"I think you should stop being so mean to me, Zahed."
"Why would I ever do that?"
Aryan grins, a bright, wicked thing.
"Because I kiss you like this."
•
Mira Zahed and Aryan Shankar are at war.
When her best friend and his cousin decide to fall in...
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♥ ♥ ♥
I MADE A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL. I made out with him too. Among other things.
I try not to mull over the last one too much.
Especially not as Friday evening rolls around, a week later.
Aryan and I have returned to regularly scheduled programming. In our case, that's no more silent treatment and more knife emojis on my part and a lot of responding taunts on his. In a string of late-night texts that he'd sent me to confirm the date and time of Daniel's luncheon, also known as my imposing reckoning that is tomorrow and the loose-string of our deal, we'd simply never stopped texting. I'd fallen asleep mid-conversation last night, phone on my pillow, into a restless slumber from which I'd woken wanting nothing more than to back out.
Aryan makes it more than clear that he expects me to in his never-ending taunts over the past week. I should block his ass for it. I know what he's doing though. He's challenging me, rousing me up like flint to fire because he knows I won't back down. I hate that it's working.
And I hate that he's right about what he said that day in the gym showers. I hate that after the brief giddy excitement of toilet-papering a Beverly Hills mansion wore off, I'd sat down in my room and was still angry. I'd thought to myself— that toilet paper can be cleaned up by morning and he'd still have his mansion and his family and I'll still have my anger. It's the hollow type of anger too, a swallowing pit yawning at the very centre of me.
Nothing like the anger a certain jackass who has a penchant for responding to my texts within minutes inspires. That one is heady and dangerous.
I've been telling myself that I did what I did last week so that we'd be even. He gives me life advice, I give him head. Nothing sweet or romantic about it. Nothing to do with the fact that I thought about it, nothing to do with the fact that I'd wanted to, nothing to do with the fact that kissing Aryan Shankar is heady and dangerous and I want to do it every time he's near, nothing to do with the way his—
Glass shatters.
I startle from my own thoughts, looking up sharply just as heads twist toward me in UCLA's Biology lab.
I absolutely refuse to blush, even if I'm holding two shattered pieces of a now broken Petri dish in my gloved hands, the remaining shards littering the marble countertop, glass pieces glaring at me accusingly.
"Fuck," I swear viciously.
The teacher at the front of the room throws me a dirty look. I have a violent urge to snap back at him. He's an arrogant piece of shit teacher anyway, the CEO of mansplaining fucking Molecular Biology— where he has in-depth thoughtful scientific discussions with the boys, he puts on his pre-school voice to talk to the girls. He probably doesn't think girls should cuss. And he has a coffee stain on his white lab coat.
