“Quit playing into the stereotype, Clarin.”
It may have sounded like a joke, but the more I got to know Clarin, the more I recognised what was hidden beneath the confidence that he projected. He camouflaged his insecurities behind enough bolster to make you forget that he was a simple person with flaws and vulnerabilities just like any other person. Part of the bluster was the way he joked about being gay. Things couldn’t have always been easy for him. He knew who he was now, and he had support in the form of his friends… but I couldn’t imagine how much work it would have taken to get there; to get to a place of security, of confidence, of sureness. Especially without his mother.
Especially with his father.
Sometimes, his struggle leaked through. He didn’t like when I saw it.
“How about this?” he asked, turning serious. Oops, his eyes had narrowed on my face, as though he knew exactly what my mind had been dwelling on. “I’ll stop lugging baggage around once everyone stops looking at me like a side-show that they can’t quite piece together—once they stop saying that Weston killed my mother because of me, because I disgraced the perfect Voda-genes by turning out ga—”
“Clarice!” Poison snapped.
Clarin quickly fell quiet, turning his head in the direction of our angry friend, who had apparently been listening the whole time, and had now stopped walking. She dropped her bags and glanced around at the bare scattering of students that were filtering into one of the residential buildings. Some of them had turned around, surprised at her sudden exclamation. She stormed over to Clarin, grabbed both of his cheeks, and planted a kiss right on his mouth.
I fell back in shock as a half-laugh, half exclamation of horror escaped my mouth. I slapped a hand over the lower-half of my face to cover up the sound. Clarin remained frozen for a moment, and then he looped an arm around Poison’s back and dipped her dramatically. The students around us started to stir, some of them whipping out their phones to get photographic evidence. I’ll admit, they were quite the sight. Poison was wearing ripped jeans and knee-high boots, her loose sweater falling off her shoulder to reveal one of the more elaborate hints of lingerie that I’d yet witnessed from her. I snapped my gaze back to their joined mouths and realised that they weren’t actually kissing—more like mashing their mouths together without moving.
In fact, it looked like they were trying their hardest not to laugh.
Someone whistled loudly, and Clarin pulled her upright again, a huge grin on his face. He started laughing uncontrollably, like the kiss had been the funniest thing in the world—not your usual reaction to a kiss from a girl like Poison, I was sure. Poison wiped her mouth with the back of her hand unnecessarily, and dipped into a bow.
“Thank you!” she cried out loudly to the gathering crowd. “Thank you all!” She gave a smaller, more sarcastic bow to Clarin. “You’re welcome!”
“I’m sorry,” Clarin said, doing that muscle-curl thing to pick up all of his bags again. “I forgot.”
“Forgot what?” I asked, as Poison returned to her fallen luggage. “That it’s illegal to get it on with your cousin in most countries?”
“Forgot that labels don’t define us,” Poison filled in, taking the lead and forging a path through the sudden swell of people that surrounded us. “The best way to confuse society about which box to place you in is to jump into all the boxes at the same time. Now Clarin is gay, but a little bit straight; available, but a little bit incestuous; and totally hot, but a little bit disgusting on account of the incest thing.”
“Hey, Seraph,” someone nudged me as I passed, “I’ve got a spare bunk in my dorm room if you’re looking for a new brother.”
I ground my teeth together, giving the guy my back. I had grown adept at hiding my reaction to the bullying that I received during the last month of high school, but I hadn’t been exposed to it over the break and I wasn’t particularly overjoyed at the prospect of needing to recondition myself. I had been secretly hoping that people might have forgotten about me during the busy transition from high school to college… but how hard could it really be to forget a girl secretly posing as one of Weston’s bastards—and therefore claiming to be borderline Zevghéri royalty? Not everyone recognised me, but those who did made their whispered words achingly obvious as I walked by, attempting to ignore them.
“Orgy in the music department,” an unfamiliar guy announced to me as we neared the building. “I heard the Adairs like sharing. Practise room C!”
An angry retort was on the tip of my tongue when Poison spun around, pointing a finger of warning at my chest.