Chapter 6
Freshman Year, Second Semester
As if he’s been summoned by my thoughts, my phone buzzes with a message from an unknown number.
I’m getting kicked out of my room.
I push my textbook off my lap and tuck my legs under me with a smile. Amber sprayed perfume between her boobs and dry-shaved her legs before she left our room ten minutes ago, which means this could only be one person.
Don’t freeze to death.
It’s not exactly freeze-to-death cold outside, but the mid-thirties is cold for Tucson. My windows are dark and frosty, and the dorm heater is struggling to keep up.
Heading to the library now. Might not make it alive.
Sucks to be you. I’m buried under three layers of fuzzy blankets, in a roommate-less room.
Now you’re just being cruel.
Not that I mind, but how’d you get my number?
Amber. It was my condition for leaving tonight. This is Jupiter, right?
It’s been a week since the basketball game with West, and I won’t lie and say I haven’t thought about him since.
And every time I think of him, I think of his story about a lonely boy, which made me cry, and how I can’t help but wonder if that story showed me a part of West he otherwise keeps hidden.
I think about how he voted for me to win, despite wanting the prize for himself.
I feel the weight of his hand on my shoulder and his multicolored eyes trained on mine when he said, I was just trying to impress you.
I had no idea he cared so much about my opinion, especially when he can write like that.
Funny and bittersweet. I was laughing all the way to the end, right up until the moment a tear landed on my keyboard.
Are you saying my roommate sold me out for sex?
She thinks we’re friends.
Is she right?
When my phone buzzes again, my reflexive grin is idiotic.
Meet me on the second floor of the main library and we can find out.
I glance again at the frosty windows. Nothing has ever sounded less pleasant than trudging across campus in the cold.
Too cold. You’d have to pry me out of these blankets.
Is that an invitation?
I blink at my screen, phone clutched in my hands, my mouth forming a small O. I quickly scan back through our conversation, trying to decipher anything suggestive in it. I brought up sex, but in a funny way. I mentioned my bed (more than once!). I dared him to pry me out of it.
But he’s not—he wouldn’t—I didn’t summon him here for a Sunday-night hookup.
Right?
Room 314.
I send the text with shaky fingers, and then I press my face into my pillow.
Eight minutes later, he knocks.
“Hey.” West stands with his shoes toeing the threshold of my room, his cheeks pink from the cold and his chest heaving like he ran here. His hands are on my doorframe, his fingernails a scratched-up Sharpie-purple that I would hate on literally anyone but him.
“Hi.” A beat passes in which neither of us moves, but then I stand back so he can shut the door behind him, shrinking the room by a factor of five thousand. He shifts his weight, and I blurt the first thing that comes to mind. “Want something to drink?”
He rakes his fingers through his hair. “Sure. Do you have milk?”
I laugh until a flash of embarrassment flits across his face. “Wait. For real?”
He lets his hair fall over his eyes and walks around me to survey the wall over my bed. It’s empty except for a handful of pictures from home and a poster of earnest writing quotes. Finally, West looks over his shoulder. “Or whiskey?”
“You want milk or whiskey?” I open the mini refrigerator that fits under my loft bed and stare at a half-empty Red Bull that I was rationing for later and the chocolate protein shakes that Amber drinks for every meal.
I look back at him. “Shockingly, we don’t keep either in our room, unless you want Amber’s almond milk.
It’s expensive, though, so she might kill you. ”
His shoulders creep up to his cheeks. “I was kidding. Whatever is fine. Or nothing, honestly.”
“The girls in 308 always have a stash of something, but they hate me ever since I accidentally left my retainer next to the sink four weeks in a row,” I say wryly.
His lips tilt. “It was a joke. I don’t even drink.”
“Yeah, neither do I when my parents are asking.” I flash him a smile, and he lets his bag drop to the floor.
“Do you really brush your teeth in the shower?” he asks as he bends over my desk to inspect a picture of me and a few friends from graduation. Most of them stayed in the San Diego area, but I didn’t have the grades to get into any of the UC schools. I doubt we’ll still be talking come Thanksgiving.
“Do you not? My brothers have done it for as long as I can remember. I thought it was standard.”
“Not standard. And not that hygienic, if I had to guess.”
“Oh.” I bite my lip, standing alone in a shoebox of a room with a guy who thinks I’m gross while my face heats like a solar panel. “I didn’t realize that was information I should have guarded with my life. That’s even more embarrassing than the quotes on my wall.”
He glances up at the poster that reads: The road to hell is paved with adverbs.
“No, it’s not. And anyway, my family calls the TV remote a ‘genie,’ and I didn’t know that was weird until I was, like, fifteen. We also howl at the full moon every month.”
I blink at him. “Why?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. We thought it was funny, and then we got superstitious about it.
One month we didn’t do it because it was raining or something, I don’t remember, and the next day my youngest brother broke his leg.
I had to pull him to school in a wagon for six weeks.
One day the wheel fell off, so I put him in a wheelbarrow.
A neighbor called my mom, and she yelled at me for not telling her about the wagon.
” He shuts his mouth abruptly and scowls like he regrets telling me all that. “We never missed a full moon again.”
“Never?” My real question is implied in my raised eyebrow.
West grimaces. “Never.”
I pull the blinds away from my window. “Is it—”
“Not until Tuesday,” he says.
“Damn.” I suddenly can’t imagine anything I want more in life than to see West howl at the full moon. “Well, thanks for sharing the weirdo misery. Glad to know I’m not alone.”
“I just told you multiple embarrassing things about my family. You owe me another one.”
I climb onto my bed and sit with my back against pillows while I motion for West to sit next to me. “Okay, here’s one. When I wanted a snack, I used to eat a piece of Wonder Bread slathered in margarine and white sugar.”
“Try harder. That shit was the fancy dessert in my house,” West says with a smile.
“I once opened my mom’s top dresser drawer—”
He holds up his hands. “I don’t think I want to know this—”
“—and it was filled with loose baby teeth. She admitted that whenever she played tooth fairy, she’d drop my and my brothers’ teeth in her drawer to save for later, but she never did anything with them. She doesn’t even know whose are whose.”
“That’s worse than I expected, and I expected parental sex toys.”
I lean across my twin bed and cover his mouth with my hand. “Don’t say that ever again.”
His eyes spark, and then he licks my palm. I shriek and rub my hand against his chest while he laughs. “I can’t believe you just licked me.”
“I can’t believe you’re surprised. Didn’t you say you have brothers?”
“Two older ones. Who are nice to me, by the way. How many siblings do you have, and do you torture them regularly?”
He hesitates, like he’s not sure of the answer, but finally settles on “Four.”
“Whoa.”
“Yeah.” West ducks his head, letting his hair fall over his eyes again like he does when he’s uncomfortable.
I didn’t realize I knew that about him until now.
Just like that, an entire portion of my brain is suddenly devoted to learning the story behind that reluctant four.
I’ll die if I don’t find out. I’m going to dream and daydream and write stories in my head until he tells me.
I’ve auto-deleted a mountain of info to make room for this clawing curiosity.
The names and faces and histories of any guy I ever had a crush on, for instance.
Gone in the bob of his Adam’s apple, erased in the slow dip of dark eyelashes against his cheeks.
West looks like he’s in agony. He hasn’t told me the story yet, but he will. I find the only ounce of patience I possess and change the subject. “You’re a horrible distraction. I’m supposed to be doing math homework.”
His shoulders slump in relief, and when his eyes catch mine, I see the unspoken Thank you in his rainbow irises. “Sorry, I’ll stop distracting you.”
“I don’t mind,” I say too quickly. “I can’t do my homework, anyway. I don’t understand it.”
“What are you learning?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” He picks up my textbook and starts thumbing through the pages. “Where are your notes from class?”
“I don’t have any.”
A scrap of paper filled with hastily scrawled dialogue flutters to his lap. “I think I’ve found your problem.”
“Inspiration strikes when it strikes, West. It’s not my fault that my Greco-Roman-inspired fantasy with an emotions-based magic system and a bodyguard romance is more interesting than trigonometry.
” Just like it’s not my fault that words stay put on the page, unlike numbers, which dance around whenever I look at them.
“You write during class?”
“I write during everything. I’m writing a kiss scene in my head right now.”
He chokes on his own breath. “The fuck?”