Unspoken (The Woodlands) (6 page)

“Right, economically sound.” I popped my pill in my mouth and swallowed. “Maybe we should go out this weekend and put this pill to good use.”

Ellie’s face lit up. “Sounds like a great idea. I’m going to do some recon at class today to figure out where my future boyfriend will be partying.”

“Does future boyfriend have a name?”

“Ryan Collins.”

“Can’t wait to accidentally run into him at a bar this weekend.” I winked at her.

“Me either.” Ellie smiled wryly at me. “It’s okay to crush on Bo. Nothing to be embarrassed about.”

Despite my attempts at diverting her attention, Ellie had accurately identified the source of my bad mood. I gave her a tiny shrug. “It’ll be forgotten this weekend.”

Being the good friend she was, Ellie didn’t laugh in my face at this bald-faced lie.

To my surprise, when I arrived at class on Friday, Bo was already there, leaning against the door, waiting for me. He had a black eye and a puffy lip. There was a bruise over one of his cheekbones and his hands were scabbed and swollen. He could barely hold the pen in his left hand, yet he looked happier than I’d seen him all week.

I rewound my memory of the e-mail he’d sent. Sore?
Something
going on? My mind had jumped immediately to the bedroom because that’s where Bo spent most of his time in my imagination, but I’d apparently interpreted the whole thing wrong.

After I’d stared at him for what seemed like five minutes, he broke out in a huge grin and held out his hand. “Stop looking at me. I’m not supposed to smile.”

“What the hell, Bo?”

“The other guy looks worse?” he offered as some kind of half-baked explanation, leading me down to our now customary seats in the front.

I shook my head. “Were you fighting?” I whispered, not wanting anyone else to hear me, particularly not the two freshman girls who sat behind Bo and me and had clued in to what a magnificent addition he was to the homo sapiens species. I actually saw one of them give the thumbs-up toward heaven the other day in class after Bo leaned over the table to pick up a piece of paper that had floated off. You could bounce a quarter off that ass.

Bo leaned close to whisper back, “Yes. Why are we whispering?”

“Isn’t it illegal?”

“The Casino,” Bo explained in a normal tone, not caring who heard him. “Different regs there.”

“Like no regulations?”

“Pretty much.” He nodded and started to cross his arms but winced when he realized his hands were too tender to be tucked into his body.

I bit my lip to keep from asking a bunch of nosy questions. “Do you need me to take notes for you today?”

“Yeah. Do you mind?”

I shook my head. “When you e-mailed me and said you would be too sore for class today, I thought it might be something else.”

Bo gave a hoot of laughter. “Nope, but it
was
all consensual. You jealous?”

Yes, I was
, I thought sourly, but I didn’t want to admit it. For some reason, now that Bo was my lab partner, I’d begun assigning other ownership thoughts to him. What a crazy thing to do. I kept my mouth shut because I didn’t have a good comeback other than the truth, which I certainly was
not
going to share. Conveniently, the professor began his lecture, but Bo leaned over and whispered, “Nothing to be jealous about, Sunshine.”

Sunshine?
Bo slouched against his chair and spread his legs wide, brushing up against mine. He slung his right arm over the back of my chair. If I leaned backward, I could have pretended he was hugging me. Concentrating for fifty minutes was a bitch. At the end of class, I quickly packed my belongings, afraid that if I spent one more minute with him, I’d throw him down on the table and see what bruises he had hiding under his shirt today. And if I could kiss them to make them better. If I spent even one more minute with him, I would be, as Ellie had put it, toast.

Chapter Five

AM

D
ESPITE
OUR
BIG
TALK
OF
partying all week, Ellie and I stayed in and watched movies when the weekend rolled around. While we watched actresses drum songs on the bottoms of cups, I shored up my anti-Bo defenses. I made a new list of excuses why I shouldn’t be crushing on him and ran through them each morning. None of them were very good, but that wasn’t the point. If I could make it through this semester without tearing my clothes off in biology class, the little white lies I told myself would be worth it. When Monday rolled around, I intentionally arrived late to class and sat in the back. I didn’t remember much of the lecture, as I spent the whole time staring at Bo’s head and wishing I was sitting right next to him. Bo turned around once and found me in the first pass. We stared at each other for what felt like an eon but was probably seconds. I couldn’t read his emotions but I knew what I was feeling.
Regret.

On Tuesday, I met up with Ellie back at the apartment after classes were over. When I came through the door, she shot me a pleading glance.

“What’s up with the puppy eyes?” I peered at Ellie, who was standing with her hands clasped in front of her next to the paisley sofa we’d bought from a garage sale on the west side. It was so hideous—blue with red floral paisley designs all over looking like grotesque snails—that we both agreed it had circled around to awesome. Plus, it was super comfortable. We theorized the person who’d bought it was colorblind and sat on it and felt as if he was lying in marshmallows. Then he fell in love and his new partner made him throw it out. At least that’s the story that Ellie and I made up.

“I need to ask you for a huge favor.” Ellie looked pitiful and hopeful at the same time. Like I would ever say no to her. Ellie had been my rock since we were kids. Half my courage in sticking it out here at Central came from knowing she was standing right beside me.

“Sure, buttercup. What do you need?” I flopped down on the sofa, tossing my phone on the coffee table.

“Willyougotodinneroncampustoday?” Ellie spilled out her request so fast that it was like one long word. I thought she was joking at first because Ellie knew I never ate meals on campus. Not since about midterms of my freshman year. Not since the unspoken words and low murmured whispers turned to actions. But when she didn’t laugh or give me a verbal cue that it was just a prank, I turned to look at her.

She gave me a pained, wry smile. “It was a stupid idea.” Unlocking her hands, Ellie came to rest on her side of the diseased-looking marshmallow.

“Tell me about it,” I said quietly. The invitation was all she needed. Turning to me, Ellie hitched one leg up on the sofa. As I looked at her glowing face and her sparkling eyes, I knew I was going to be eating on campus tonight.

“I’m totally in lust with that guy, Ryan, that I told you about from my Rocks for Jocks class. I need to know more about him,” Ellie babbled. “I’m pretty sure he’s a freshman. Maybe on the baseball team? I mean, I assume he’s a jock because why else is he taking that course?”

“So he’s eating where tonight?”

“Oh, um, I overheard him say he was meeting ‘the guys’ at the Quad Commons Café.” She blushed and said, “I don’t know what it is about him that I find so adorable, but he’s all dorky cuteness.”

“We need to do a little covert stalking is what you’re saying,” I finished for her.

She nodded. “I know I’m asking for something big here.”

“Nah.” I shrugged. “I’ve been thinking that my self-imposed exile is kind of dumb. How am I supposed to crush on Bo Randolph if I avoid campus?”

“You really want to go?” Ellie looked skeptical.

“And miss the opportunity to stalk this guy with you?” I grabbed her hand. “Tell me more.”

As Ellie described his mini Mohawk and retro cool eyeglasses, I mentally assured myself that everyone had moved on from my sex life. There had to be other scandals, other bits of gossip that people were exchanging. By the time Ellie had finished giving me an exhaustive rundown of this guy’s entire physical appearance from his eyebrow piercing to his dark wash jeans and plaid button-down shirt, I’d convinced myself that I had nothing at all to fear. What could anyone say that they hadn’t already said? Clay Howard’s threats were probably hollow. He couldn’t be on campus all the time, and the likelihood of running into him in the QC Café was very low.

Still, I spent an inordinate amount of time later that day wondering if my jeans were too tight or my T-shirt showed too much cleavage. In a fit of uncertainty, I changed into a pair of loose fitting khakis and a white button-down shirt and left the room to find Ellie inserting earrings in front of the hall closet dresser. Ellie looked me over and almost stabbed herself through the cheek with the earring post.

“Are you going to work as a clerk in a shoe store?” Ellie asked with a heavy amount of disdain.

I looked down at my clothes. “Too bland?”

“Girl, even the people at the Dockers store would be embarrassed to be seen in that outfit.” Ellie frowned. She was right. Ordinarily I had no problems picking out the right outfit, including for class, but for some reason tonight I was a mass of nerves and indecision.

“We don’t have to go,” Ellie said in a rush, measuring my anxiety by the hideousness of my outfit. She met my gaze in the mirror and her eyes softened in sympathy. That look sent a steel rod up my spine.

I hated pity more than I hated the gossip. Maybe she gave me that look on purpose, to help me find my courage. I turned on my foot and went into the bedroom, where I picked up a pair of discarded skinny jeans and a loose silky top. I pulled on a pair of heavy socks and a battered pair of riding boots. My heavy felt, navy-blue peacoat completed the outfit. I looked a lot less like Dockers layaway and more like hip young person. I felt better, too.

The past year had taught me that sometimes the best defense in the world was a stony glare and the right attire. Going into the lion’s den dressed like I was dressed for church was bound to create even worse talk than looking like a prostitute. The latter they expected, the former said I was trying too hard. The vultures never liked anything more than cutting down people who set themselves up.

I picked up my phone and ID card and headed out to meet Ellie. She was putting on the last touches of makeup. The au natural look required as much effort as the heavily made-up look. Guys never knew the difference, but the cosmetic industry didn’t have fifty shades of natural and blush lipstick because girls could run around with bee-stung lips just by biting them heavily. Biting led to chapped lips and teeth marks.

We didn’t talk as we walked toward the commons. Ellie seemed to instinctively understand that I didn’t have much to say. The campus looked magical in the evening light. The snow sparkled where it was illuminated by the lampposts that marched along the sidewalks, intersecting the campus lawns. Central was an old campus, over one hundred years old, and even though it had been modernized, the feel of it was nostalgic. The streetlights were made of wrought iron instead of hard steel. The callboxes looked like old-fashioned telephone booths. Even the sculptures positioned throughout had an old-world charm to them.

Maybe the student body took cues from it. For all the modern, liberal thinking that was preached from the professors’ podiums, the men and women who took classes here had some deep-seated, old-fashioned views. Girls who hooked up a lot were sluts. Guys who did the same were studs. Girls who wore their hair short and their pants long were lesbians. Guys who used too much product and cared too much about their appearance were gay. And those who didn’t conform were weirdos and easy objects of scorn.

During my freshman year, I’d have given anything to be thought of as a weirdo or gay. Being deemed a slut meant that you were fair game to every asshole on campus. They could slap your ass or casually grab your boob during the sober, daylight hours. Once the sun went down and the beer came out, the groping was more obvious. Then it was a full body press, trying to corner you in a dark spot and stick their hand up your skirt. If you said no at any time, you were a bitch or cock tease or cunt. And because no one wanted to admit being turned down by the class bicycle, rumors started anew.

I remember one guy whom I’d never met, never talked to, bragging in the library to a few others in his study group about how he had to force me off his dick so he could get another beer, that I was just
so
hungry for him. Another guy regaled the group with how he’d poured beer on his penis and then forced me to suck him off. They all laughed when he described, graphically, how he had held my hair in place and how the gagging noises I made only made him harder.

None of it had ever happened, but it didn’t stop me from feeling violated, used, and dirty. It wasn’t one thing that drove me off campus, but a hundred wounds both large and small. I felt that if I spent one minute more than necessary there, I would be nothing more than a dried honeycomb, all the life sucked out of me, exposed and used.

As Ellie and I walked down the sidewalk, no one stared at me. The cement at our feet didn’t crack in half. We were just two students in a big crowd, some moving toward the commons and some away. I felt anonymous for a moment, and I almost stumbled when relief poured through me.