They were also the inventors of Defy. The teachers and high school staff didn’t know too much about Defy, because it went on at Vicious’s house parties over the weekends, but we got the general idea. The game was simple: Our students challenged each other to bloody fights and beat the shit out of each other. For fun.
Defy was supposedly voluntary, but I didn’t doubt people were afraid enough of Vicious to indulge his whims, however ridiculous or dangerous.
“Make me,” Jaime challenged me on a whisper, his eyes narrowing into slits and zeroing in on my face, his fingers still digging into the neck of an amused, bluish Vic.
Jesus Christ. I never touched Followhill when it came to detentions and tardy slips. His mom was the fucking principal, and she already hated my guts. But he’d cornered me. I had to react.
I clutched my necklace tighter.
Why was he doing this? Yesterday, he eye-fucked me to unconsciousness and back. And now…he…he…
Oh, shit. Now he’s cashing in on the debt.
He didn’t want me to back down. He wanted me to accept his dare. Was I going to take the bait? It wasn’t like I had much choice. I owed him big time for the Range Rover. Whatever it was he wanted from me, it was already his.
“You’ve just landed yourself in detention for the next week, starting this afternoon.” I pulled open the drawer of my wooden desk and started filling out the detention form.
Everyone fell silent. I’d never done this before. Not to a senior and definitely not to James Charles Followhill III.
From the corner of my eye, I watched as Jaime finally let go of Vicious’s neck. Vicious made a sucking sound and grabbed his junk, motioning to Jaime, laughing as he strode back to his seat. Other students slapped his back and looked between them, slipping notes. Probably bets on an impending Defy fight that was about to go down this weekend.
I smacked the detention slip on Jaime’s desk, and he jerked his eyes up, beaming a smile at me so sinister my panties melted into gooey, sweet liquid. We both knew what I was doing.
Awarding him with one-on-one time with me, exactly what he wanted.
Accepting an arrangement that’d put me in a fragile, potentially disastrous spot.
I was saying thank you to him for threatening my class, telling them to behave, so that he’d be the only person in detention for the next week.
And at this point, there was no denying it—I was allowing myself to free-fall headfirst into the end of my career, doing somersaults on my way down.
Jaime Followhill had celebrated his eighteenth birthday three days before the parking lot incident, which made the chain of recent events even more suspicious. Had he waited to hit on me? Why? He could have any girl in school. (After Trent Rexroth had a taste, of course.)
I’d already spent my lunch break roaming his Facebook page like there was no tomorrow. His timeline was a pointed reminder that he was eight years my junior. He had pictures from summer camp, for fuck’s sake. He was always sporting a dimply smile, tan muscular forearms, a stunning pair of bright blues, and a ton of friends.
Jaime had everything, and I had nothing. He had a coddled past, a cushy present, and a dazzling future. I, on the other hand, was already tainted with career failure and headed toward a life of scrambling to stay employed and out of debt. We didn’t make sense. Even for a fling.
But I was too selfish and vulnerable to say no. Besides, having him would be like sticking it to his mom without really letting her know about it.
Win-win, right?
That afternoon, I slipped into the classroom where detention took place, noting that the wooden door to the room had a window.
I wasn’t surprised to see the blond HotHole was already there, sitting in the front row, jingling his car keys—and our secret—between his strong fingers with a smirk, haunting me with his teal eyes. Gulping, I sat down at the teacher’s table and took out my laptop and some exams I needed to grade.
“Put your phone in your backpack, Jaime.” I wet my lips, my eyes focused on my paperwork.
He did as he was told, but I felt his lingering gaze licking me everywhere. My self-consciousness levels were so high I was on the verge of throwing up. I acted like I was about to commit a crime. In a way, I was.
After a few minutes of me pretending to type absolutely nothing on my laptop and him staring at me with a cocky smile, like he was about to devour me at any second, I grunted, “Why don’t you do your homework? I’m sure you can do something constructive with your time while you’re here.” He had two hours to burn, and my face couldn’t be that fascinating.
But I swore I heard him mumble, “Sizing up my prey is constructive.”
My head bolted up from my screen, and I shot him a dirty look. “Excuse me?”
He tilted his chin up, flashing a row of pearly whites of the Hollywood variety. “Ms. Greene, this is going to happen.”
I knew what he meant.
“I have no idea what you mean,” I snipped. Pshh. Playing games with an eighteen-year-old. I promised myself that after today, I was going to take a long, hard look at my life. Preferably while enjoying a generous glass of wine. Well, not a glass, maybe more like a bowl.
Jaime leaned forward on his elbows, his huge arms spanning his whole desk. The devious twinkle in his eyes assured me, once again, that his age was merely a number. Hell, he’d probably slept with more people than I’d kissed in my entire life.
“Yes, you do. You know,” he said with a smile that was arrogant, yet forgiving. Who was the grown-up here? Who was corrupting who? I swallowed.
My eyes dropped to my keyboard, and I struggled for a steady breath. I was shit-scared and turned on. Apparently, this was the perfect combination to make me produce small moans resembling a cat in heat.
“Why me?” I asked.
Jaime remained motionless, but his stare nipped at the sensitive flesh of my neck, tickling my lower abdomen. “Because,” he said slowly, his soft lips parting as he drank me in, “I want to fuck a teacher before I go off to college.”
And just like that, ladies and gentlemen, my quivering thighs and glassy eyes suffered a bad case of ice-cold bucket of rage.
Standing up and folding my arms, I pinched my lips together to make sure a curse didn’t escape them. “I’m sorry, James. I don’t seem to register half of the things you’ve said today, because it sounds like you’re begging to fail my class and get kicked out of school.”
Now it was his turn to stand, and I shrank back toward the whiteboard when I remembered he had a good nine inches on me (also in his pants, if that prevailing rumor was right.)
“Sweetheart,” he said, following that with a tsk-tsk of his tongue, his confidence unnerving. “Give me your worst. Fail me. Throw me in detention for the rest of the year. We both know it won’t affect my graduation or my future. You’d only be shooting yourself in that lovely, sexy-as-fuck foot of yours.”
His eyes moved to my legs, and he took a step forward. My throat constricted with an unfamiliar need to bite something. Preferably this HotHole’s butt.