didn’t show on my face. “Oh?” I asked, voice carefully neutral.

“Not a lot of information out there on Scarlett the anime-loving lost girl, though.”

I couldn’t help myself. I laughed. “Bad luck.”

“Nah.” His grin widened. “I’d rather figure you out for myself anyway.”

Something about the tone of his voice when he said that made my stomach clench. At first, I mistook it for nerves. But as we jogged up the steps into the dining hall and he held the door for me, I wondered if it might be something even more dangerous.

Please, do not let those be butterflies.

Inside, the dining hall was crowded. The cliques here seemed pretty similar to the cliques at my high school. There were jock tables and cheerleader tables, the sleekly-dressed business major types and the programming engineer sorts—although even they were dressed so nicely that their plain black hoodies probably cost more than my entire wardrobe.

As I followed Kane toward the line for the food, I surreptitiously scanned the dining hall for Winter.

It didn’t take me long to spot her, on the far side of the cafeteria tucked into a corner. It was a mark of her status here that Winter alone was able to hold down a four-person table without anyone encroaching or asking to borrow her chairs.

Hopefully I could figure out how to ditch Kane before I was forced to actually go over there and talk to Winter…

For now, I trailed him over to the sushi counter. Yes, the campus had its own sushi counter, where the chefs made you individual rolls to order. There was also a counter that served fresh burgers to order, another that did salads, and one that changed every day. Tonight, it appeared to be Mexican night, judging by the tacos.

The food here looked restaurant-quality.

But I’d noticed that a lot of the students still didn’t bother to eat it. Winter, for example, had not only a personal shopper, but a chef who came in to prepare meals for her twice a week—big healthy salad lunches, carefully portioned salmon and chicken dinners, all the with the proper ratios of vegetables-to-carbs-and-protein.

No wonder she didn’t bother to come here often.

“What’s your poison?” Kane asked, grinning. I noticed he’d ordered a veritable feast of maki.

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