Stuck With The Four Hotties

There are no etiquette guides online for how to tell four of your boyfriends that you slept with number five. It just doesn’t exist.

“Were they pissed?” Miranda whispers, eyes wide as I sit on the couch in her and Creed’s apartment, wondering when he’s going to come back so I can see him before I head back to my own room.

“I just … I don’t understand how it works,” Lizzie says, grimacing slightly, her bouncy curls swept up into a high pony. She’s on the floor, twirling a spoon around in a container of ice cream. “I’m the jealous type I guess. I could never share.”

“Me neither,” I say with a guilty shrug of my shoulders. I curl my knees up on the couch and put my arms around them. “But I don’t have to. They’re not allowed to date anyone else, that’s how our arrangement works. I told them it was their punishment for all the things they’d done to me. For once in their spoiled, privileged little lives, they can’t have everything exactly when and how they want it.”

“I happen to think you’ve changed Creed for the better,” Miranda declares, and there’s a softness in her gaze that’s getting easier over time. The more time she spends with Jessie, the less she looks at me like that. Not that I mind. I just … unrequited love sucks.

I look over at Lizzie without meaning to and her amber eyes lock on mine. Maybe Tristan’s love is requited? I have no idea. We don’t talk about

Lizzie much.

“So,” Miranda begins and my head snaps up as I sense a bout of crassness ready to spill from her pretty lips, “did you and Tristan ever sleep together?” “Mandy,” I grind out, but she waves me away. She’s just eaten one of the pot chocolates I got from Zayd during first year. I have yet to try any, but Miranda found them in my stuff and ate one about … forty-five minutes ago.

Pretty sure the effects of the THC are kicking in now.

“It’s fine, we’re all girlfriends,” she says, and Andrew glances up from his phone screen. “What? You could be a girlfriend, too, if you’d stop sucking up to your dad and just tell him you want to bang Gary Jacobs.”

“Not ready for that, but ‘kay, thanks,” Andrew says, rolling his eyes and then giving Lizzie a look. “You don’t have to answer her question, you know.”

“I know,” Lizzie whispers, glancing back at me. “But it’s fine, I don’t mind. No, Tristan and I never had sex. We kissed, but … that’s pretty much it.” My heart soars, even though I feel like an asshole, and I do my best to clamp down on the emotion. Whether they did it together or not has nothing to do with my feelings toward Tristan.

I don’t know why I’m harping on this. I just went over it with Zack.

The past doesn’t matter except as a history lesson, a series of mistakes to be learned from. It’s the present that defines us, and the future we look toward with hope. Waxing poetiF, again. I looked it up online, you know, spontaneous word vomit in the brain, and the number one symptom that kept coming up was love. Over and over and over again.

I chucked my phone against the wall in frustration and nearly broke it. “So, they weren’t pissed?” Miranda asks, bringing us full circle back to

the start of the conversation.

“Jealous, maybe,” I say, thinking of Zayd’s clenched jaw. “But not pissed at me. At each other, more like.”

“I wish I had a harem of girls fighting over me,” Lizzie says with a wistful sigh, just before the door opens and Creed walks in. He sees me sitting there, and slips out of his red academy jacket, giving that cavalier smirk that I used to hate but now crave with a frenzy I can’t explain.

“Did you come over to fuck me?” he asks with a saucy little wink, sauntering over and unfolding his long, boneless princely body on the couch between me and Lizzie.

“No. Did you wake up deciding to be asshole today?” I ask, but all I get are a pair of heavy-lidded blue bedroom eyes, and a racing heart. “We were

just discussing what happened between me and Zack.” Creed scowls, but he doesn’t say anything. How could he? He went out of his way to flaunt girls in front of me last year, just to make me feel sad and lonely and jealous.

And I’m not doing any of this to make him feel bad. Although … I’m starting to.

How long can I date all of these guys without hurting them? How can I pick one without destroying the others?

That is not a question I’m eager to find the answer to.

Spring break gives me another chance to talk to Charlie about my new boyfriends. I’m planning on it, but when I get home, the first thing he does is tell me he’s transferred his care from Harper’s family’s medical center to … somewhere else.

The first person I call in a panic is Windsor, hiding in the corner of my room near the closet and hoping Dad can’t hear me talking on the phone.

“Wind, he move treatment centers,” I choke out before the prince even has a chance to say hello. There’s a long pause, and the slow easy chuckle of a man who knows he owns the world.

“Yes, I know. I was going to talk to you about that when I stopped by.” “Stopped by?” I ask, and Wind laughs again.This is the property of Nô-velDrama.Org.

“I have nowhere to stay for Spring Break, so I thought …” I narrow my eyes and lean my back against the wall. This is typical Windsor York behavior right here, acting innocent while really, he’s been calculating all along.

“You thought you’d stay here again?” I stare at myself in the vanity mirror across the room, at my big, wide brown eyes, full of fear

for Charlie. I can’t lose him.