We Make Mayhem [boyxboy]

Chapter Eight

Noah and I stepped into the hall. My palms were dampening my timetable and it was pissing me off.

"Look," I said to Noah once the office door was closed. "I'm not showing you around all day. Just show me your timetable and I'll tell you how to find each classroom and then we should go our separate ways."

Noah raised his eyebrows. "Should we?"

"Well, we definitely can't be friends."

He grinned and I immediately felt like I'd lost a debate I didn't even realize was happening. My breath got all short, as if I had just run five miles.

"Why not?" he asked. "Just because I caught you in the act of vandalizing my house last night?"

"It's... not that." My cheeks were on fire. "Just give me your timetable."

He handed it over and I held it next to mine. Because it was very, very important for me to know if we shared any classes.

"If it's not the vandalism, what is it? Is it that your girlfriend hates my dad's guts?"

I scanned the timetable but my eyes didn't absorb any of the information. I read it again. Fuck, what was happening to my brain? Why was I so distracted by the way he was looking at me? It felt like he wanted to watch me squirm...

"We have the same homeroom," I said. "After that, you have History in the east wing and English Lit in the west. Then..."

Ah, fuck.

"What?"

"You're in my art block in fourth period," I said, shoving the timetable back at him. "Downstairs, east wing. You'd better not fuck it up."

I don't know why I said that. I was nervous. Everything was perfectly fine until I came face-to-face with him. Now I felt... off-kilter. Stressed. Like my fuse was incredibly short and he was holding a match to it.

Noah's eyes went cool and narrow.

"You may think you know everything about me because you know about my dad," he said, "but you don't know shit."

I took a deep breath. I had the weird feeling that this was the right time to say something heretical. Why I wanted to say it was another question. I just knew I had to.

"I couldn't give less of a fuck about Temptr or your dad," I said. "You're going to get a lot of shit at this school, so you might want to think twice about pissing off someone in a position to mitigate a lot of it."

He snorted. "Oh, yeah, the guy helping his girlfriend vandalize my house wants to mitigate shit for me."

"For the record, I was trying to stop her."

"Yeah, I hear producing someone's podcast is a great way to stop them."

Noah Lord had done his research. He probably knew as much about us as we knew about his dad.

That made me shiver.

I wanted to make it perfectly clear to him that he was wrong about me—that I didn't want his father's business destroyed and that I didn't want Temptr users to be harassed and shamed.

So I echoed him: "You may think you know everything about me because you know about my girlfriend, but you don't know shit."

The way his eyebrows slightly raised told me I had thrown him for a loop. He didn't have a sassy response ready. I turned on my heel and headed for the stairs. On the landing I realized he was following me.

"What do you want?" I snapped.

"You're showing me to homeroom, dipshit, remember?"

Goddamn it. My cheeks caught fire as I continued storming upstairs. I burst into Mrs. Weston's homeroom, Noah close behind me.