Page 13 of Heartbreak Kings
Marcus
“Blake, it’s been a week,”I pointed out in a teasing voice as we gathered for our supper in the fraternity kitchen. “We’ve heard almost nothing from your end. How about a report from the front?”
The casual way Blake scoffed as he sat down at the head of the table told me he had run into more resistance than he had expected—possibly more than he had known what to do with.
“Fine,” he muttered tonelessly, not making eye contact—and confirming to me that things had not gone as planned.
From the beginning, I had expressed my issues with Blake’s crazy plan to seduce Sabine and break her heart so she would leave on her own. You couldn’t call yourself ethical and then plot to fuck and dump an innocent woman specifically to drive her away. I understood some guys’ reasons for having problems with a co-ed campus, but why did the answer always have to boil down to being vicious to the woman involved?
“Tougher nut to crack than expected, eh?” I lifted the corner of my mouth, and he scowled. “Or did you finally sort out that she doesn’t really deserve this?”
“It isn’t about what she deserves or not.” He ran his hands back through his wavy hair in frustration. “What she deserves is the opportunity she’s fighting for. She just needs to be doing it somewhere else.”
“So, break her desire to stay here and then come at her with a bribe?” It was a little better than just driving her off, but it was still cold, corrupt, and kind of uncool.This shit is why I’m not getting into politics after college.I never wanted to end up in a position like this again, doing something I found patently wrong to satisfy constituents and donors. That was also why I wasn’t becoming a criminal defense lawyer after law school. It was the DA’s office for me. Dad didn’t think I was a fighter because I wouldn’t enroll in Officer Training School and join him in the military, but he was wrong. Fighting in court to put away perps and keep more people from being hurt was a much worthier cause than killing one another in some sandbox overseas.
He peered up at me slowly. “I just want her gone, Marcus. Not hurt. But she won’t leave any other way. She’s too stubborn.” And then he chuckled a bit, relaxing, a faint smile drifting onto his face. “Just another thing to like about her, really.”
“Interesting.” Nathaniel came breezing in with a bottle of green tea, settling his lean body into his chair and eyeing his plateful of chicken cordon bleu. “You’ve gotten attached?”
“No,” Blake answered too quickly, clarifying that he had. “She’s just nothing like what Carmody and the others—and that mess with the blog posts—would have led us to believe.”
“She’s also beautiful,” I teased, but the smile dropped off my face when he shot me a bleak look. “No, seriously, what is with that face?” I asked him more gently. “What the fuck happened?”
“I started approaching her in her classes, once in the dining hall at lunch. I began intervening when I saw one pledge breaking protocol to harass her. We had a few conversations. They’ve started getting longer and friendlier, but she’s wary and smart. Also, she’s probably the hardest-working person I have ever met in my life. We may have an up-and-coming threat to our dominance of the grade curve.” Blake was smiling when he talked about her. It was a wistful smile.
I understood it probably better than he did.Holy shit, dude. You haven’t even fucked her yet, and look at you.
And then an uncharitable thought popped into my head.I should let you go on with this—fuck her, fall for her, and end up with your heart broken once she finds out the truth and dumps you on your pompous, overconfident ass.It’s what you deserve for going through with this when you know it’s wrong.
“So, what?” I asked. “Now we should go through with this because she’s a better grade machine than us?”
Nathaniel chuckled and sipped his tea. “Rubbish. There are no threats, only fellow competitors. If she wants in on the running and has the right stuff, she’s welcome. But I’ll be beating all of you this year, regardless.”
That got a laugh out of both of us, and Blake settled back in his seat. “She just wants her degree and connections for a good internship,” he sighed. “She wants to pursue them alone. She doesn’t care about our political struggle with the administration. She’s focused on her goals, not on causing problems for us men.”
“She would be an interesting one to mentor, if half our pledges wouldn’t throw a massive tantrum over it.” Nathaniel sipped his tea, then tilted his head slightly in concession. “Along with Jude.”
I winced slightly, sitting back. Jude was our problem child—just mature and well-connected enough to be part of our quintet, but still way too close to a dumbass teen in both mentality and attitude toward women. Among all of us, he was the one with three hookup apps and an image folder full of nudes. Ironically, he was also the one among us who had the least success with women, though he had a certain boyish charm that disarmed some of them.
“Jude’s young,” Blake sighed. “He’s still too worried about appearance over integrity.” He took a swallow of his coffee, which he took black and so strong that you could smell it brewing before you stepped onto the property.
“What’s Daniel’s take on this so far? Have you talked to him?” Daniel was off “romancing” a sorority girl from NYU who had gone from teasing him online over our school’s uproar, to chasing a date with him over the course of three days. He had bragged about it before leaving, promising to return before the next fraternity meeting.
“I think he likes the idea of seducing her, but not much else.” A few pledges trailed through, and we went quiet until they followed the second-year leading them up the stairs. I couldn’t remember the guy’s name. That bothered me. I was usually good at keeping all our members straight in my head, but right now, I was just too distracted.
“Do any of us want to go through with this, besides maybe Jude?” I asked gently.
Blake shook his head. “No, but they have left us with very little choice at this point.”
I couldn’t agree with his methods, but after a week of this, I knew that behind it all was more pressure than Carmody and those idiots could bring to bear. The Dad Patrol was now on us with the phone calls, asking what we were doing in protest to this “outrageous move by the liberal chancellor and board.” My father, the General, had called from Washington, demanding that I find a way to “fix it.”
Between the neurotic boys-clubbers on campus and the old-guard woman-haters keeping the university’s funding fat, we were being pushed into this.I hate it.“So, you like her, you hate that we’re doing this, and you want to go through with it anyway. How is that going?”
“She’s wary,” Blake replied softly. “Of men on this campus, of Alpha Omegas, of us, of me. She’s done her background research on us. She keeps asking me what my interest is in her, and I’m not sure what to tell her.”
“Sex?” Nathaniel suggested. “May as well keep it simple and at least half true.”
“She’s way off from that,” Blake admitted after a few seconds’ hesitation. “I haven’t even touched her yet.”
