Swish

.15

"Well Princess, looks like we interrupted something," Patrick said just as the two of us sprung apart after the initial shock of being caught wore off.

"You never call me Princess," Maddie pouted and I had to stifle the laugh that was ready to come out of my mouth. 

Patrick leveled Maddie with a megawatt grin and I knew Eli was in for it. 

"Oh, I wasn't talking to you," Patrick said, evil grin pointed towards Eli and I couldn't help laughing right along with Maddie even though I was secretly annoyed that they'd interrupted us...but then also partly grateful as well, because no matter how attracted I might've been to Eli, he was still my dad's player and I had still sworn off boys. 

"Alright alright, that's enough babe.  I actually need to talk to V for a second.  You got a minute?"

I nodded to Maddie, flashing one more look over my shoulder at Eli who already had his eyes on me, almost like we couldn't be in the same room without our gazes gravitating towards the other. 

"Yeah, sure."

Oh great.  This was where I was going to be fired, before I'd even received my first paycheck.  There went my dream of moving out and sticking it to my dad and-

"Girl, what did I tell you about Eli?  He went for you even before a frat party and you were seriously about to kiss him?!"

"It's not like that.  He's-" I cut myself off, not sure what I could say to her because it wasn't like I could just come out and say that I had lied about who my dad really was and Eli and I had bonded over the mutual crazy drama that my family had rained down upon us...or maybe I could, but either way, I wasn't going to do that. 

"He's different?  Wow.  I mean, I thought you were smarter than that but I guess I'll just have to prove it to you."

I furrowed my eyebrows as she skimmed through her phone looking for something, and a wry satisfied grin of distaste flooded her features as she held out her phone to me. 

"What am I looking at?"

"See that arm in the background?  That tattoo on the person's back?  It's Eli's.  This is from my friend Mia's snapchat story from a few days ago.  She saved it and posted it to her Instagram feed.  I know it's recent because I remember seeing it when she posted it.  This was from last Friday, quite a few days after he met you.  So tell me again about how he's 'different'?"

My stomach pitched as I took in the grainy photo, the faux dog ears adorning the girl's features as she posed for a duck face in the heavily edited photo with multiple different filters on it, and sure enough, there was his silhouette in the background. 

It was shadowed, but I could just make out the charcoal ink wrapping around Eli's back and climbed up his side, the intricate detailing impossible to replicate.  It was him, and the serpent and lion that dueled for dominance on his back gave him away completely. 

I had once marveled at the sight of the tattoo that must've taken hours to complete, the amount of pain he must've endured in order for all of the shading to give way to the entire piece, but after seeing that picture, all I could feel was...contempt?  Anger?  Jealousy?

What did I have to be jealous of?  Sure, we'd been hanging out, and there was an inordinate amount of heat between the two of us, but there was never anything else that had happened between us. 

We'd come close, twice in one day, once when we'd hit our heads together in the entryway to my house, and then there was that moment we'd had in the doorway of my bedroom, in my dad's study...