He's the type of attractive that it’s impossible to ignore, so all my hard work to blend into the crowd is destroyed when everyone watches him smile widely at me. Ignoring him, I pass him as if he’s a complete stranger, but he races to catch up with me and slings his arm over my shoulders. “Your next class isn’t for an hour, I thought we could go grab a coffee and maybe something to eat.”

“No thanks.”

“Okay, so what do you want to do for the next hour?”

“I don’t really care what you do, but I plan to go sit my ass down under that tree over there and read,” I say tersely, walking to a tree and sliding down the trunk until my ass is rested against the roots in the grass.

I ignore Clay as he paces in front of me, obviously at a loss for what to do. Eventually, he sinks to the ground beside me and sighs dramatically. “We’re trying to fix things,” he says after an interminably long silence.

I try to ignore him, engaging with any of them is futile, but I find myself eager to understand them, at least in this. Lowering my cell to my lap, I exhale, lift my head and stare at him. “Why?”

“Because we don’t want you to hate us.”

I’m disappointed by his answer, I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I wanted, no needed something more than just that lame, surface-level explanation.

“What does it matter if I hate you? We’re not friends, we never have been. I’d never spoken a single word to any of you before the day Sebastian took over my life. He didn’t ruin our relationship, we never had one. So be honest, just be fucking honest, what difference does it make if I hate you all?”

His eyes flash with hurt, but what does he have to be hurt about?

“Did Bastian tell you that he spotted you on your very first day at GAA?”

“Probably, he’s said a lot of bullshit, I try not to listen.”

Clay laughs a little brittlely. “Well, he did. He saw you in the group of new freshmen and he literally stumbled over his own feet just at the sight of you. For him it was instant. Love at first sight or whatever you want to call it. But he knew he couldn’t approach you. You were a freshman, freshmen are untouchable, even to The Elite.”

“This is a cute story and all, but what does this have to do with you?”

“We followed you.”

“Excuse me?”

“He wanted you to be safe, so we followed you. Me, Evan and Hunter, we followed you, learned everything we could about you, because he loved you.”

“I was barely fifteen and he was what? Sixteen, almost seventeen? Did none of you ever just put his want for me down as a childish crush? Normal people don’t obsess over a girl they’ve never spoken to, they don’t have them followed, stalked. They walk up to them and say, hey.”