Breaking Rule Number Two

Chapter Two

"If you open that curtain I'm going to stab you," Casey groans.

Lorelei's hand pauses on the cream-colored blackout curtains in Casey's room. "With what?"

Casey lifts her head just enough and opens one eye to see what's on her nightstand. "I'm going to make a prison shank out of a gum wrapper."

Lorelei opens the curtains and Casey smothers her face in her pillow to block out the light. "Casey, it's literally two in the afternoon and you promised you'd go on a run with me and then have a study session at THC."

Casey turns over, her eyes still squeezed shut. "That was before Abby kept handing me the beer bong."

"You're being over dramatic," Lorelei walks around her best friend's bed and sets a glass of water down with a tub of Asprin. "Hydrate and you'll be fine."

Casey peeks through her lashes at her nightstand. "Oh good, I can stab you with the glass instead."

"As your best friend, I'm going to give you a pass for being mean because that's what besties do," Lorelei drawls as she plops down on the side of her friend's bed. "But I don't appreciate this attitude."

Casey brings a hand to her mouth, the movement of the bed making her nauseous. "Oh my god, I think I'm still drunk."

"So is this a bad time to tell you that you also promised to drive me to campus for my tutoring session today?" Lorelei glances at her watch. "That's in thirty minutes."

Unlike many of her peers, Lorelei was typically an early riser no matter how much she drank the night before. She was always up and ready, mostly because sleep came at very small intervals for her nowadays. Instead of fighting it, she simply got up and did what needed to be done.

That morning she'd already run, gotten coffee, studied, read a book, and meal-prepped for the week, and now she had a tutoring lesson to give that she was going to be late for since she couldn't find the keys to the car she and Casey shared.

"You're funny," Casey pushes herself up with her back against the headboard. "Why'd you leave the party so abruptly last night? I thought you and Brandon were getting it on."

Lorelei shivers at the memory of yesterday's party. She could still picture his face staring back at her, the shock and sadness there. He hadn't expected her there either, maybe that's why he hadn't followed her.

"You know, he might be a little weird, but Brandon's not a hockey player and he seems nice," Casey says with a shrug.

Lorelei plays with the hem of her shirt and gives a forced laugh. "Wow, the standard bar for guys really is that low, isn't it?"

Casey rubs her eyes with her palms. "It'd be even lower if it weren't for rule number two."

Rule number two was no dating hockey players.

It started as a joke, but after her childhood and especially after the previous summer, it became a life motto to Lorelei.

Lorelei's biological dad was a hockey player who chose his career over his family when he got Lorelei's mother pregnant, leaving them with nothing. From middle school on, whenever Lorelei talked about a boy or said she was going to go on a date with one the first question that came out of her mother's mouth was, "does he play hockey?"

By the second year of high school, it became a rule that Lorelei and Casey made up as a joke to poke fun and it was as serious as don't eat yellow snow.

"So, is everything okay then? Nothing bad happened at the party, right?" Casey presses again.

Lorelei straightens. "No. Why would you say that?"

Casey grabs the water from the nightstand. "You don't normally leave without saying bye first, you just texted me and dipped."

As best friends since middle school, they've kept very few secrets from each other, especially now that they've been roommates at college for three years, so it physically pained Lorelei to not say anything.

Casey spent the summer in Europe with her family while Lorelei worked a full-time job at a gym and even though they talked often over the phone, Lorelei could never bring herself to tell her best friend the truth.

She knew if she did, things would be different, and right now Lorelei needed things to go back to normal. She needed normal for a little first.

She didn't plan on keeping her summer a secret forever, eventually, she'd tell Casey–she just had to find the right time.

"I just got really tired," is the stupidest and best excuse she could come up with. "Anyway, where's the keys to the car? I got to head out now."

"I think they're in my jeans in the bathroom."

Lorelei stands. She knew she should have checked the bathroom. "Thanks, I'll see you later then–"

"Lorelei," Casey says, stopping Lorelei in the doorway.

Casey moves her tangled brown hair to behind her ear and then looks down at her glass of water and then at her friend. "You'd tell me if something wasn't okay, right?"

Lorelei's hand gripped the door frame tight. "Casey, you're my best friend," she says almost breathlessly. Panic set in at the thought of her friend having figured out what happened over the summer, but it quickly dissipated as the facts set in. She didn't know who he was or what he looked like or even his name. She was in another country when everything went down. She'd come out and say it if she did know, Casey was upfront like that. She wouldn't beat around the bush.

"Of course I would," Lorelei says before turning away, the taste of the lie making her cringe.

She hated lying almost much as she hated herself right then and there.