“Jesus, I haven’t been persuading you,” Hudson snaps. “Can you please give it a rest? I’m not actually Satan.”
“I never said you were!” I snap back, doing my best to ignore the relief I feel in the pit of my stomach over the fact that he’s talking to me again. “But do you blame me for wondering?”
Macy, obviously realizing I’m fighting with Hudson again, rolls her eyes and starts gathering up her class supplies into her backpack.
“You’re bloody right, I do!” The fact that the Britishisms are coming back tells me just how upset he actually is. “Don’t you think things would look a lot different if I was actually using my gift on you? You’d be doing whatever I tell you to instead of arguing with me until I want to pull my bleeding hair out.”
“Well, excuse me for remaining a sentient being with thoughts and ideas of my own. So sorry to inconvenience you.”
Is it a bitchy response? Yeah. Do I care? Not even a little bit. He deserves it with his silent treatment one second and his “lord of the manor” attitude the next.
“You’ve been inconveniencing me since the day I laid eyes on you,” he growls. “Why should today be any different?”
“You know what? Why don’t you bite me?” I shoot him a mock-innocent look. “Oh, wait. I forgot. You can’t.”
Hudson’s growl becomes a snarl, and he finally turns from the window and stalks across the room toward me. But then he stops several feet short of me, hands shoved into his back pockets as he stares me down with narrowed eyes. “You’re going to push too far one of these days. You know that, right?”
“And then what? You’re going to punch another wall?” I narrow my eyes right back. “Don’t threaten me. I’m not some scared little girl who’s just going to fall in line. If you wanted that, you should have holed up inside some sweet little human’s brain instead of mine.”
“Some sweet little human?” he repeats, and just like that, his anger is gone, replaced by an amusement that’s almost palpable. “So the gargoyle thing is starting to grow on you, hmm?”
I don’t know what to say to that, don’t even know how I feel about what I just said. So I do the only thing I can do in this situation—I ignore his question completely.
“Come on, Macy. We need to get to the cafeteria. Jaxon’s going to think I forgot about him—again.”
“I’m ready,” my cousin answers. She grins. “I’ve just been waiting for you and Hudson to stop tearing into each other. I gotta say, your face was priceless.”
“How did I look?” I ask as we close the door behind us and start walking down the hallway.
“Like you wanted to murder a small village. Or, you know, a major metropolitan area.”
“Now you’re talking my kind of fun,” Hudson joins in. “Just tell me when and where and I’m there.”
“Wouldn’t you be there anyway? Considering we are currently attached?” I raise my brows at the fact that the worst seems to be over—at least for now.
“It was a figure of speech. You know what those are, right?”
“You mean like verbs? Nouns? Adjectives?” I tease him, because of course I know what a figure of speech is. I also know what colloquial phrases are, which is what he actually threw at me.
Hudson rubs his eyes. “You scare me sometimes, you know that? You really do.”
I laugh, then throw him a colloquial phrase right back. “Baby, you haven’t seen anything yet.”
He sighs. “Don’t I know it.”
47
Are you Bloodstoned?
“So I have a question,” I tell Macy as we walk to the cafeteria.
“Sure.” She looks at me quizzically.
“How obvious was it that I was fighting with Hudson back in our dorm room? Because if people can tell, I’m sure they’re thinking there’s something seriously wrong with me.”
“Umm, too late for that,” she teases. But when I shoot her an exasperated look, she relents. “I think you forget where you are. Last year, a witch turned herself invisible for almost six months. People spent a semester walking around looking like they were talking to the walls. Weird shit happens here every day. Nobody even blinks most of the time.”
“Yeah, well, they blink at me. All the time.”
“We’ve been through this. Dating Jaxon means half the school hates you and the other half wants to be you. That’s just how it is. Add in the gargoyle thing and it’s not the talking to Hudson that’s going to make people stare at you. So relax, okay?”