Well Played

She turned and narrowed her shocking eyes at Zayn, her attractive features twisting in distaste. Up close, Zayn noticed, she looked even hotter than she had from his previous position. Definitely a rare trait.

“What are you doing, grease?” she snapped condescendingly.

“I need a partner,” Zayn explained easily. “And you’re sitting right next to me. I swear I’m good at this stuff.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “Guess I have to work with the scrub,” she told her friend, who was wearing a blue skirt and white sweater.

The redhead nodded and pushed her desk together with the guy in front of her, who was staring very pointedly at her chest.

Pig, Zayn thought. If you want to stare at her boobs, at least be subtle about it.

“Now I can’t work with my best friend,” the girl scolded with irritation. “I hope you’re happy.”

“I’m fine,” Zayn responded, putting on what he knew was a killer smile. It always made the girls swoon.

Yet she didn’t even bat those eyelashes of hers as she turned to her notebook, copying down the sentence on the board to get to work.

“So what’s your name?” Zayn asked.

She flicked her head up, her jaw tense with hatred. “I know that you don’t do any work in the lower-level classes, but this is an honors course. We actually have to do what our teacher tells us here.”

“I know. That’s why I transferred in,” Zayn fired back without hesitation. “But if we’re going to work together, don’t you think I should know your name?”

“I don’t hang around with greasers,” she told him matter-of-factly.

“I ain’t asking you to,” he replied, trying to sound offended. “I’m asking your name. What, do you not know what it is or something?”

She looked like she was going to assault him verbally for a second before sighing. “I’m Rose.”

“See? Now was that so hard? Nice to meet you, Rose.”

“I wish I could say the same.”

Zayn pretended he wasn’t offended as he turned back to his classwork. After he finished the first problem and turned the paper so Rose could read what he got better, she asked a personal question of her own. “What’s your name?”

“Zayn Malik,” he replied.

Immediately, her body tensed up. “That’s what I was afraid of.”

Zayn knew that he didn’t have the best reputation around school, but he didn’t think the mere sound of his name could elicit so much fear from a classmate. Sure, he’d lifted things from convenience stores, he’d mugged and robbed people a couple of times when he was drunk, and he wasn't the kind of guy that would run away from a fight, but he’d never done any of the real bad stuff. Unlike some of his friends, he’d never stolen a car, he’d never raped a girl, and he’d never hit a girlfriend in his life.

“Why’s that?” Zayn asked, wondering why anyone would be so afraid of him from his history of theft.

She shook her head. “Never mind. Let’s just do the work.”

Zayn followed her directions again, and he wondered for a second what the fuck had gotten into him. Since when was he someone who took orders from broads? Especially one as delectable as the one sitting next to him. Girls like that didn’t like pushovers; they wanted a guy to lay down the law.

“No, tell me,” Zayn insisted after a minute. “Why are you afraid of me?”

She let out a long sigh and put her pencil down on her desk. “Don’t you hang around with Dallas Winston?”

Zayn felt a clench in his stomach at the sound of his friend’s name. He could remember a time when he and Dally would run around Tulsa, fucking up all sorts of shit. They got drunk together, partied together, picked up girls together. Although Dally never loved a single thing in his whole life, except maybe Johnny, there was no dispute that the two boys were best friends.

But after all the events of the previous year, all the fun came to a screeching halt. Nearly half the people he had cared about in his life had died, both far too young. Neither of their lives had really bothered to begin yet, and no one would ever know how successful they would have become.

“I used to,” Zayn answered, noticing that his tone was tense, but not having the willpower to change it. “But he died a little while ago.”

For a second, the girl’s eyes flicked up to his face, clearly having observed that she’d struck a nerve. “Sorry,” she commented, but it was fairly easy for Zayn to tell that she didn’t mean it. In fact, she probably felt a bit safer because a hood like Dally wasn’t running around on the streets anymore.

“Whatever,” Zayn muttered, sneaking a look at the clock. There was still twenty minutes of class and no way to escape the now-awkward situation.

Zayn finished the work and sat back, again shifting the paper to such a position where Rose could copy down his corrections without having to strain that pretty little brain of hers.

When they finished, the rest of the class was still working, struggling through what grammatical errors could be present in the examples.

“So tell me,” Rose started, taking it upon herself to break through the wall of tension that had risen between them, “are the rumors about you true?”

“Depends on what rumors you’re talking about,” Zayn replied mysteriously, officially turning to face her head-on. God, she was sexy, despite her modest dress. But it wasn’t hard for Zayn to do a little guesswork and figure out what her body looked like underneath those clothes.

He hoped it would be just as easy to get the real deal, whether she had a boyfriend or not.

“Well…” she trailed off, biting her pale bottom lip, “Patty Richardson’s been telling everyone that you kind of…” Rose leaned closer to Zayn, whispering at her lowest volume. “That you raped her.”

Zayn tried to remember who Patty Richardson was before it came back to him. She was the girl he’d picked up on the side of the street next to the corner store. She was rushing down the street, her sweater pulled tightly around her shoulders, clearly frightened to be caught on the wrong side of the city so late at night.

In Zayn’s mind, he’d just been a gentleman, offering her a ride home. It wasn’t his fault that she’d leaned over and kissed him when he pulled into her driveway, and things just escalated from there. Until she was almost completely naked, her underwear the only thing left on her, and Zayn looked at the clock and said he had to get home.

So, technically, they hadn’t even had sex. Zayn didn’t know what Patty had against him, but he figured she must have been hurt that he’d rejected her offer.

“I didn’t rape anyone,” Zayn told Rose honestly. “Patty came onto me, and I turned her down. She’s just sore.”

Rose didn’t look like she believed him completely as she pulled back, done with the whispering. Although, to Zayn, it had been pretty incredible. Being in such close proximity had meant that Zayn could smell the perfume she wore, which was a unique combination of something floral and a bit of vanilla.

“Wait, you hang around with Two-Bit, don’t you?” Rose asked, her eyes getting a kind of light that Zayn hadn’t yet seen.

He only wondered about the sudden change in mood for a second before he nodded. “Yeah, Two-Bit’s a good friend of mine.”

“Two-Bit’s the only greaser that I’ve ever liked,” she chuckled. “I caught up with him at the drive-in one night, and he and I talked while I was waiting in line to get my popcorn. He’s a funny one, for sure.”

Zayn smiled, remembering some of Two-Bit’s greatest moments. Like the time he got arrested for doing gymnastic stunts down the street, then trying to goof around with the cop that told him to stop.

“He is,” Zayn agreed quietly as the teacher started to bring the class back together again to go over the answers.

Zayn made a small checkmark with his pencil next to each correction that he’d caught accurately, which turned out to be all of them.

Rose seemed to be pretty shocked at Zayn’s ability to do English, judging from the fact she stared at him throughout the entire process of going over the problems.

But then again, Zayn thought, maybe she was returning the favor of checking him out, just like he’d done to her earlier.