Sure, sometimes, she didn’t walk straight, and she had a bad habit of walking into me while we walked down the road, not balancing correctly when she stood for a long time, but I had never once thought it was weird.
And I would never mention it to anyone anyway. Why was she bringing this up?
“Why would you think that?” I asked.
She looked away and shrugged. “I don’t know. I just look weird.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I’m so clumsy,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t know who will respect a lawyer who limps around everywhere and?—”
“Stop it, Athena,” I said. The words came out more sternly than I’d expected, but I was sick of her putting herself down.
When we had first become friends, that was all she did. And she had worked hard to feel confident in herself. And now, for some reason, she was like this again, and I wasn’t having it.
Athena stared up at me, her eyes widening even more. “But?—”
“That experience might’ve shaped your life, but you’re more than that,” I said, wondering why the hell this was coming up now. “Why do you care about what anyone thinks of you anyway?”
She looked down at her lap, voice dropping. “Because …”
I waited for her to continue, but she didn’t after a few moments.
“Because?”
“I don’t care about what just anyone thinks of me,” she said.
But she obviously did care. At least, she cared about what I thought if she was asking me this. But never in my life had I ever intentionally done anything to make her think otherwise. I loved her for who she was, not what she looked like or how she walked.
“You don’t understand,” she whispered, tugging the blankets around her body. “I l—” Before she could finish her sentence, she smacked her lips closed and looked down at her knees, bouncing them up and down, her cheeks reddening by the moment. “Never mind.”
“What is it?” I asked, lowering my voice and grabbing her hands. “You can talk to me.”
“Not about this,” she whispered, glancing over to my computer. “I … I can’t.”
“If you can’t talk to me, then at least tell me why you think this all of a sudden. Was it your little run-in with Derek? Did he say something to you about me? Is that why you don’t want to tell me about it?”
“No!” she exclaimed, but she couldn’t look me in the eyes. “I was just thinking about it …”
I balled my hands into fists, ready to kick his ass for good this time because Athena was lying to me. I could hear it in her voice, could see it in her expression that she tried to hide from me. Derek had said something to her, and I planned on teaching him a lesson.
Nobody messed around with my girl.
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
ATHENA
I blew out a breath and stared emptily at the law textbook in front of me. While I needed to prepare for the bar that I had next month, I couldn’t think about anything other than what had happened earlier in Charlie’s room.
Between wanting to breed me to talking about my limp, had he been telling me the truth?
“Okay,” Heather said, slamming my book closed. “What’s up?”
“Nothing,” I said, shrugging it off and not even peering in her direction.
When I tried to open the book, Sierra peeled it away from me and stuffed it into her black bag. I glanced up to see Heather, Sierra, Sun, and even Evelyn staring at me and waiting as if I had something to spill.
