NOAH #3
I ran faster, losing breath soon enough, then slowing down.
Dormitories were lined up on the northern part of campus, only a little distant from the houses that fraternities and athletes had.
And mine, a long, two-story building, was the closest. I rushed in and up the stairs, then down the first floor hallway until I reached the last door on the right.
I barged in as soon as the key turned in the lock, then slammed the door shut and released a deep exhale.
Fucking fuck. There were many ways to embarrass me, for sure, but none were as effective as the public splashing of a beverage onto my face.
And that goddamn, puck-loving, ice-skating, physics-failing asshole did just that in a house that packed half our campus.
By morning, everyone would know about it.
And everyone would laugh at me behind my back.
I was so screwed.
I needed to transfer to another college. Preferably another state. Or maybe to Germany. That sounded nice and far enough. And, ideally, I would pull that off before sunrise.
After I showered the stink of juice and booze and other people’s sweat off my body, I pulled on my black boxer-briefs with eggplants printed all over them as some charm to attract, er, eggplants.
Back in my room, I slipped under the comforter and lifted a copy of Principles of Stellar Evolution and Nucleosynthesis that I’d found in the library a few days earlier.
The room was warm, but the heat of embarrassment was warmer.
It radiated out of me. It tugged on my attention in every way. There was no reading tonight.
I dropped the textbook and looked around. It was Friday. It was night. The campus was buzzing with people falling in love, having sex, vomiting, eating junk food at odd hours, and living their lives to the fullest. And here I was, lying in my bed.
It was a good bed. Winning a Physics Olympiad guaranteed a lot of perks.
Scholarship, a spacious dorm room all to myself, access to all physics teachers at any time of the day because they wished to network and shape me.
It also guaranteed a nice income from tutoring, especially when I realized that demand was such that I could choose my own students.
So I chose the best of the best. Gone were the days of tutoring football jocks in exchange for protection like I’d had to do in high school. Little good did that do.
My room was a cozy place. In fact, it was the coziest place I’d ever lived in.
Its walls were a dark cream, the closet and bookshelves matched the same type of wood and shade of brown, and the rug was a dark red over the deep brown hardwood floor.
The desk was slightly off in tone, a lighter shade of brown than all else, with a black office chair screwing up my feng shui.
Lamps were my main source of light, although there were lights on the ceiling, too.
The bed was bigger than the one I’d had at home, where my parents had designed a room with a lot of workspace and little comfort.
My trophies from local, state, and national level science fairs and physics competitions dotted a shelf above my bed.
Rocket models and spaceships added soul to the same shelf.
Posters of alien worlds in all their retro sci-fi glory featured Foundation’s Terminus and Dune’s Arrakis, as well as a few others that weren’t based on any existing intellectual property, but were simply an artist’s ideas of what a gas giant’s surface would look like.
Above my bed, a string of dim white Christmas lights stretched under the bookshelf, over another poster — this one was of Babylon 5 — and down to the outlet behind my nightstand.
I closed my eyes and dropped my glasses on the nightstand, then sank into the big, soft pillow and exhaled with a groan.
As I did, I realized several things at once.
It was lucky beyond belief that Matt had turned Sawyer away for me.
I had no time and no use in that endeavor.
However, at the same time, I found myself imagining sitting next to him, our knees touching by accident, his long locks of hair falling over his face as he followed the equations I was explaining.
He really was a breathtaking one. The tattoos, the earrings, the piercing in his left nostril, and those gorgeous, half-moon eyes.
This is why it’s lucky Matt put a stop to it, I thought.
I would never be able to concentrate and neither of us would get anything out of those sessions.
I would secretly drool over him and make blunders while stammering my explanations for his problems. He would learn nothing.
A talented physics student would have less chance of success because I wouldn’t direct my time and attention to them. And that was the end of it.
No matter the delicious eye candy that Sawyer was, he would be a horrible waste of my time. Besides, he’d made me into the biggest loser and gossip on campus tonight.
I would be smart to keep reminding myself of that.