Pulse (Contemporary new adult/college romance) (Club Grit Trilogy) by Brooke Jaxsen Read Free Book Online Page A

sometimes, not everything was a romantic comedy, that sometimes, people lived in real life.

Chapter Four, #DTF:
    T HE LAST THING I EXPECTED WAS THAT SKYLAR WOULD BE STUCK ON MY MIND FOR THE REST OF THE COMING WEEK. I didn’t go to that week’s #ThrowbackThursday and instead, went with Kim to Beta Rho Omega’s “Pub Night”, where they had a variety of artisan craft beers and ales. I was technically underage, but that didn’t really matter. In my acceptance packet to Omega Mu, I’d received a fake ID straight out of the engineering lab of UCBH, with a hologram and laminated surface to fool any bouncer and the on campus cops. Unlike a lot of frosh, I wasn’t stupid enough to wear stuff with my class year on it. I wasn’t about to advertise that I graduated high school around this time last year. High school was in the past, and what mattered right now, more than my present, was my future, as Samantha kept reminding me. Maybe that meant that courage came in a liquid form for me now (and that enthusiasm came in pills, and that bravery came in a syringe filled with powder and that I was assured none of the other girls had diseases and besides, we were sisters, why not be blood sisters, right?) but wasn’t my future worth it? Wasn’t I worth it?
    I knew what all the girls dreamed of. They either wanted guys like their dad or the men that would be the future fathers of their own children. They wanted the kinds of guys that could buy summer homes where everyone wore white to sunset parties and drank white wine at eleven in the morning on their white designer couches eating white brie on white toast crackers. They wanted the kinds of guys that had power, that were men while most were boys, that had #class instead of #swag but didn’t wear fedoras and watch children’s television shows. They wanted the kinds of guys that they read about in magazines, the kind that sometimes dated someone that wasn’t a celebrity but once they did, never left her because she either fucked his balls off like a porn star or kept them in her new designer purse purchased with his money.
    Of course, we weren’t just there to drink. I could get one of the older sisters to get me alcohol whenever I needed it, they had a run to the liquor store at least once a week. What I was there for was to get some of that enthusiasm and bravery. I was there for my drugs.
    Downstairs, in the basement, was where the guys got high. People jokingly called it “Rape Central”, unless they were jealous God Damn Independents, the people without sororities or fraternities to call their own, the kind that didn’t really belong in our world but were invited for reasons I didn’t really understand yet. I knew that the frat boys would fuck anything that moved, but the girls of Omega House had standards, even if many “applicants” to their bedroom were accepted. Only Omegas and Betas were allowed down in the basement so I had to flash my lavaliere, the little silver pendant that said OMG in white rhinestones on sterling that would be upgraded to one with white diamonds and white gold on graduation, to gain entry.
    The room was filled with smoke, the sweet skunk’s scent of weed as well as the mulled leather smell of tobacco, and a bunch of old furniture was downstairs, stuff that had accumulated over the years but was still usable: a few large leather couches with holes that were extremely plush as well as a mirrored coffee table that people were setting up lines of coke on, the way that some people set up their grocery and makeup hauls for Instagram shots. There’d be no photos here: we weren’t that stupid. One of the first rules that Omegas learned was that what happened in Beta Basement stayed in Beta Basement.
    “Hey,” I said, extending the word out. A few of the guys raised their hands.
    “’ey, girl,” said a guy I recognized: DeAndre, someone I’d met at one of the few obligatory frosh mixers and had subsequently taken with me when I ditched. He