He was just making guesses. He didn’t know the truth. How could he? They didn’t know one another, and she would have remembered a face like his had she ever seen it in the past.
Then he placed his arms around her shoulders and declared that he knew all about how he was invading her personal space. Jia Li was fairly certain she was able to keep her face straight and unreadable, but her pulse raced at his touch and not in a pleasant way.
She hated lying, so she didn’t respond to what he had said about her. Instead, she decided to take some shots in the dark herself with the hopes of hitting a mark. “Since we’re playing guessing games, I’ll make some about you.” She tried to duck under his arms, but he tensed, and she thought he was going to grab her. She paused a moment and took a normal breath, mentally counting to three as she studied his dark eyes. Then she ducked again, but he let her go, and she took a few steps back, reestablishing her personal space.
“You’re probably very lazy. It’s not even five in the evening, and you’ve already been drinking. I bet it’s not all you do. You’re probably the rebellious type. Your parents have probably given you a free ride to this school, but you don’t want to be here, so you take out your anger on yourself and on everyone around you. Maybe you even think that screwing yourself over enough will force someone’s hand, and you’ll be expelled? That would sure show Mommy and Daddy, wouldn’t it?”
When she first began speaking, she was smiling her cynical smile, but by the end, it had disappeared. She really wanted to understand why he would be such an asshole. He seemed fairly intelligent for someone who did such stupid things. It was almost like he was putting on a show but for whom? The dryad wasn’t about to feel sorry for this jerk, so she shut off those thoughts. What was there to really understand? He was contemptible. That was probably all there was to him.