response.
“I’m really glad to see you made it home safe and sound,” I admitted. My words sounded breathless. I had prayed so hard for that outcome. Even when he hadn’t wanted me, I was so happy that he was alive and unharmed.
“I missed you, Grace. More than you will ever know.”
He smelled delicious again. I wanted to press my nose into the well of his throat and breathe deep, imprinting his smell onto my memory banks. It would make my nighttime fantasies slightly more real and vivid. I forced myself to drop my hand.
“I—” I cast around for the right words to say. I wanted to explain myself in a way that still preserved my pride but conveyed I wasn’t a toy to be discarded and then picked up whenever he felt like playing with it again. “If you truly want to be friends, Noah, I can do that. But nothing else.”
His face remained unchanged, which made me falter. Maybe he did just want to be friends, and I had misread the entire situation. I gave him an uncertain smile and said, “I’ll see you around campus then?”
“Don’t friends hang out?”
I nodded my head. Yes, but we weren’t really friends. We were some weird, undefined category where we had some shared intimacy, yet were not in a real relationship.
“How about we study together at the library on Wednesday?” Noah offered.
I shrank back, tears at the back of my throat. I was right to be cautious. He wanted to just be friends, like his kiss-off letter said. He had referred to me as a little sister. I cleared my throat to make sure I sounded as easy going as he did. “Sure. I have Stats & Methodology that day, and I always need to review my notes after that class. Meet you there.”
I stood up then and walked to the door that led up to my third floor apartment. When I looked back to wave, Noah was standing there with one hand on the back of his neck and the other at his hip. He looked frustrated, managed a slight smile, and then nodded in return. I went upstairs, as confused as I had ever been.
***
I had three classes on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. They started at 8:00 a.m. and ended right after noon. I usually met Lana for lunch at the Quad Commons Café, the one place Amy says we should never eat. Lana rarely got up before eleven and scheduled all of her classes in the afternoon. Lunch was about the only meal we shared together on a regular basis, and it was usually the first of the day for her.
We had two choices on campus. The dining hall, which served a variety of cafeteria food, along with a salad and dessert bar, or the Quad Commons Café, where you could get deli sandwiches and light grilled items. Tuesdays, we would meet at the dining hall, because they had Taco Tuesdays, but most days we met and had big prepared salads from the QC Café.
Lana had already purchased everything and was sitting at a table unwrapping her salad.
She was wearing sunglasses, which I tipped down when I arrived at the table. She allowed me to see her swollen eyes before pushing the glasses up and waving me to my seat.
“Peter?” I queried. She mhmm’ed and I waited. She pulled out her phone and showed me a picture of some blonde in front of a mirror, wearing tiny panties and her shirt pushed above her bare breasts. They were rather large and obviously fake. Not Lana.
“You’re getting hit on by a stripper?” I guessed. Lana made a buzzing sound.
“Wrong. Peter forwarded me this charming selfie.”
“Intentionally?” I gasped in horror.
“No, I think he meant to send it to Luke Larson, his frat brother, but the phone auto-filled ‘Lana’ instead,” she explained in a careful monotone, as if any expression of emotion might break a dam she’d built.
“Done in by autocorrect.” I handed her back the phone. I wanted to delete the photo. It wouldn’t do any good for Lana to keep it on her phone. “What did you do?”
“I replied back ‘nice rack.’ He called me immediately asking what I was talking about. He tried to say that it wasn’t anything, just a pledge prank. The lies were so weak that I figured he wanted to get caught, forcing me to be the one to break up with him.”
“Did you?”
“I didn’t give him the satisfaction. He wants to break up to