The Outsider: Hard Knox Part 15

"Haven't you heard? I'm Knox Jagger. If bra.s.s knuckles and steel-toed boots can't keep me down, the girl spraying a can of Silly String at me's in trouble."

"Yeah, but haven't you heard?" When his hand wrapped around my wrist, I pulled away, but his grip was about as breakable as when I'd tried to bust through the handcuffs. "I'm Charlie Chase-the girl who name-calling and general loathing can't shut up, so too bad for the guy trying to intimidate me with words."

Right before he yanked the can out of my hand, I got in one last squirt. It gushed right into his eyes, immediately followed by a huff and, "You're going to regret that."

The harder I tried to stay serious, the more I felt the laughter ready to rip through me. When his fingers gripped my side and squeezed, I let lose.

"Stop it, Knox!" I shouted between spurts of laughter. "Not fair! The rules of Silly String war clearly state tickling is off limits!"

All that did was make him squeeze my sides harder, and now having possession of the Silly String can, he paired the tickling up with spraying Silly String into my hair.

"I'm going to kill you!" I squealed, trying to wrench it out of his grasp-to no avail.

"Nah, you won't. You like me too much." Now he was laughing-probably because the Silly String was so thick on top of my head it was spilling over onto my forehead. "Your world would be colorless and void without me in it."

"Yeah, sell your lies some place else." I leapt up, trying to s.n.a.t.c.h the can away. "We're all stocked up here."

Knox's reply was pinching my waist faster, making me laugh even harder.

"Who's the funny girl now?" he said, laughing right along with me.

"You!" I screeched, trying to wrench out of his grasp. "You're the funny girl now!"

Then, in a moment of sheer genius or stupidity, I twisted my leg behind Knox's, curled it back sharply, and yanked with all of my might. I had the element of surprise, but the thing about taking down a guy the size of Hulk's half-brother was that he took down whoever was still attached to him. In a heap of limbs and surprised huffs, we tumbled to the floor, him falling an instant before me, which was handy since he broke my fall. Although since his body wasn't much softer than the floor, he only cus.h.i.+oned my fall marginally.

Knox groaned. "You might not weigh much, but you come down like a ton of bricks, Charlie."

Kicking the can of Silly String out of his hand, I pinned his shoulders. "Though I be but little, I am fierce."

Knox inspected my hands on his shoulders and me above him, then something in his eyes gleamed. We were both covered in ribbons of neon purple string and had just been engaged in a sibling-like war, but I could still feel heat bursting to the surface and traveling through my body until the entirety of it seemed to be consumed.

"I didn't know you knew Shakespeare," he said, his voice a note lower. "I took you more as a Plath kind of girl."

"I didn't know you knew Shakespeare. Or Plath." I suppose knowing of them didn't mean he'd read them, but as time had continued to reveal, there was more to Knox than anyone would have guessed. "I took you more as a Maxim kind of guy."

He s.h.i.+fted below me. The movement did nothing to calm the heat pooling in my stomach. "It is my Bible. Everything a guy needs to know about women and love is contained in the pages of one of those babies."

I lightly slugged his chest. "I think you're mistaking love for l.u.s.t. I see how you could get them confused, no doubt they're six-and-one-half dozen to you, but there is one teeny-tiny difference between the two."

When Knox pivoted below me so his back was flat across the floor, my body went to slide off of his out of instinct. My legs spread across his lap, our hips connected, our eyes locked and mouths parted . . . That was a recipe for a repeat of last night. Right now, a repeat sounded like exactly what I wanted, but I wasn't sure if I'd feel the same in an hour. Plus, after Knox's vow to keep me at arm's length, I supposed heat or not, it was destined to fizzle out.

"What's that difference?" His hands gripped my hips, keeping them where they were.

I had to clear my throat before I could answer. Something about having his hands on me, holding me to him, was messing with me-my mind, my senses, my voice. "With l.u.s.t, the attraction is all based on 'What can you do for me'? But with love, it's about 'What can I do for you?' Selfish versus selfless."

The skin between his brows lined. After a couple of moments, it erased as a wide smile crawled into place. "Yeah, that's not what I've read."

Groaning, I grabbed the almost-empty can of string and didn't stop spraying it at him until it was all the way empty. By that time, half of his face was concealed by purple ribbons of string. When a knock sounded on the door, I a.s.sumed it was Harlow come back to retrieve a book or something she'd forgotten.

I yelled out a quick, "Come in!" as I parted the lines of string from Knox's eyes so he could see. His dark eyes made a stark contrast against the brightness of the string, but it wasn't the contrast I noticed so much as the gleam still in them-the one that had only grown from a minute ago.

I noticed the familiar scent before I saw her. Sandalwood. That wasn't Harlow.

"I can come back if you're busy." Neve didn't try to hide her appall when she stepped into the room and found me straddling the Knox Jagger on my dorm room floor.

When Knox glanced back to see who was there, not even the layers of string could hide his equally impressive look of surprise. "Not busy yet. But we were about to be."

Slugging his arm before s.h.i.+fting off of him, I wiped some of the string from my face. "We were in the middle of an argument, but clearly I came out the victor."

Knox snorted while Neve scanned the room, looking with equal confusion between the remaining boxes and Knox sprawled out on the floor. It was almost like she was trying to ascertain if she'd just stumbled into an alternate reality. "What's going on?"

There were so many answers to that, and given she didn't specify, I went with the most innocent one. "I'm getting packed up."

"I can see that. But why? You're not leaving school are you? Because I really thought you were above dropping out mid-semester."

I shook my head, wondering when she was planning on finis.h.i.+ng glaring at Knox. "No, I'm not dropping out. I'm just moving out of my dorm for a little while."

"Why?"

I didn't pause before answering. "That's cla.s.sified."

Neve's eyes widened. She'd been my teacher for three semesters, and I admired her moxie and courage, but she wasn't my parent. I didn't need to answer her every question.

"Where are you moving to?" She thrust her arms at my boxes and lifted her shoulder.

That answer did give me pause.

"In with me."

My back was to him, but I heard the smile in his voice.

"Excuse me?" Neve said.

"Moving in with me." Knox slowed his words as if he was talking to someone hard of hearing.

"I heard you the first time. But why on the G.o.ddess's green earth would Charlie move in with you?" Neve's hands waved back and forth, making the bells on her bracelets jingle.

"Because I rock her world."

Spinning around, I warned him with a raised brow. "Not helping."

His reply was a shrug and a wider smile. Neve, though, looked as though she were one second away from calling 911 or ordering a lobotomy on me. I wasn't used to people looking at me with disappointment, and it wasn't something I would tolerate.

"Is there a reason you stopped by? Or were you just hoping to play a little Silly String war?" I asked.

Neve peaked a brow at me, no doubt because I wasn't playing the bend-over-and-take-it role she wanted me to. "Can we talk?" Her eyes skated over to Knox. "Alone."

"There's a subtle hint," Knox said as he lifted himself from the floor. After wiping a sheet of string off of his face, he winked at me. "I wonder what-or whom-you two ladies will be discussing." When he moved toward the last few boxes, Neve gave him a wide berth, although she was probably putting as much s.p.a.ce between them as the room would allow for the opposite reason I'd done so earlier. "I'll load up the rest of these boxes and head back so I can finish getting your room ready. When I'm done, I'll swing the truck back over and catch a ride to my place if you're not ready to go yet. The spare keys to the truck are right there on your desk. Think you can find your way back to the house?"

I tilted my head. "I got a twenty-one-hundred on my SATs. Pretty sure I can figure out which roads to turn down to get back there. If not, I'll just follow your bread crumb trail of ego and ent.i.tlement, and I'll be good to go."

Knox shook his head, laughing, as he stooped to pick up the boxes. "If you don't make it back to the house by nightfall, Gretel, I'll come save you from the evil witch."

I choked on a laugh, but Neve looked ready to choke on her fury.

"So long, Hansel," I said with a wave.

He answered with a lift of his chin as he carried the boxes toward the door. He had three good-sized ones in his arms, but the bulk didn't seem to affect him. "Catch ya later, Mrs. Landry."

To see her face, addressing her by her last name and calling her a Mrs. was the greatest insult anyone could pay her. Even if she believed in the inst.i.tution of marriage-which she didn't-and had actually found someone to marry, she wouldn't have gone by Mrs.

Knox still had one foot in the door when Neve powered across the room, basically slamming the door on his a.s.s. She waited a few moments before saying anything, just watching me as if she were waiting for an alien to burst out of me. After another few seconds ticked by, she crossed her arms and shook her head. Because she hadn't shown anything but disapproval since she'd walked through that door.

"When I told you to get comfortable with him, I didn't mean move in with him, Charlie." Her arms thrust out at my empty room, her head still shaking. "I respect your know-no-bounds gusto, but that boy's a black hole you don't want to get too close to."

"There's more to Knox than his reputation gives credit to." I crossed my arms, feeling defensive, but defensive of what-or whom? Me and my reasons for moving in with him? Or him and the undeserved stereotypes that had been taped to him?

"Believe me, Charlie, I know." Coming toward me, Neve pulled a manila folder out of her oversized hemp purse. It was labeled K. Jagger.

"What is this?" I asked when she held it out for me.

"More to Knox than his reputation gives credit to." She waved the folder and waited.

Chewing the inside of my cheek, I stalled. I wasn't sure I wanted to know what was inside that folder, but I also knew I had to make myself look. Fact was still fact, whether a person wanted to acknowledge it or not. Taking the folder, I opened it, stuck my hand inside, and pulled out the first thing my hand fell on. As I pulled it out, my eyes narrowed.

"Who are they?" I asked, studying the student photos of about a dozen girls.

"The ones who've come forward to report being drugged and raped-this year alone."

My mind automatically added the "And we're barely a month into the year" part Neve left unsaid.

She continued, "If the statisticians are doing their jobs right and ninety-eight percent of girls choose not to come forward when something like this happens, then in addition to Sinclair's world-renowned engineering program, we're about to become known as the place where a girl's most likely to be drugged and raped."

My heart sped up as I did the math. There were ten girls on that paper. If they were the two percent who'd come forward . . . The math was difficult to do when I felt dizzy, but it basically meant date-rape was a widespread epidemic that had touched hundreds of girls' lives at Sinclair.

"Oh my G.o.d," I whispered, falling into the chair at Harlow's and my desk.

"If there is one, he doesn't have anything to do with this." Neve came toward me, eyeing the folder as though she wanted me to rip into the rest of its contents. "But I know someone who does have something to do with it-someone who mistakes himself for G.o.d."

My head whipped up. "You think Knox did this? You think he drugged and raped these girls?" The idea was so preposterous, I could barely voice it.

"Not all of them. Maybe not even any of them. But I do believe he's the one distributing the drugs responsible for this pandemic."

All I saw was the rage on Knox's face when he'd seen that little white pill dissolving in my water. His unbridled fury. How could a person who pushed the drug loathe it so much? "What makes you think he's responsible? Are you going to actually give me some proof or just keep forcing your theories down my throat?" I'd never been afraid to speak my mind around Neve, but I usually employed a tone of respect in our verbal sparring. She was p.i.s.sing me off though, and my respect was reserved for those who didn't p.i.s.s me off.

"For starters, Knox Jagger was seen at every single one of the parties these girls were at the night they were drugged. A mere coincidence? Or a drug dealer in his element?"

The more she tried to sell me on the idea, the more I couldn't believe it. "Knox and just about every other guy at Sinclair were at those parties. That's hardly watertight evidence."

Neve leaned into the side of the desk, looking at me. "No, it's not watertight, but it doesn't exonerate him either. And there's more."

She was clearly waiting for me to dig deeper into her 21st-Century witch trial, so I pulled out the next paper in the folder. It took me a moment to figure out what it was, but once it registered, I swallowed. The report kept going with a continued at the bottom of the back of the page.

"a.s.sault. Disorderly conduct. Property damage. Threats. The list goes on . . ." Neve pulled out another sheet. "And on . . ." She pulled out one more while my stomach hit the floor. "And on."

It took me a few solid breaths to clear my head enough to reply. Don't let her fl.u.s.ter you. Don't let her make you see it her way. Don't let her corner you into believing it. Knox was innocent until proven guilty, and everything in my hands didn't make him guilty of what she was claiming. It might make him guilty of being hot-tempered and short-minded, but not guilty of dealing roofies at Sinclair.

"These are campus security reports, not police reports. He wasn't actually charged with any crimes here." On a few of the security reports, there were photos of him someone must have snapped with their camera phone while he was in the act of hurling a garbage can across the cafeteria . . . or pinning some guy against a brick wall . . . or swinging a bat at a Mustang.

"Only because you could line up every male on the administration board at this school and still not find enough b.a.l.l.s to go up against Knox Jagger. If this had been any other student, he would have been serving time." Neve dropped another photo into my lap.

Knox was pinning a guy down on the commons, whaling on him with an expression that chilled me all the way to my marrow. I'd heard about that kind of rage, read about it, but to see it on the face of someone I'd handed my trust to was something else. When I looked closer at the photo, I recognized the guy on the receiving end of Knox's fists. It was one of the uppercla.s.smen in Beck's frat. I couldn't quite recall his name, but Douche would suffice. He was the kind of guy who walked with an ent.i.tled switch to his step, appraised women like they were more meat than human, and had been the genius behind the initiation the year Beck rushed-whoever nailed a certain number of girls during rush week was in the club. The number had been twenty. We hadn't been dating at the time, but still . . . I hadn't talked to Beck for a week when I found out about that.

"Why didn't some of these guys Knox 'a.s.saulted' press charges then?" I asked. "I know this guy, and he doesn't exactly have a forgive-and-forget policy."

"Probably, again, because combined, the victims don't possess enough b.a.l.l.s to press charges against Knox Jagger."

I studied the pictures. I reread the reports. I contemplated them with as much indifference and objectivity as possible. After a few minutes, I knew something wasn't adding up, but I couldn't figure out what. At face value, Knox looked like some raging chimpanzee who'd fled the science lab, but that wasn't who he was. No, he wasn't a laid-back, easy-going guy, but he wasn't an animal driven only by instinct either.

"There's something missing. There's something we're not seeing. It's like we've got everything here in front of us, but without the encryption key, none of it makes sense." The reports of breaking and entering on campus, the threats made to certain students, the a.s.saults made on some of those same students-it all had to be connected, but I wasn't sure how.

"The encryption key is right in front of you, Charlie. You're just refusing to see it." Neve tapped the picture of Knox. "He's dangerous." As soon as I shook my head, she continued, "And one of these days, dangerous will morph into lethal, and you'd better hope you're nowhere around when it does."

The thought of Knox being a danger to me was absurd-he'd saved me multiple times, multiple ways. "Why did you show me all of this? I thought you wanted me to be as unbiased as possible when it came to Knox so it wouldn't skew my quest for truth." I shuffled all of the papers back into the folder.

"I showed you this because I wanted you to know who you're dealing with. He isn't just some other Joe-college schmuck." Neve's gaze wandered around my barren half of the room, her eyebrow lifting. "And apparently my timing couldn't have been better since you're about to be sleeping with the enemy."

It was said with a tone of irony, but that didn't keep my hackles from rising. "We'll be sleeping in separate rooms, thank you very much."

"Oh?" Neve popped a mint into her mouth. "And how long will that last? A night? Maybe a week?"

Tilting her head, she appraised me in such a way that I felt sure she sensed the conflict I felt when it came to Knox. Almost as if she'd been outside the truck last night, peering in the window as I jumped Knox and would have gone the distance if it hadn't been for him hitting the brakes. She knew. That was why I didn't have a leg to stand on right then, and she G.o.dd.a.m.n well knew it.

"Make sure to include that in the article. It ought to add a scintillating twist. The closet feminist tumbles into bed with the female objectifier. Slash drug dealer. Slash felon. Slash convict serving a life sentence."

"What happened to a little old-fas.h.i.+oned innocent until proven guilty?" I called as she opened the door.

"And what happened to good old-fas.h.i.+oned journalists who weren't so easily blinded to the truth by a handsome face and a man who knows how to rock his hips just so?"

"Uncalled for," I hissed, wondering how I could have considered building an idol to Neve Landry last year. All I wanted to do now was wring her neck.

"I'm not trying to upset you. I'm trying to get you to open your eyes, which you are resistant to doing in this case. Knox Jagger is the definition of dangerous, and all you see when you look at him is an abandoned puppy on the side of the road. As journalists, we learn not to get queasy at the first signs of danger, but I'm not sure you're the one to write this article anymore." Her eyes wandered around my room again, seeming to sadden when they fell on the duffel bag at my feet. "I'll figure out a different way to make sure this b.a.s.t.a.r.d pays his dues. This article isn't worth your life, Charlie."

I lifted the file-the file containing all of the evidence Neve was convinced pointed at him being guilty. "It's not my life I'm worried about saving. It's his." I didn't need to see the future to know that if an article written by Neve Landry, backed by this kind of circ.u.mstantial evidence, were ever published, Knox would spend the best years of his life rotting away in prison.

"And this life you're so worried about . . . Are you sure it's worth saving?"

Before she slipped through the door, I made sure she witnessed the look in my eyes. "The article's being printed at the end of the year. Read it to find out."