"Y'all are lab partners now?"

"Unfortunately."

"Uh-huh. Now, is that partners in Biology or…Chemistry?"

"You suck."

I attempted to bury a snicker and failed. "I'm sorry," I quickly conceded when she turned to glare at me. "But you two are a match made in heaven."

"More like a match made in hell," she was quick to point out, as we walked out of school and headed for the student parking lot. "He's a demon," Mercy continued to rant, blowing out a furious puff of air. "For real, Molls. That boy is the spawn of Satan himself."

"Then Satan has some good genes," I shot back, unable to hide my smile.

"So fucking good," she agreed with a dramatic sigh. "Ugh."

"Rourke really isn’t that bad," I decided to offer up, and I meant it. When I moved back to Ocean Bay for sophomore year, everybody at school ignored me. Worse than ignoring me, they pretended that I had never existed in the first place.

The friends I had left behind had changed. Gone were the kids with skinned knees and buck teeth. In their places were jocks and cheerleaders. Queen bees and alpha males. Breasts and bitchiness. Six packs and testosterone.

Everyone had forgotten about me.

Everyone except for Rourke Owens.

His warm offer of 'welcome back, Molly' on my first day back, and then his mumbled 'morning' or 'what's up' every day since meant a lot. Six-pack and pissy attitude or not, he had never once pretended that I didn’t exist and I appreciated that about him. It gave me the rare opportunity to see something in him that not a lot of people got the chance to see; the good person hidden beneath his heartless asshole façade.

As for the guys Rourke hung around with? Yeah, I wasn't even close to thinking about them – about him.

I couldn’t.

If I did, I would break and I had done enough of that in my short lifetime.

No more!

"I thought we already established that he's a demon."

"Yeah," I agreed with a roll of my eyes. "But not the worst demon in town." Trust me. "His issues make him testy and a little rough around the edges. But there's a heart underneath all of that assholeness and I think you know that."

A huffed breath was Mercy's only response to that.

Yeah, she knew it.

I grinned to myself, knowing that I had won that round.

Go me!

"I'm not going to the game tonight," she said then, bursting my temporary bubble. Earlier this week, Mercy had, albeit reluctantly, agreed to attend one of our school's home football games with me. Before I could protest or complain about her backing out, she quickly continued, "I know that I promised I'd go with you, but I can't do it. Letterman jackets and pom-poms?" She shook her head, not bothering to hide her disgust. "No, Molls. It's just not me."

It was a fair point and one I couldn’t really object to, not when I felt the same way. I loved football. I truly enjoyed the sport, but I couldn’t deny that I didn’t belong in the bleachers with our classmates. I didn’t fit into their world. Like Mercy, pom-poms were definitely not my thing.