And, hell: who was she to judge Raven when she herself could count her friends on one hand? And two of them were a surly biker addicted to bench presses and a drug dealer turned club backer.
Evening was coming down fast when she arrived at the door of her dorm, dark pressing in close at the hallway windows. She checked for and didn’t see a stripe of light along the bottom of the door, which meant Jamie was still out, likely logging more time in the ceramics room.
It was a relief…and not. She wanted to go ahead and hash things out while she was still bolstered by her visit with Ian.
She let herself in, hung up her bag and her jacket in the blue semidarkness coming through the snow-heaped window. Kicked off her boots and crossed to switch on the wall-mounted lamp above her headboard. She turned, sat down on the side of her mattress, and saw Jamie sitting across the room on her bed.
“Ah! Holy shit, you scared the hell out of me!”
Jamie didn’t react the way someone who’d accidently spooked her roommate should have. She didn’t react at all, in fact.
While she waited for her heartrate to slow, Cass did a quick inventory, and then frowned.
Jamie sat all the way back on the bed, pressed against the wall, rather than on the edge like Cass. She had her legs drawn up tight to her body, and her arms wrapped around them. Her face was buried in her knees, hair fanned out across her shoulders. It looked wet, like she’d just showered and was letting it air dry. Cass noted her cozy socks, her sweats, her favorite threadbare old hoodie, the one with Deku on the front. It was a hoodie that always made an appearance if Jamie had the sniffles or terrible monthly cramps. Cass thought of it as her something’s-wrong hoodie.
“Hey,” Cass said. “You okay?”
Jamie didn’t react at first, and Cass wanted to shout at her.Get over yourself! Are you never going to speak to me ever again? Over Sig? Really??But then, finally, Jamie lifted her head. Her face was wet and splotchy, her eyes puffy and red-rimmed. She’d been crying. She was still crying.
Oh no. Was she that upset about their rift? About Sig?
“Jamie,” Cass started.
And Jamie croaked out, “I’m sorry.”
Cass felt her brows shoot up. “You’re sorry?” Wow. She’d come in here ready to offer up her own apology, but it turned out waiting had done the trick.
“Yeah.” Jamie sniffed, and brushed her hair back, and that was when Cass saw a mark on her lower lip. A little red dot, like a bee sting.
Like abite.
“You were right about Sig.”
Cass’s heartrate accelerated again for an entirely different reason. “I was?”
Jamie nodded, and swiped beneath her eyes as more tears gathered on her lashes. “He’s a piece of shit,” she said with feeling, voice quavering, hand trembling as she wiped her face again.
Dread gathered in the pit of Cass’s stomach, souring the latte she’d chugged. “Jamie, what happened?”
Jamie sniffed hard, and tipped her head back against the wall. When she did, the lamplight slid over fresh red marks on the sides of her neck. “I went to that coffeehouse they like, the one just off campus.”
A pretentious, hipster non-chain place that was quite delightful, with its macrame plant hangers, its plush chairs, and the cats who zigged and zagged along the walls on a series of shelves and ramps. Cass had only been once, and loved it, but wouldn’t darken its door again so long as Sig and his goons frequented it.
She nodded to show her understanding, and Jamie continued, “I was hoping to run into Sig. I wanted—shit, I wanted to tell him you were being stupid, and that I told you so, and that I didn’t feel the same way you did. That if I got invited to one of his parties, I wouldn’t fake sick and leave early.”
The dread got heavier. “Oh no. What did you do?”
“I—I’m sorry, Cass, I didn’t believe you, and I should have!” She took a shuddering breath and wiped her nose. “And he was so cool about it. He was nice. He asked me to join them, and we had coffee, and when he got ready to leave, he asked if I wanted to go with him, and I said yes, and we went back to his house, and we—we—”
“Jamie,” Cass said, leaning forward, hands clenched in her coverlet. “Did you sleep with him?”
She shook her head hard, hair flaring out. “We started to, but I got nervous, and I told him no, that I changed my mind, that I wanted to wait. But he…he…” Her lip quivered as she sucked in another quivering breath, and when she made eye contact with Cass, her gaze was miserable. “He forced me. He held me down, and he bit my lip, and he made me.”
The churning dread heated, and bled into anger. The kind of anger she thought might be genetic; the kind that had spurred her brothers to lethal action over the years. “He raped you.”
“Yes,” Jamie whispered, and buried her face back into her knees. “He did.”
Seven
