High School Treachery | ✓

BONUS 1 | Blue Eyed Boy

He didn't do relationships. Not anymore.

He always made sure that any girl he gave the time of day wouldn't be the type to form feelings for him. And that's what had made Lyndon hold his interest.

She was smart, so much smarter than him and everyone else at Arlin, and her beauty was otherworldly. He was sure her eye color alone could make any person she wanted desire her. And she had a boyfriend. Her interests were somewhere else, so no matter what came out of Jalen messing with her, her heart would never stray from her boyfriend.

But then they broke up, and instead of cutting off all ties like he should have—like he normally would—Jalen took her out. And then he took her out again.

Taking her to the ice cream spot had been a mistake, it was too different and close to home. The SoHo outing was more his formula: go to places his parents had connections at, who would definitely tell them where they had seen their son and who with.

That brought him back to where he needed to be, back to the mindset of this king the people of Arlin idolized. Someone who didn't get hurt, because they didn't allow themselves too, because they didn't care.

From then on, it was just an attraction. A physical attraction he'd felt plenty of other times with plenty of the other girls he'd talked too.

Constantly being told by Cortney to stop seeing Lyndon helped him want to see her more, too. While being with girls helped with his reputation as King, Jalen's main goal had always been to piss his and Cortney's parents off—hopefully enough to call off the engagement.

It wasn't until, one day, when David pointed out that he'd only been talking to Lyndon and no other girls, that Jalen realized maybe, just maybe, he wasn't acting like the king everyone expected him to be.

David made it extremely clear that Jalen's relationship, friendship, whatever with Lyndon wasn't like anything he'd seen before. Then, he corrected himself.

"Actually, it's kind of like something I've seen before," he'd said, eyeing Jalen with a little bit of annoyance and a whole lot of sympathy. "And we both know how that ended."

Jalen convinced himself that David was wrong. Sure, Lyndon had proven to be a little different from the others, but that was because the girl asked a thousand and one questions.

But through all his convincing and talks in his mind over whether or not David was right, there was something inside of Jalen, bubbling and growing whenever he was around Lyndon, that was sometimes too hard to ignore.

It wasn't until the day she first heard the rumors about her parents. Right after they started fake dating, the students of Arlin quickly began talking about Lyndon and her family, and Lyndon had heard every word of them questioning why her family moved.

The look on her face had caused something in his chest to constrict, a nagging pain tugging at his heart when the tears began gathering in her eyes and she asked him in a broken voice to take her home.

He knew it then, in that very moment, that there was no denying it. Lyndon Prince did the one thing Jalen had tried avoiding—and had been avoiding—for almost two years. She made him feel.

It wasn't long after that he had fallen in love with her. Maybe he didn't completely know it or acknowledge it, but he sure as hell felt it the night they had dinner with his parents. It was the way she handled herself, stood up for herself. The way she completely understood him when they spoke in his car.