The Bad Boy with a Heart of Gold

✖ Chapter 28 ✖

I caught myself and jumped back, slamming my back against the lockers. A few onlookers flinched and turned away, pretending as if they hadn't been riveted by the drama.

"Sorry," Sawyer said with a sigh as he ran his hand through what I now knew were silky strands of hair. He pulled away from me. "I'm trying to be a good boy but it isn't my forte."

"Ha, ha," I said, enunciating each syllable with care. "You haven't been a good boy in years, you panty dropper."

His reaction was to wiggle his eyebrows. "Is it working?"

I wanted to laugh, I really did. But that was not really going to help me stay away from him. And that was what I needed to do. I looked all around, but Courtney and Lina we now too far for me to make a discrete trek back to them all across the hallway the nearest escape route from Sawyer's pheromones was the girl's restroom.

"Listen," I told him as if he were a feral animal. "I'm going to back away from you very discretely."

"Okay," he said, eyes twinkling.

"And you're going to let me. I'll say something about studying, and you'll pretend to be annoyed. Got it?" I did just that, moved closer to the girls' restroom door and loudly declared, "And don't forget your books, you hear me?"

He mock saluted. "Crystal clear, captain."

But not before giving me a wink that made me weak in the knees. Dang him.

There were a few girls inside the restroom that I ignored as I made my way to the sinks to wash my face. The cool water helped bring the redness down, and as I patted my face dry with paper towels somebody came out of a stall that I really didn't want to have to engage with.

I remained silent as Lexie Cooper stood by the sink next to mine. She put something in the pocket of her jeans before setting out to wash her hands. A blue splotch in her hand caught my eye. It looked like the kind I got when I spent too much time drawing with my pen. I looked down at the thing in her pocket and saw that it was a marker. Who the heck went into the bathroom with a marker?

And then it clicked.

My back grew ramrod stiff. I couldn't move, even though I wanted to dash inside the stall she had vacated and see the proof for myself. Some younger kid came in and went directly in it, and I had to swallow my irritation.

As she dried her hands, Lexie said, "I saw you and Sawyer earlier. You guys look chummy chummy. Are the rumors true?"

I looked at her, really did. Although she was beautiful, the perfect picture of a high school sweetheart, there was an ugliness in her eyes that couldn't be denied. You felt it like a burn on your skin when she directed her attention your way, and the heat was on me now.

I lifted my chin and point blank asked her, "Were you the one who started the rumors?"

The question caught her off guard, but then she started laughing. It sounded pretty and twinkling and still grated on my nerves. "What does it matter if everybody believes them?" She folded her arms and scanned me up and down and back up. The expression in her face dismissed me as a lesser specimen. "At the end of the day, you're not really Sawyer's type and he's going to get tired of you pretty soon. And then I'll be there for him."

My skin crawled with the comment. I shouldn't let it get to me, yet it did. Because even though I'd spent years putting Sawyer in an other category, completely separate from my clean and orderly world, I'd always really known that I just wasn't the type of person who was in his radar. It was hard to compare myself against someone as drop dead gorgeous as Lexie or even Courtney and come out with an unscathed ego, and I'd never found Sawyer worth the effort.