The Outsider: Hard Knox Part 14

Harlow froze in the midst of her hug-torture, and I groaned.

"I suppose I don't need two tries to guess whose voice that is," she said before glancing at the doorway.

"Well, it sure isn't Prince Charming," I muttered. My eyes narrowed on the figure hovering in the doorway.

"If I was Prince Charming, I'd be wearing tights and serenading some fair maiden on bended knee." Knox entered the room, appraising Harlow and me and our position with a wicked smile. "I'm more along the lines of Prince Reality."

"Prince? That's a stretch and a half." I rolled off the bed. Once I was standing, I crossed my arms and leveled him with a look.

"Kind of like considering you a fair maiden. So aren't we just a match made in un-fairytale heaven?"

"Introductions," Harlow stated in her no-nonsense voice. "Where I'm from, they're considered good manners before two people duke it out with wits and words."

Knox grinned at me, sweeping his hand in a proceed fas.h.i.+on.

Why his grin made me glare, I don't know. It was like a knee-jerk reaction. "Harlow, meet Knox Jagger. The proverbial, literal, and metaphysical pain in my a.s.s." I matched his grin. "Knox, meet Harlow, my former roommate and soon-to-be-again one, and my trusty sidekick." When Harlow swept toward Knox, her man-catching smile on full beam, I added, "She's also with someone-a lieutenant in the Air Force. Probably not someone you'd want to mess with."

Both Knox and Harlow gave me a strange look. Yeah, because I was the crazy one in the room.

"Nice to meet you, Harlow. Sorry again for the crack-of-dawn call this morning." Knox shook her hand, somehow managing to keep his eyes on her face.

I hadn't thought that was possible when any guy was introduced to any girl, let alone Knox Jagger meeting the indelible, drop-dead gorgeous Harlow Bennington.

"Nice to meet you too, and again, no worries about the call. You can feel free to call me whenever you like." Harlow paused with her mouth still open. "Or, you know what I mean . . . Whenever you need me . . ." Harlow shook her head. "Or whenever you feel like you need to do me . . ." Her hands clamped over her mouth right before she squeaked out, "Call me. Whenever you need to call me."

My eyes rolled to the ceiling. Just what Knox needed-another beautiful girl losing her sense around him. At least I didn't have to worry about Harlow losing her panties to him as well. I hoped.

Knox wasn't quite gloating, but it was pretty d.a.m.n close. "I like your roommate, Charlie."

"I do too," I replied, folding my arms tighter. "Too bad I have to make a serious trade down."

Knox shouldered up beside Harlow, inspecting me with narrowed eyes. "Is she always like this? I mean, it's like she's confused insults for compliments."

"More like she's forgotten what a compliment is-if she ever knew in the first place." Harlow nudged Knox as they exchanged a look.

When they chuckled together, I moved toward them. "Okay, that's it. I refuse to let you two align. I've got enough enemies without you guys joining forces in the Charlie-Chase-is-the-devil theory." Winding my arm through Harlow's, I led her toward the door. "If you don't leave now, you're going to be late for Economics of Third World Countries."

"I love a humanitarian," Knox interjected from back inside the room.

"Oh yeah, you positively embrace humanitarian philosophies," I threw over my shoulder.

Harlow popped her head back through the door long enough to say, "I love a person who loves a humanitarian."

"Control yourself," I hissed, giving her a soft shove down the hall. "That's Knox Jagger, the guy whose name has become synonymous with s.e.x."

Harlow smiled. It was a little too dreamy for my liking. "There are worse synonyms out there."

"Filthy s.e.x. Synonymous with filthy s.e.x."

She batted her eyelashes. "Even better."

"Get to cla.s.s already," I ordered, waving her down the hall. "And don't forget to stop by the health center on your way back and get your brain checked."

Harlow waved and headed on her way. "Don't forget to check in every day, or else I'm going to come knocking at Filthy s.e.x's front door and tapping my foot until you answer."

"You're a true friend!"

She was almost to the stairwell when she laughed. "I didn't think you knew what one of those was."

She was already gone, but I still stuck my tongue out in her direction.

Of course that would be when Knox appeared beside me, looking at me with that familiar look of amus.e.m.e.nt. "I like your roommate."

"Don't even think about it," I warned, bristling. Why was I bristling? It shouldn't matter to me if Knox thought Harlow was the bee's knees. It shouldn't matter to me if Harlow returned the sentiment. So why did it? Whatever the answer was, I probably didn't want to know it, so I shoved the question aside and filed it in the shred-and-destroy folder.

"I'm not. Believe me," he said, shaking his head. "At least not in the way you're warning me off of."

And cue the suddenly defensive emoticon. What the h.e.l.l? I felt like I was on some kind of emotional roller coaster I couldn't get off of. If it didn't stop, then I wouldn't scratch leaping out of the cart off the list of options.

I turned on Knox, crossing my arms. "Why's that? Because you could do so much better with the girls who think the height of cla.s.s is shoving their panties-their worn panties-down your pockets?"

His smile morphed into a laugh-one that reverberated down the hall. Apparently, while I had half a million emotions when he was around, he only had one-amus.e.m.e.nt. "No, as college girls go, Harlow seems like the exception to the cla.s.sy rule, but it's just a policy I have."

Other than never sleeping with the same girl twice, as there were four billion of them to go through, I hadn't been aware Knox had policies when it came to the past, present, and future women in his life. "What policy?"

"No college girls."

That took a moment to set in, but once it had, disbelief was the next stop on the emotion train. "I'm going to need to hear that one again."

Knox leaned in. "No. College. Girls."

By that point, plenty of college girls had filled the hall, trying to look busy redecorating the boards on their doors or chatting with a neighbor a few doors down. Some were obviously doing nothing other than staring at Knox with wanton desire written all over their expressions. Since I didn't want to be responsible for a panty shortage in Stewart Hall, I tugged Knox back into my room. I could almost hear the combined sigh of disappointment echo down the hall when I closed the door.

"So I'm going to need an explanation of that one."

"An explanation of what?" Knox asked, looking around the room as though it was the first time he'd seen it.

When his gaze s.h.i.+fted back to me, his eyes darkened. I was alone in my room with Knox. Behind a closed door. Tempting fate might have been fun for some people, but it wasn't for this person. Opening the door a crack, I felt the tension waft out.

"Your no-college-girls policy," I said. "Because from what I've heard, your policy is pretty much the opposite."

He crashed on my bed, making the frame groan beneath his weight. And now he was lying on my bed, stretched out across it, almost exactly where my body would be if I were asleep in it. "Haven't I proven by now that you shouldn't believe everything you've heard about me?"

"And yet rumors don't just spring out of nowhere." My back hit the wall behind me. Without realizing it, I'd put as much distance between Knox and me as the room allowed.

Knox tilted his head. "I'll concede to that in certain instances."

"In this instance?"

From his tilted grin alone, I knew the rumor had been hatched from some kernel of truth. "I might have gone a little crazy at the start of my freshman year. I didn't have that no-college-girls policy, and man, did I pay the penalty."

"Define 'a little crazy,'" I said, tapping my heel into the wall and trying to behave like he was any other guy sprawled across my bed. In this moment, though, trying was not succeeding.

"Are you sure you want me to?" He met my stare and waited.

"Never mind. Add that to the list of 'Questions that Should Never be Answered.'" I s.h.i.+fted when my mind fired off a number. All I could do was hope his actual number of s.e.xual partners and the one rolling around in my head were nowhere close to each other. "So what happened to make you put that policy into effect?"

"Just to be clear-is this a question you actually want answered?" He curled his hands behind his head and stared at the paper chain looped around the ceiling. "Because you can ask me any question you want and I'll give you the answer-the truthful answer-so make sure you really want to know the answer before you come at me with a question. Okay?"

I nodded. "Okay."

"Was that an okay as in you understand or an okay in that you're sure you want your last question answered?"

"That was an okay to both."

Knox s.h.i.+fted, making himself more comfortable. "To put it simply, college girls are like a bipolar person on crack. One minute they want to be taken care of, the next they want to be independent. In the morning, they love themselves. By nighttime, they hate themselves. Everyone's their friend, or no one's their friend. They know what they want; they don't have a f.u.c.king clue. They know what they want to do tomorrow but can't seem to get past yesterday." Knox exhaled, like merely thinking about it was exhausting. Keeping up with him was exhausting enough, so I could imagine what life had been like for this rampant womanizer during his first year of school. It wasn't enough for me to bring out the sympathy tissues though. "They're still trying to make up their minds about almost everything, and go them for doing that whole personal reflection thing, but it's too much d.a.m.n drama to deal with on a day-to-day basis."

"A bipolar person on crack?" I smiled, despite knowing, as a member of the college girl demographic, I shouldn't. "Okay, I'm coming to you whenever I need a brilliant, albeit politically incorrect, descriptor of the next person or group I write an article about."

Knox held his arms out before folding them back over his stomach. "My brilliance is here for your exploitation."

"I'll keep that in mind." When I started to push off the wall toward him, I forced myself back. The wall was my safe haven. Move away from it, and nothing was certain. "So no more college girls . . . Then why the h.e.l.l do all of them flash their unmentionables your way if none of them have gotten any action from you since your wild first tour of Sinclair?"

"Because they've heard the rumors that you have," he said, continuing his stare-a-thon at the ceiling. "It's not like I wear my policy stamped across my forehead. Or my s.h.i.+rt." Picking his head up, he inspected my s.h.i.+rt-Don't Make Me Get My Flying Monkeys.

The next question that came to mind gave me pause-hot on the heels of Knox's warning not to ask him a question I didn't want answered. I thought about it for a few moments before voicing it. "So if it's not the college-aged girls getting a piece of the Knox Jagger pie, who is?"

Sure, celibate was an eight-letter word some college guys might have navigated from time-to-time, but it wasn't a place a guy like Knox had ever wandered longer than a few days. My own lack of experience didn't make me immune to the fact that his strut and knowing smile had been earned with excessive amounts of between-the-sheets time.

"Who isn't?" he replied. Although his tone was clearly teasing, I guessed his reply was closer to the truth than not. "There's this great thing known as the mid-twenties female. It's a true phenomenon how a few years and some Oprah-recommended reading can change an unsure breed into a so-sure-they'd-make-you-their-b.i.t.c.h-if-you-let-them species-both in and out of the bedroom."

His answer made me s.h.i.+ft.

"Sorry. Too much? I forget that in my quest to answer you truthfully, I don't have to give the whole whole truth. Discretion is something I'm still working on."

"No, you don't have to be discreet with me." I shook my head. "I find your honesty strangely refres.h.i.+ng. Unlike the rest of the college dips.h.i.+ts, you don't feel the need to lie and fudge your answers to the intimacy questions. It's nice that when a guy looks me in the eye and tells me just how much or how little action he's getting, I actually believe him." I went to shove off of the wall again, and this time I made it a couple of steps before I plastered myself back to that puppy. "You're not like the rest of the college guys out there, Knox. Go figure." I'd a.s.sumed he was the quintessential one, pumped up on the 'roids of experience and bloated ego, and I'd been wrong. He might have been the only one out there I trusted at that juncture.

He lifted up onto his elbows, staring at me in a way that made wall-planting nearly impossible. "I could say the same for you."

My heart pounded in a familiar way. At least, in the kind of way that had become familiar since I'd met Knox. "I'm not like the rest of the college guys out there?" As I couldn't do or say what my body was pulling me toward, I went with my response default-sarcasm.

"You know what I mean." He peaked a brow, seeing right through me.

"Yeah. I can't believe I'm admitting it, but I think I do know what you mean."

Knox sat up slowly and deliberately, and just when it looked like he was about to get up and cross the room toward me, he stopped. With a sigh, his expression twisted, and he seemed to force himself back down on the bed.

So we were both being careful. We were both holding ourselves back. I wasn't sure if that made staying where I was easier or harder.

"Do you need help packing up anything else? Or should I finish hauling the rest of your boxes down to the truck?" His eyes stayed focused on the ceiling the entire time.

"If there were a kitchen sink, I'd say that's about all you missed." In contrast to Harlow's side of the room, which was a blend of Mardi Gras and a carnival (mainly due to the abundance of stuffed animals and beaded necklaces), mine looked empty. And desolate. And depressing. A sigh slipped past my lips.

"Hey, Charlie? Are you still okay with this?" Knox sat up again but stayed planted on the mattress. "I know this all happened fast, but do you want to talk about it some more or something?"

"I think we talked-slash-argued about it enough this morning. I'm going to have the wisdom to accept the things I cannot change, for once, and focus on the things I can change-like the future permanent address of the b.a.s.t.a.r.d who's after me. What's the street number of the state penitentiary again?" I asked, tapping my chin.

Knox eyed the boxes. "Are you okay with this?"

I huffed. "A little late for checking to see if I'm okay with this, don't you think?"

He was silent for the span of a breath. "Are you okay with this?"

My teeth gritted. Why was it the calmer he stayed, the less calm I did? "Here's a tip: when you pretty much coerce a person into agreeing to something, it's not considered good form to ask them a few hours later if they're okay with it."

"Are you okay with this?"

"If by okay with this you mean forced into this, then yeah, I'm 'okay.'"

Another span of a breath. "Are you okay with this?"

"When a girl is under duress of peeing her pants, she'll agree to just about anything. You took advantage of that knowledge, so stop playing the 'I care' card now." I was running out of witty responses. If he kept at this 'Are you okay?' battle, I was going to lose because, truth be told, I wasn't exactly sure why I was battling him over it. I just knew that I had to continue. Maybe I hated to lose, or maybe it was just that I hated the idea of losing to him, but I wasn't ready to wave the white flag.

"Are you okay with this?" For seeming to have such a hard time looking at me a few minutes ago, his penetrating stare was pinning me to the wall.

"There's okay. And there's me."

"Are. You. Okay. With. This?" He didn't wait the length of a breath that time.

My mouth opened to fire something off, but nothing came out . . . because nothing was left. My witty-meets-difficult tank had officially been drained. Knox waited, as still and silent as a sentinel, while I felt close to breaking a sweat from trying and failing to pull out one more round of resistance. Other than a No!, sticking out my tongue, muttering a You're a jerk, or flipping him an always cla.s.sic bird, it seemed I had nothing more creative to answer him with.

Well, nothing more creative than the actual truth.

"I'm okay with this," I said softly, scuffing my toes against the low-pile carpet. Saying those words had been like trying to push an elephant up the side of a mountain-except harder. "It's only temporary, and you're right, we will work better as a team. The faster we find this guy, the faster I can get back to living my crazy life of sneaking into frat parties for research and puckering over a plastic cup filled with p.i.s.s Light."

Knox smiled. Actually, Knox smiled at me. "You're sure?" He was already moving toward the remaining boxes.

"See this? It's my sure face." Circling my finger around my face, I frowned.

"Well, good. Because you being unsure about moving in wouldn't have changed anything, but it eases my conscience knowing you're okay with it." The wink he flashed me didn't keep me from grabbing the can of Silly String Harlow kept on her desk. Up until now, I hadn't been able to comprehend what kind of situation could ever arise that would require Silly String, but this one kind of did.

Ripping the cap off, I aimed it in his direction. "You're a pain in my a.s.s."

Knox lifted an unimpressed brow when he saw the can. "Right back at ya, sweetheart."

My finger moved to the depressor. "Being forced to move in with you is one thing. Being chained to you all night and morning when you knew how to free us is another. But calling me sweetheart?" With a shake of the can, I aimed it at his head. "Yeah, not even close to okay." I pressed the b.u.t.ton, and a line of bright purple string burst from the can, splatting on his forehead.

For a moment, Knox didn't seem to realize his face was being a.s.saulted by a purple string of foam, but as soon as that cleared, a challenging smirk went into place right before he charged me. I didn't stop spraying, covering even more of his face, but it didn't slow him any.