Campus King | 18+

Chapter Twenty-Four

Hannah

The emotions his name incited left my insides feeling ice cold. Even now, my body physically rejected any mention of him, and my stomach tightened into a painful knot.

I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to shove away the flood of memories I tried not to ever think about. I would be the first to admit that he'd done a number on me and that I hadn't dealt with many of the ugly scars he'd left behind. This past year had been about getting myself back to a functioning adult, which meant putting off my trauma. But these things had a way of resurfacing, even with the mere mention of a name.

Swallowing hard, I began again, "I went to some frat party on South Street with these other girls from my dorm. It was my first real party, and I wasn't really expecting anything to happen, but Dylan singled me out in the crowd."

Even now, I could feel those dark, predatory eyes on me. It was a look I would never forget.

"He was the definition of a bad boy, the kind all the freshman girls drooled over. And he'd set his sights on me. I certainly didn't have any prior experiences with that kind of attention." Dylan had been so good at giving me the validation I craved. In a way, he'd been that last step I needed to step away from my family completely, and at the time, I'd seen him as my savior because of that. "Before the night was over, I was enamored with him."

"Wait," Tristan interrupted me. I looked up to see him frowning, but it wasn't because he was angry. "Are you talking about Dylan Masters? He has this fucking ugly tattoo on his neck — a skull or some cliche shit like that? He was always waving his daddy's credit card around."

I blinked, a little thrown off by the fact that he knew my ex. But of course Tristan knew who Dylan was. I'd later find out that Dylan had a certain reputation, one that was only amplified by the ridiculous tattoo Marcus, his best friend, had convinced him to get.

"Yeah... that's him," I mumbled, a little embarrassed now that he knew exactly who I was talking about.

"He had a nickname — the Freshman Groomer. He would fuck around with a whole bunch of them, and then leave them in a bad state." His gaze cut to mine as he realized where this story was heading.

I gave him a small, pathetic shrug. I wish I could have said I'd known better than to get involved with the likes of Dylan, but I simply didn't. "Yeah, well, then you can probably guess how the rest of this story goes. Kinda." I looked down to pick at a loose piece of lint stuck to the edge of my hoodie. "I do think I was different from his usual type. For starters, he never officially ended things with me. I think he genuinely liked me in his own unique way." Why else were we together for nearly a year?

Still, in that whole year, I knew next to nothing about him, only that he came from a wealthy family, because how else was he supposed to sustain his lifestyle? He didn't work, he hardly went to classes and he couldn't pick up after himself. From what little I'd gotten out of him, he had a full set of parents and a sister somewhere, but I never got to meet any of them. I mostly remembered him ignoring his dad's phone calls, and at the time I sympathized with him for it. I couldn't fault him when I was doing exactly the same thing.