Savage Royals: A Reverse Harem High School Bully Romance(47)
Finn couldn’t restrain himself from yelling at the screen, and every time he did, Cole would swing something at his head. Since I was still sitting next to the blond football player, that meant I did a lot of ducking too, and even though the movie was legitimately terrifying, I found myself laughing.
“Jesus. You are the fucking worst. And now you’ve got her as your backup worst,” Cole bitched when his stash of nearby projectiles ran out.
“Sorry if we know how to enjoy cinema and you don’t.” Finn smirked, kicking his feet out in front of him, stretching his long legs. “It’s meant to be an interactive experience.”
“She’s fucking laughing. It’s not a comedy!”
“Legs,” Finn intoned, turning to me with a serious expression as he gestured to the TV. “This is serious. Someone is about to die. Can you please be respectful of that?”
That only made me giggle again, and Mason shot us both a look.
“Spoilers, motherfucker. Shut the hell up.”
Finn rolled his eyes, but for the rest of the movie, he actively tried to stop himself from speaking to the screen—which was actually funnier to witness than him blurting things out.
By the time the last victim was murdered, I found my eyelids drooping, and as soon as the movie was over, I made my excuses and left before any of them could offer to walk me back to my dorm.
As I made my way across campus in the dark, an odd feeling settled in my gut.
That had been… fun.
I hated to admit it, but I’d actually had a good time hanging out with the Princes. The Princes. The four boys I’d sworn to hate forever, the four who had gone so far out of their way to make my life miserable for an entire semester.
Just like they’d sat down today and dug up dirt on Evan’s family, they had systematically gone after me just because my presence threatened their worldview.
And now that things had shifted, I felt guilty, confused, and most of all… sad.
If things had been like this all along, I could’ve seen us becoming good friends. They were all charismatic and funny—even Cole, in his own way—their light shining so brightly it made people want to be around them.
If they had treated me the way they were treating me now from the moment I’d met them, I could imagine something really great developing between us. I probably would’ve asked one of them out, if I was being honest with myself—although I wasn’t sure who.
But it hadn’t always been this way.
For three months, they’d been the bane of my existence.
And I could never, ever let myself forget that.
A strange thing about suddenly being in the Princes inner circle was that I found out about a whole other side to the school I’d never known existed.
The rich boy fight club wasn’t the only illicit activity they organized. Apparently, there was also a standing arrangement where once a month, the resident advisor of Clarendon hall turned a blind eye while they threw a raging party in the dorm. Parties weren’t technically allowed on campus, which was why the two I’d been to last semester had been at Petra’s house.
Students with parents who traveled a lot or were just generally absent tended to be the ones to host those, and although I hadn’t gone to many, I’d heard about a lot of them.
But the dorm thing? That was new to me.
I’d been to Clarendon Hall a lot in the past couple weeks, but as I walked inside on a Thursday night in mid-February, my head swiveled around in amazement. The place was totally transformed.
The common room, usually lit by bright overhead lights, was dark, with only a few colored lamps providing purple and blue illumination to the space. Music thumped, although a little quieter than at the house parties I’d been to.
During Biology, Elijah had leaned over and whispered in my ear that they were throwing a party, and I was invited. And in English Lit, Mason had tugged my desk closer to his, a question reflecting in his bright green eyes until I’d nodded.
It had taken me about thirty minutes of pacing around my dorm room and changing my outfit a dozen times to work up the nerve to actually walk across campus and step inside though.
Part of me was sure this was going to be the night it all came crumbling down—the truce, the peace treaty, whatever it was.
My track record at parties wasn’t great, after all, although at least there wasn’t a fucking pool at this one. Not unless we crossed all the way over to the gymnasium, where the Olympic-sized pool was probably locked up for the night anyway.
I blinked in the dim light, tugging nervously at my strapless top. My boobs weren’t huge, which was actually a good thing for a dancer, and it made wearing tops like this easy enough. The fabric was a shimmery blue, and it hugged my body, showing just a hint of my stomach above my black skinny jeans. But I had a sudden moment of panic that it was all wrong, and I was about to turn around and go home to change—and maybe never come back—when an arm wrapped around my waist.
“Legs! You made it!”
Finn grinned broadly at me as he raised his voice over the music, his blond hair shining pale blue in the light.
“Yeah. I said I would.”
It took effort to speak. His hand had landed right on the small patch of bare skin around my middle, and the feel of his fingertips brushing my skin was doing strange things to my body. I swayed into his touch unconsciously, and he wrapped his other arm around me too, bringing us chest to chest as he bent his head to speak into my ear.