Page 20 of Monstrous Serpent

No one even touched me.

I press my palms into my eyes hard enough that I see stars.

Adrenaline. Had to be.

What other excuse is there?

I’m not into guys, never have been. Would’ve figured it out by now if I were, right? I mean, Knight has walked around the locker room naked. Sure, I checked out his piercings once, but only because I was curious about the hardware.

It’s not like I stood there admiring his dick. Didn’t even give it a second thought.

I scrub both hands over my face, groaning, then reach into my pocket and pull out my phone. There are a few missed texts from Doyle, but I don’t have the energy to deal with him. I scroll through social media for a bit, then open Google to look up why my body reacted the way it did.

Honestly, I should just put the whole night behind me. I’m lucky that I got out of there. It could have been so much worse. Those two guys could have . . .

I shake my head. “Not going there.”

The first thing that pops up. Fear kinks.

Great.

Let me just add that to the list. Dyslexic. Too competitive. Takes the same girl to the same restaurant every two weeks and thinks he's killing it. Can't tell when he's being cheated on.

And now, gets off on being scared.

Like any girl’s going to sign up for that.

Blue yawns so wide his jaw cracks, and I can count every one of his teeth, then he puts his head back down and sighs like he's the one having a bad week.

“Yeah,” I mutter. “Same.”

I toss the phone aside. Time to stop thinking about the past. After shifting Blue off my lap, I sit up to dig through my backpack for my Macro textbook and the notes from Demir’s lecture. If I’m going to be pissed off, might as well aim it at something that’ll eventually help me.

Except my notes look like they belong to someone else. Half the words are abbreviations I don't remember making up, and the rest trail off mid-sentence, where Demir moved to the next slide before I finished writing.

“Agg. D = C + I + G + something. That's what I've got. An incomplete formula.” I follow the arrow I drew, but it points at nothing. “And is this word nominal or national?”

Great job, idiot. Real useful.

Sighing, I flip open to chapter three. Maybe I can make sense of the nonsense I wrote. There's a section on aggregate demand in bold, so I press my finger under the first line and read out loud. “Ag-gregate demand repre . . . represents the total quantity of goods and services demanded across all levels of an econ—economy at a given overall price level and in a given time . . . period.”

I take a breath and look at it again. Total quantity of goods and services. Okay. All levels of an economy. Got it. At a given overall price level and in a given time period.

What the fuck does that mean together?

I read it again, slower, my finger under each word. “Aggregate demand represents the total quantity of—” My eyes jump a line, and I'm suddenly in the middle of a sentence about equilibrium that I didn't start. I drag my finger back up to find where I was.

Doesn’t help. Even though I can say every word on this page out loud, I can't make them mean anything together.

Brayden would've had this chapter done by now. My older brother probably would’ve even quizzed himself for fun. Meanwhile, I’m going for my fourth attempt with my finger under every word, and the textbook is winning.

“This is fucking bullshit.” I close the book and put it on top of my bag along with my notes. Lying down on the couch, I pull Blue against me and press my face into the back of his neck. “I fucking hate how stupid I am.”

He licks my arm.

My breathing stutters, and I sniffle, squeezing Blue tighter. “Love you, buddy.”

“Cody, here’s your . . . Blueberry, go place.”