“Yeah. We made up. He was so sweet. Look.” She showed me a silver necklace with a little lopsided heart. One of those generic things that you could get in nearly any jewelry store.
“Wow, pretty.” Yes, because the shiny thing made up for him forcing her to have sex when she didn’t want to.
“He said he’s going to be more understanding.”
“I hope you hold him to it.” She didn’t answer and just kept staring at the necklace. “Seriously, Katie. I just don’t want you to get yourself into a bad situation.”
“I’m fine.”
I wanted so, so much to believe her.
“Do you want to go to the library with me?”
“Yeah, sure,” she said, staring down at the necklace. It nestled perfectly between her boobs, something I’m sure Zack had planned on.
She was distracted the entire time we were at the library, too busy texting or doing whatever on her phone to pay attention to her textbook. I also caught her fingering the necklace more than once.
About an hour into her study time, Brittney showed up and dragged her over to a corner where she could squeal about the necklace. Granted, I definitely had done the squealy-happy dance before, but for some reason, this one left a sour taste in my stomach.
Katie came back and packed up her stuff.
“We’re going to the movies to see that new Nicholas Sparks. You want to come?”
“I should really get this done. I’m like, way behind.” I pointed to my book. “I wish I could.” Seriously, I did. Although, Trish would probably see it with me if I asked her.
“Okay, then. I’ll… um… see you later?” It sounded like a question. Of course I’d see her later. We lived in the same room.
“Yeah.”
She gave me an almost sad smile before she left. For the first time, I felt sad for her.
The Zan Parker box rattled open after Katie left. I’d put duct tape on it, but I couldn’t keep it closed any longer.
We’d had two semi-normal interactions. For the first time, I didn’t want to rip his head off and spit down his throat. And, I would dance naked in the football stadium before I admitted it, but he’d almost been funny.
He probably thought I was a freak for the whole pinky swear thing, but he’d been the creepy guy who’d given me tea with a poem on the cup, so maybe we had weirdness in common.
Oh, hell no.
I had nothing in common with Zan Parker. Nothing.
“Hey, long time no see.”
Simon’s voice made me almost pierce my tongue with my teeth. He laughed and sunk into Katie’s chair, putting his hand on my shoulder.
“Whoa, calm down. Just your gay friend, not a serial killer.”
“How do I know you’re not a serial killer?”
“Because I actually have social skills.”
“I’m sure there are plenty of charismatic serial killers.” None came to mind, but if he gave me a moment, I was sure I’d come up with one.
He grinned.
“Not as charismatic as I am.”
I shook my head, fighting a smile.
“I miss you,” I said.
“I know, I miss you. I’ve been so busy with everything, not to mention, um, there’s this guy…” he trailed off and sighed a very un-Simon dreamy sigh.
“Oh, really? And when do I get to meet this fellow and make sure he’s up to your standards?”
“Soon. We’re not really a definite thing yet. Boys are complicated.”
Now it was my turn to sigh.
“Tell me about it.”
“How’s the Brothers of Doom sitch?”
I said the first thing that came to my mind. “Confusing.”
“How so? No ducklings?”
“It’s… Nothing. It’s fine.” Wow, I was actually able to reel the words back in before I blurted them out. Maybe I was making progress.
“No way, you do not get to dangle a piece of something delicious like that in front of me and then snatch it back.”
“You’re going to think I’m a freak.”
“Lot, I went to one of those religious camps where they try to pray away the gay. I can handle it, I swear.”
So I launched into telling him about the bizarre encounter with Zan, leaving out as many details as I could, including the pinky swearing.
He listened without comment until I was done.
“You don’t have to be ashamed of being nice to him. Maybe you’ll turn into one of those people who’s able to forgive.”
“You don’t just turn into one of those people, Simon. You either are one, or you aren’t. I’m just not. It’s enough that I told him I don’t blame him as much as Zack, but he was still part of it.”
“People can change.”
I closed my book. “How long have you known you were gay?”
“Since I saw Fabio on the cover of one of the romance novels my mother hid in her underwear drawer, why?”
“You haven’t ever changed your mind?”
He narrowed his eyes. “I know what you’re getting at, and these are two different things. Think about it: What if Will had caused the accident? What if he had been drunk and driving?”
“It didn’t happen that way.” I knew what he was getting at, and I didn’t like it.
“Hypothetically.”
“You know my answer. The difference is that I love Will. He’s my brother. He could do anything, and I would still love him.”
Simon paused before he said, “What if you loved Zan?”
I snorted. That was never going to effing happen.
“Just saying,” he said, getting up. “Come on, I’ll buy you one of those tea drink things and we can go watch whatever sappy movie you want.”
“Can’t. I have homework.” He glared at me, and I gave in a bit. “But you could buy me some tea anyway.”
Simon bought me tea and he filled me in on the latest doings of the millions of clubs he was in. It gave me a chance to focus on something else. Something outside my head.
I went back to my homework, but I didn’t get very far. I called it a night around eleven and went right to bed.
Katie slunk back in around midnight and I pretended to be asleep.
Simon’s ‘hypothetical’ question kept me up half the night.
After several hours, I decided that imagining Will had been the one driving got me nowhere. He hadn’t been driving. End of story.
Chapter Nineteen
Zan
“So this is it, huh?” Tate took a drag off his cigarette and stared up at my dorm. He’d managed to get his car project, a 1973 Camaro, to run well enough to drive it down.
I nodded and leaned down on his car. I was skipping all my Monday classes to hang with him. If I was going to do this, I was going to do it right. No safety joint. No one tequila shot.
All the way. Back to my comfort zone.
“You been to any good parties?” he said, tossing the cigarette into the grass.
“Not really.”
“Then what have you been doing? Studying your books like some smart kid?” He glared at a few guys who gave his car the once over.
“I’ve been running a lot.”
“Don’t tell me now you’re going to turn into one of those granola freaks?”
“No worries. Hey, you wanna get out of here?” I didn’t want to invite Tate into my room.
“Sure, let’s roll.”
Tate had brought a bunch of weed and a few pills with him. I stuck to the weed, even though he threw a bag of pills at me.
“For later.” I shoved them in my pocket. I could always flush them after he left.
“What’s up with you man? I thought you died or something.” We were parked in a little gully on the side of a bridge overlooking the river, both sitting on the hood of the car and passing a joint back and forth.
“Just been busy.”
He turned his head and grinned at me. “Right, busy. What’s her name?”
“What?”
“The only time a guy bails on his friends is for a girl. She hot?”
“It’s complicated.”
I saw him nodding out of the corner of my eye. “So she’s not hot.”
I couldn’t tell Tate that Charlotte wasn’t just hot. She was certainly that, but she was also beautiful and sweet and funny and adorable. She made me want to do stupid shit like quote Rumi in the moonlight and buy her sparkly things for her ears. She made me want to grab her and kiss her and run my fingers through her hair and promise to bring her the moon.
“Dude, you’re spacing out,” Tate said.
“Sorry.”
“Damn, you are so whipped.” He laughed and blew some smoke in my face. “You fucked her yet?”
“No.” The last thing I wanted to do was fuck Charlotte. I wanted to have sex with her, but not just fuck her once and have that be it. Once wouldn’t come even close to being enough with her.
“What are you waiting for?”
“I told you, it’s complicated. She isn’t that kind of girl.”
“Calling it complicated just means that you’re too much of a pussy to make a move. The Parker I know would never let a chick run his life.”
I watched a cloud slide across the sky, changing and reforming.
“Maybe I’m not that guy anymore.”
“Whatever. I think all this reading and shit has made you into a moron.” He tossed the remains of the joint in the river. “Just quote her that poetry you started reading. Girls love that crap.”
I tossed in my unfinished joint as well.
“So what are we doing tonight? I didn’t bail on work just to come down here and mope with you about a girl.”
“I don’t know.”
“Guess we’ll just have to find something.” Tate grinned in a way that made me think twice about the decision to invite him up. But only for a moment. Not long enough for me to say no when he told me to get in the car.
Lottie
A bang against my door woke me from a half sleep. The room was just starting to lighten, and Katie was dead to the world, snoring with her arms and legs thrown out everywhere.
The bang sounded again, so I got up and looked out the peephole. There was some guy I didn’t know standing, or rather leaning, and a very messed-up looking Zan Parker leaning on his shoulder.
What. The. Fuck.
“Open up. Parker wants to sleep with you.” Great. The guy I didn’t know was clearly bombed out of his mind. How they’d even gotten up here was a mystery.
I had to open the door so they wouldn’t wake up the entire hallway.
“He lied. You’re totally hot,” the strange guy slurred. Zan was totally silent. He may have been passed out.
“Look, I don’t know who you are, or why you’re in front of my door in the middle of the night, or what you’re on, but you can go now.”
“Whatever, bitch,” he said, shoving Zan from his shoulder. He dropped like a stone before I could catch him. Not that I would have been able to hold his weight anyway.
“I’m outta here. You college kids are all too uptight.” He stumbled toward the elevator and was gone.
There I was, with a fucked-up Zan Parker at my feet.
“Charlotte?” His eyes opened and he squinted up at me. He really needed a haircut.
“Why the hell didn’t you go to your own room?”
“Couldn’t remember the number.” He closed his eyes again.
“But you remembered mine.”
“Yup.”
I stared down at him, wishing I could just be a heartless bitch and shut my door and leave him there. Or drag him to the elevator, push him in and watch the doors close.
“Shit fuck.”
I grabbed his arm and tried to get him to his feet.
“You wanna give me a little help here?”
“Trying.” He got his long legs under himself and with my help, we got him to a standing position. “Now what?” he said. Yeah, my thoughts exactly.
“Can you walk?” I didn’t want to wake Katie up. Partly because I didn’t want to be a bad roommate and partly because I didn’t want anyone to know what I was doing. Hell, I didn’t even know what I was doing.
Slowly I got Zan to move his feet forward and got him to the elevator. My plan was to get him back to his room so he could sleep it off.
I just hoped we didn’t get caught. I probably wouldn’t get in trouble, but I didn’t want anyone, even an RA, to know about this random act of kindness. If that was what this was.
I got him in the elevator and leaned him against the wall so I could have a break. If he wasn’t so freaking tall, it would have been a lot easier.
I yawned and Zan rolled his head so he could squint at me again.
“Charlotte.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not sure which of the thousand things you’ve done wrong you’re sorry for now and I doubt you know either, in this state.”
The elevator opened on his floor and I got his arm over my shoulder again as we struggled our way to his door.
“Where’s your card?” I said.
He opened his eyes for only a second. “What?”
I shoved him against the door and started the lovely task of searching his pockets. Of course he couldn’t be the kind of person who wore their card on a lanyard. I didn’t either, but I always kept my card in my back left pocket.
He watched me while I searched, finding it in his back pocket. I tried really hard not to think about where my hands were going, and that only a little bit of fabric separated my hand from his skin and other things.
I moved him to lean against the wall and slid the key card into the door before opening it as slowly as I could. There was enough light from the hallway to see that his roommate’s bed was empty and I breathed a sigh of relief as I turned the light on.
One side of the room was a disaster. Clothes and cans and random crap everywhere. The other side was orderly and sparse. I figured that was the Zan side. I got him in and sort of shoved so he fell onto the bed, banging his head on the wall.
“Ow,” he moaned.
“Shut up,” I hissed. My brother and Simon were on the other side of that wall, and they were the absolute last people I wanted to find out about this little adventure.
“‘We are the mirror as well as the face in it,” he muttered, opening and closing his eyes. “‘We are tasting the taste this minute of eternity.’” I swung his feet up on the bed and started yanking his shoes off. “‘We are pain and what cures pain, both. We are the sweet cold water and the jar that pours.’”
How the hell he was with it enough to quote poetry but barely able to walk, was beyond me.
“Charlotte?”
“What?” I finally jimmied his shoes off and chucked them on the floor. I guessed it didn’t matter if he slept in his clothes, because I sure as hell wasn’t undressing him.
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying.” He tried to sit up, but I shoved him back down. “Just shut up and stay here. I’m going to get you some water.”
He nodded and stayed put. I peered out into the hallway and dashed as fast as I could to the bathroom and back with a glass I’d found on his desk. I didn’t really care if it was dirty or not. He wouldn’t know the difference.
Zan was on his side when I came back.
“Here,” I said, shoving the water at him. He took it, but his hand was wobbly, so I held it for him as he sipped.
There, I’d done something good for my karma. That was it, I was done.
“Charlotte?”
“WHAT?!” I snapped before I realized how loud my voice was. Shit. I clapped my hand over my mouth, as if I’d screamed a curse word in church.
“I’m Boo Radley.”
“You’re what?” He sort of slurred it, so I wasn’t absolutely sure that was what he said. What did Boo Radley have to do with anything?
“I’m Boo Radley.” His e
yes closed and he went limp on the bed.
“Aw, shit. Zan, Zan!” I tapped his face and his eyes fluttered open before closing again. Good, he’d just passed out.
I put the glass back on his desk and stared at him for a minute. If I was being completely objective, and I was only doing so because I was tired, I would say that he was good-looking.
The dark hair, the eyes, his height. Good body, too. If I was a different kind of girl, I might have pulled his shirt up just to see what was under there, stomach-wise. I wasn’t that kind of girl.
Zan twitched in his sleep, his face creasing as if he was concerned about something. He breathed deeply and his face relaxed again.
Okay, so he was good-looking. Handsome, even. In kind of an old-fashioned Mr. Darcy kind of way.
I shook my head to snap myself out of the little hallucination I’d just indulged in. I was clearly suffering from sleep loss.
I took one last glance around the room. He had lots of photographs pinned (against dorm policy) to the wall. All of them were in black and white, but I didn’t gaze long enough to see details. I wondered if he’d taken them. I twitched the curtain aside and saw that the sun would be up soon. I had to sneak back to bed before anyone saw me.
“This never happened,” I said to Zan. “Got it?” I was met by the sound of his quiet breathing. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
Chapter Twenty
Zan
Someone had apparently been hacking into my brain with a chainsaw as I’d slept. Or at least that was what it felt like when I woke up the next morning. Correction, it was the next afternoon when I glanced at the clock on my desk.
Fuck.
I looked down and found I was still in my clothes from yesterday, but someone had removed my shoes. I had a fuzzy memory from the night before, but I must have imagined it.
There was a half-full glass of water on my desk that I grabbed and chugged, if only to get the nasty taste out of my mouth.
I had no idea what happened to Tate. The last thing I could remember clearly was the two of us crashing a party at the local apartment complex and drinking a lot and him snorting some of the pills. I couldn’t remember snorting any, but that didn’t mean anything.