By Chance (Accidentally In Luck #1)

40. Late on Day One - E

*E*

"JAY! WE'RE GONNA BE LATE! HURRY YOUR ASS UP!" I yelled up the stairs. It was our first day and he was going to make us late, the jackass.

I could've driven myself, but we'd agreed to ride together a while ago just because neither of us wanted to start today by ourselves. If he took much longer though, I was gonna risk it. I wouldn't risk embarrassing her in front of everyone there. Embarrassing her in front of Elle and Jay were one thing, but not in front of those people.

I was a second away from yelling at him that I was leaving when I heard him pounding down the stairs. "About damn time, dude. If we want to surprise and not embarrass the girls, we have to actually get there on time."

Jay didn't say a single word, which is when it hit me just how nervous he was. He rolled his eyes, hiked his bag up on his shoulder, and walked out of house.

I none-too-gently snatched my bag off the counter and followed him to the car. I glanced at the dash clock as I got in and breathed a silent sigh of relief. "You're lucky that we shouldn't be late," I muttered to Jay.

I knew I shouldn't be such a dick to him, but I couldn't help it anymore. I'd gotten used to having Cora in the house and even though she'd been gone for a week, I still woke up expecting to see her every morning.

The second night she slept over, after a rather large disagreement, I had given her my room and had taken the couch for myself, but not 15 minutes after we'd said goodnight I had been visited by a wide-eyed Pip completely wrapped in the blanket from my bed like a burrito and dragging the excess on the floor behind her asking me to go back to my room.

After that night, it became a thing that we always slept together. Nothing ever happened beyond mild bouts of tickling every now and then, but it was comforting to have someone wrapped in my arms that snuggled into me as I slept. I don't know if she felt the same, but as long as she walked into my room every night as we were going to bed, I went with it.

She finally moved to Elle's house a week ago and I've barely slept since. Not because I haven't wanted to, but I haven't been able to. After sleeping with Pip in my arms for about two weeks, sleeping by myself was next to impossible. I felt like I was missing a piece of myself every time I tried to close my eyes.

Yet again, it was Pip torturing me without even knowing it.

So, naturally, I had decided to let her torture me even more over the next many months.

I checked the time again as we started to hit traffic and dropped my head back onto the headrest. Time was really speeding by faster than I needed it to.

I groaned. If Jay had made us late, I was going to punch him. And not just in the tournament finals either.

*****

We were late.

I was not—seriously not—happy about it, and Jay was absolutely no help jumping around like a overeager bouncy ball in a small room. His nervousness was starting to get to me, and we were both nothing but nervous bundles of too much energy.

Elle and Cora had started at Los Angeles Southwest College today and after about a short talk with Jay last week, we'd decided to go talk to the president.

Thank God, he had a teenage daughter and understood that we couldn't attend under our real names because actually going to class would've be pretty impossible like that. Luckily, though, he allowed us to use our legal names on all the official paperwork, but we had notes on like everything in our files saying to call us by our aliases in class and during all other times.