4. Jude
4
JUDE
Kylie’s pronouncement left us speechless, though she’d succeeded in getting our attention. Even Parker looked astonished. Then Mason responded with his usual empathy and charm.
“Not going to happen,” he said flatly.
“Why not?” Kylie demanded. “This a four-person suite. You were going to be assigned another roommate anyway. Why not me?”
“Because you’re a girl.”
“Woman,” I corrected, but Mason ignored me. “So? I’m Kylie instead of Kyle. It’s just one letter’s difference.”
“You know what else is one letter’s difference?” Mason asked. His posture was rigid, showcasing his six-foot height. Kylie, who couldn’t have been more than 5’ 4”, looked ridiculously small as she glared up at him. “Two X chromosomes versus XY. To stay on this side of the building, you need the Y.”
“Why?” she echoed, and I had to bite back a chuckle.
Mason tried for an easy-going grin. “You don’t want to stay here with strangers.”
“I’ll be doing that anyway,” Kylie fired back. “My scholarship won’t cover a single room.”
Unfortunately, she’d just handed Mason his next tactic on a platter. “We’ve all got one kind of scholarship or another. We can’t risk it by breaking the rules.”
I nearly snorted. As if Mason had ever cared about the rules.
“This is graduate school, not a private prep school. There’s no curfew. No rule against having girls in your room,” she stood up straighter, but she still looked like a mouse confronting a cat. “If you have girlfriends, you’d let them stay the night, right?”
I winced and glanced over at Parker, but it wasn’t clear if he was listening. “Yes,” I said, before Mason could. “But sleeping over isn’t the same as moving in.”
“It kind of is.” Kylie turned her attention to me. “What if I were your girlfriend and I slept here with you most nights?”
That was an intriguing thought. She was a real spitfire. “For one thing, I’m not sure we’d both fit in the top bunk.”
Kylie ignored that. Though one eye was blue and one was green, both seemed to be filled with fire at the moment. “This is graduate school. No one cares if members of the opposite sex sleep together. Hell, for all the housing office knows, you all could be gay and having sex together every night.”
Her logic seemed to have derailed a bit, but I went with it. “Thanks, we’ll keep that in mind.”
Mason tried a new approach. “If you’re seen coming in and out of here a dozen times a day, people on the floor are going to catch on. Someone will turn you in.”
“Are you going to turn me in?” she looked from Mason to me and back again.
“No,” I said.
“Yes,” Mason said.
Kylie turned her furious gaze on him. “Why?”
“Not to get you in trouble,” he said, holding up his hands in defense. “But because this is a men’s dorm room. It’s where we can relax and be ourselves.”
“And how would my presence stop you from relaxing or being yourselves?”
“This conversation isn’t very relaxing,” Mason pointed out.
“If you can’t be yourself around a woman, that’s on you, not her.” It was highly entertaining to see someone hold her own against Mason. It wasn’t something I’d witnessed much, and he and I had been friends for nearly a decade.
Mason shook his head. “At the end of the day, I just want to chill. To de-stress without worrying about offending anyone.”
Kylie’s dark lashes flashed as she rolled her eyes. “You have no idea who’d they assign to this room if I give up the spot. The new guy might hate your music. Or constantly shush you when he’s studying. Or get night terrors and wake up screaming. Why do you assume it’s automatically preferable to room with a man rather than a woman?”
“Because this is a men’s dorm.” Kylie’s persistence was exasperating him.
“That’s not it,” she said. “It’s because of your assumptions about women. We’re all delicate creatures that’ll take offense if you cuss. Or leave a towel on the floor. Or scratch your balls while you’re lounging around, watching TV.” I couldn’t help laughing at her interesting list of male behavior, and Kylie shot me a quick smile.
Mason ignored me. “So now I’m sexist just because I think that the men’s dorm rooms should be for men?”
“Yes,” she said.
My best friend threw me a look. I raised my eyebrow but didn’t comment—at least not about that. “Let’s sit down,” I said instead, gesturing to the table. I resisted the urge to pull out a chair for Kylie. If she was going to be living here, then that made her one of us, not a guest. But right now, it wasn’t looking like that was going to happen.
She ended up sitting a seat away from me while Mason sat across from us. “Parker? This affects you, too,” I told him. He nodded and sat at the end of the table. For a few moments, silence reigned. Kylie stared at Mason. She seemed to know he was the biggest obstacle. I couldn’t help watching her. She was young—it was likely she’d just finished her four-year degree last year. Mason was twenty-six and I was twenty-seven. We’d both put in a couple of years in the real world before returning for graduate school. Kylie looked young and small, but it was clear she wasn’t naive.
Women her age and her size were often referred to as cute, but at the moment, fierce was a better description. Not that she wasn’t pretty, though. First off, there were those fascinating eyes. It was impolite to stare, but they were both gorgeous. Sky blue next to forest green. They were quite the combo. They seemed all the bigger thanks to her thick lashes and eyeshadow. I wondered if she played up her eyes so that people would notice the heterochromia right away? It probably sucked to meet new people and know that they might interrupt at any moment to ask about it. Or worse… just stare.
Her hair was mesmerizing, too. It was straight and came down a little past her shoulders. The ends were blonde, but up by the roots, it looked more red. Was there any part of her that was just one color? It was an intriguing question.
Mason resumed the debate. “It’s not right, you living with a bunch of men.” He’d dropped the strangers tactic, because she was right—she was new here, so anyone she roomed with would be a stranger.
“Why not? I spent half my life sharing a house with my uncle and his son. I doubt there’s much that could shock me at this point.”
“That’s different. It’s family,” Mason said.
“So? I can tell you the exact moment my cousin discovered internet porn, because it took him about a month of heavy viewing before it dawned on him that he should use earphones. I’ve heard my uncle make pretty much every kind of old-man noise imaginable in the middle of the night. How is a small house with thin walls all that different from sharing a room?”
God, it was fun watching her stand her ground. She should be studying law, not business. I could just see her as a tiny total badass in the courtroom.
I took advantage of a momentary pause to dive in. “Let’s go back to the part about our scholarships. The music department’s pretty cool. Unless I sleep with one of the students I give lessons to, I don’t think anything’s going to affect my assistantship. What about yours, Mason?”
“Engineering’s not as lax as the music department,” Mason replied.
“But as you said before, you have influence,” Kylie said. “There’s no way you could’ve gotten the suite that everyone else wanted if you didn’t.”
I bit back a grin as I mentally applauded her. Stroking Mason’s ego was a good approach. Then I turned to Parker. “What about the business school? That’s where Kylie will be studying, too. Are they pretty strict over there?”
Parker looked completely checked out, but then he said, “About some things.” While it wasn’t exactly helpful, at least he’d answered.
Kylie looked back at us when it was evident Parker wouldn’t elaborate. “I don’t want to risk my scholarship either, but it really doesn’t seem like a huge deal in this day and age. And if I get caught, I’ll take the blame. I’ll say I pretended to be a guy or something.”
I couldn’t help snickering and even Mason looked amused. “So we won’t get in trouble, but we’ll look like the three most oblivious people on the planet?”
“Sure,” she said with an easy grin. “A small price to pay for a totally awesome roommate like me.”
We both looked at Mason. “Jude snores,” he said, trying one last angle.
“Only sometimes,” I protested.
“He sounds like a freight train.”
“I can live with that,” Kylie said.
Did she really know what she was getting into, though? “Mason spends most of his time in his boxers. He’s a total exhibitionist.”
“Jude sings in the shower loud enough to wake the dead.”
“Mason mansplains everything. Even to other men.” Kylie’s head looked like she was watching a tennis match as we lobbed insults at each other.
“Jude quotes from obscure British comedies that no one’s ever seen.”
“Mason—”
“Enough,” Kylie said, holding up her hands. Far from being daunted by our rapid-fire recital of true—and not so true—habits, she broke into an impish smile. “What about Parker?”
“He’s a madman,” I said with a grin.
“He’ll talk your ear off,” Mason added with the hint of a smile.
Kylie grinned. “I’ll have to watch out for that.” She probably hadn’t heard Parker say more than ten words since we’d found her, Goldilocks-style, in our suite.
“We’re not moving the beds back,” Mason said firmly. “The plan all along was to have them in one room so that we’d have more space out here.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to,” Kylie said quickly.
“And I wasn’t kidding about Jude’s snoring,” Mason said.
“Noted.”
“It’s your ass on the line if you get caught,” he warned.
“Understood.”
He shook his head. “All right, if the others are game, I’ll give it a shot.”
Kylie’s grin of triumph lit up her face as she turned to me. “I’m on board,” I said.
We all turned to Parker. Oddly enough, he needed no prompting. “I’m okay with it, too.” Maybe he was starting to emerge from whatever dark place he’d been in?
I smiled at my new roommate. “Looks like you won’t spend all day at the housing office tomorrow after all.”