I OPENED MY EYES, groggy from the sudden shock of being pulled out of the dream. My body felt sluggish, and I squinted against the light. The lamp I'd left on last night was joined by sunlight streaming in through the window, but my phone's display still showed a freakishly early hour. Someone knocked at my door, and I realized that was what had woken me up. I ran a hand through my disheveled hair and rose unsteadily from the bed.
"If she needs a geography tutor now, I really am going to Mexico," I muttered. But when I opened the door, it wasn't Angeline standing outside my door. It was Jill.
"Something big just happened," she said, hurrying in.
"Not to me it didn't."
If she noticed my annoyance, she didn't show it. In fact, as I studied her more closely, I realized she probably had no idea (yet) about what had happened between Adrian and me. From what I'd learned, spirit dreams weren't shared through the bond unless the shadow-kissed person was directly brought into it.
I sighed and sat down on my bed again, wishing I could go back to sleep. The heat and excitement of the dream was fading, and mostly I felt tired now. "What's wrong?"
"Angeline and Trey."
I groaned. "Oh, lord. What's she done to him now?"
Jill settled into my desk chair and put on a steely look of resolve. Whatever was coming was bad. "She tried to get him to sneak into our dorm last night."
"What?" I really did need more sleep because my brain was having trouble understanding the reasoning behind that. "She's not that dedicated to her math grade . . . is she?"
Jill gave me a wry look. "Sydney, they weren't working on math."
"Then why were they - oh. Oh no." I fell backward onto the bed and stared up at the ceiling. "No. This can't be happening."
"I already tried saying that to myself," she told me. "It doesn't help."
I rolled over to my side so that I could look at her again. "Okay, assuming this is true, how long has it been going on?"
"I don't know." Jill sounded as tired as me - and a lot more exasperated. "You know how she is. I tried to get answers out of her, but she kept going on about how it wasn't her fault and how it just happened."
"What'd Trey say?" I asked.
"I never got a chance to talk to him. He got hauled away as soon as they were caught." She smiled, but there wasn't much humor in it. "On the bright side, he got in a lot more trouble than she did, so we don't have to worry about her getting expelled."
Oh no. "Do we have to worry about him getting expelled?"
"I don't think so. I heard about other people trying this, and they just get detention for life. Or something."
Small blessing. Angeline was in detention so much that they'd at least have bonding time. "Well, then I guess there isn't much to be done. I mean, the emotional fallout's going to be a mess, of course."
"Well . . ." Jill shifted nervously. "That's just it. You see, first Eddie needs to be told - "
I shot up out of my bed. "I am not doing that."
"Oh, of course not. No one would ever expect you to do that." I wasn't so sure but let her continue. "Angeline's going to. It's the right thing to do."
"Yes. . . ." I still wasn't letting down my guard.
"But someone still needs to talk to Eddie afterward," she explained. "It's going to be hard on him, you know? He shouldn't be left alone. He needs a friend."
"Aren't you his friend?" I asked.
She flushed. "Well, yeah, of course. But I don't know that it'd be right since . . . well, you know how I feel about him. Better to have someone more reasonable and objective. Besides, I don't know if I'd do a good job or not."
"Probably better than me."
"You're better at that stuff than you think. You're able to make things clear and - "
Jill suddenly froze. Her eyes widened a little, and for a moment, it was like she was watching something I couldn't see. No, I realized a moment later. There was no "like" about it. That was exactly what she was doing. She was having one of those moments where she was in sync with Adrian's mind. I saw her blink and slowly tune back into my room. Her eyes focused on me, and she paled. Just like that, I knew that she knew.
Rose had said that sometimes in the bond, you could sift through someone's recent memories even if you hadn't actually been tuned into the bond at that moment. As Jill looked at me, I could tell she'd seen it all, everything that had happened with Adrian last night. It was hard to say which of us was more horrified. I replayed everything I'd done and said, every compromising position I'd literally and figuratively put myself in. Jill had just "seen" me do things no one else ever had - well, except for Adrian, of course. And what had she actually felt? What it was like to kiss me? To run her - his? - hands over my body?