Bad Rep (Bad Rep, #1)(97)

We had officially been together for over a month now.  Our road had been decidedly smooth.   Though I couldn't help but wait for the other shoe to drop.  But also trying to not wait for the other shoe to drop.  But all in all, I was happy.

We were riding the blissful waves of the honeymoon period.  And things were close to perfect.  As long as we stayed far away from anything and everything Chi Delta and Pi Sig.

It was sad how segregated our lives had become.  I continued to attend to my mandatory responsibilities within the sisterhood but that was it.  My life, that had six months ago, revolved around my sorority, was now tied up in this man lying beside me.

Jordan's ties outside of our relationship were a bit more consuming.  He had bartending and his band aside from his responsibilities with his fraternity.  We were both busy, but no matter how insane our days were, Jordan slept in my bed every single night.

I knew I loved him.  I wanted to tell him.  But I held back.  I don't know why.  Maybe I was being ridiculous and wanted to hear him say it first.  Or maybe I was scared that if I let it out there, it would change things completely.  That maybe he wasn't ready for that level of commitment.

Sure, he was the sweetest guy I'd ever met.  He said and did things that made my inner pinky girlishness tingle.  I knew he cared about me.  But I couldn't stop myself from doubting that he could ever come to feel for me the way he had felt for Olivia.  That girl he wrote that amazing song for.

Yes, I was still fixated on that stupid song.  I don't know what was wrong with me and why I couldn't get over it.  Maybe it was because I was still forced to see his beautiful ex-girlfriend several times a week.  And seeing her flawless perfectness made it damn near impossible to stop myself from calculating comparisons.  Plus, she was dead set on feeding my insecurities like a wild fire out of control.

It was in the way she casually mentioned something pertaining to Jordan, or their three year history when she knew I was in ear shot.  Or it could have been the way his Pi Sig brothers acted as though she were the goddamn prodigal son whenever they saw her, showing how perfectly she fit into that area of his life.  It didn't help that pictures of her and Jordan graced the Chi Delta walls.  Collages of the girls during past formals and mixers.  Jordan and Olivia, the most beautiful couple on the planet front and center in all of them.

Most of the girls continued their Maysie Ardin freeze out.  I wasn't exactly persona non grata, but I was pretty darn close.  I wasn't included in random drink nights during the week.  I wasn't sent the sorority wide texts to coordinate outfits for mixers.  I barely got a hello when I walked in the house on the few occasions I had dared to show up.

Gracie and Vivian tried their hardest to make it easier for me.  And god love them for it.  But I could see playing for team Maysie was weighing on them as well.  Because of their association with me, our sisters were less friendly to them.  At least when I was around.  I suspected things were fine once I had left and the girls could pretend I didn't exist.

So herein lays the crux of the problem.  Why didn't I just withdrawal?  Why did I continue to subject myself to such pettiness?  It seemed like a form of torture.  And there were many days that I wondered this myself.  At night when I'd lie in bed, with Jordan's warm body pressed against me, I'd think up the grand speeches I would give, announcing my formal withdraw from Chi Delta.

I had it all planned out in my head.  I'd tell Olivia and Milla exactly where they could stuff their snotty little noses.  I would look at the rest of them and call them a bunch of bitchy hypocrites.  But then I'd wake up in the morning and swear to myself that I'd give it just one more day.  One more day to see if things would be better.  One more day to make things right again.

But as long as Jordan and I were together, that wouldn't happen.  And I was torn between this fantastic new love I had found and my longing to return to the fold.  The need to belong was strong in me and hard to quash.  I knew in my psychobabble way, that this was firmly rooted in me wanting my parent's approval.  It had simply morphed into all areas of my life.  The constant worry about what other people thought was exhausting and I wished like hell I could just let it go.  Riley thought I was an idiot and wasted no time in telling me that on a daily basis.  And I understood why she thought that.  Hell, most days, I thought that.  But I had pride and it burned pretty damn bright.

So I stuck it out.  Even as my life seemed to get uglier.  Because the rumors were getting crazy.  Last week, in my Shakespeare and Chaucer class, we were assigned groups to work on a comparative project between Canterbury Tales and Shakespeare's story telling in his tragedies.  I was grouped with two girls, Cyndy and Aimee, who had lived on my floor freshman year and a guy named Charlie, who was a year below us.  I knew their names, but knew nothing else about them.  They weren't people I saw out and about in my normal, everyday routine.

But they knew me.  Or knew of me.  I saw it instantly when I pulled my desk closer to theirs to begin our work.  It was in the curl of Aimee's upper lip when I sat down.  It was in the look of barely concealed disdain in Cyndy's eyes before she flicked them back to her book.  And f*ck if it wasn't there in the openly lascivious look Charlie tossed casually my way.