by Tia Siren
“No,” Kelly said firmly. She found herself hoping Brittany would come back in to distract the football star.
“Come on, I’ll show it to you. You don’t even have to touch it.”
“I’m going to the library,” Kelly said, standing and gathering up her books.
“How come you won't talk to me?”
“I’m only going to talk to you for this project. That’s it.”
“You’re my project,” Cody said as he stepped forward, toward the young girl. She stepped back once, twice, and then found herself pressed against the wall. Cody came forward and pressed his body against hers. She felt his cock hardening beneath his shorts, pressing against the bottom of her flat tummy.
“Get away,” she said, and Cody seemed to weigh his choices before stepping back. She swept past him and hurried out of her dorm room, leaving the man alone.
Chapter Four
The first month of Kelly’s freshman year flew by. She seemed to be the only person in the school working hard. Even the library was raucous and annoying. The other freshmen seemed more intent on partying and hooking up than on getting good grades. But then came rush week, and of course Brittany was trying to get into a sorority, so the dorm room was empty most nights. Kelly took full advantage of that, sitting and studying or working on homework.
Professor Harrison had been piling work on them, and Kelly and Cody had been forced to spend a lot of time together. But they also had individual work, and one Wednesday night Kelly found herself staring at a problem the professor had given them. It involved a unique accounting question, one that Kelly was sure would never come up in most businesses, and she couldn’t find the answer no matter how many times she flipped through the textbook. It simply was an obscure, one-in-a-million problem, and she was about to pull her hair out because of it.
There was a knock at her door. She sighed and pushed back from her desk. She stretched her arms over her head as she made her way across the small room to the door. She turned the lock and pulled the door open.
“You,” she said, groaning when she saw Cody standing out in the hall. The man laughed. His teeth were perfect.
“Can I come in?” he asked.
“Brittany isn’t here,” Kelly said.
“I know actually. I want to leave a note for her. I think it would be easier. I always do better with notes than I do with talking to people in person.”
“You’re breaking up with her?” Kelly asked.
“No,” Cody said, shaking his head. He smiled again, but it was a sad smile that barely lifted the corners of his mouth. As Kelly looked him over, she realized that it looked like he had been crying. Did he cry? She couldn’t imagine the man ever doing something like that. He was just so…macho.
“What’s wrong?” Kelly asked. Cody looked left and then right down the hall.
“I don’t want to talk out here.”
“Come in,” Kelly offered, stepping back, already regretting it. The young man nodded and stepped inside. She shut the door, and he went and sat at her desk. He looked at her books and the paper she was working on, at the question she couldn’t answer.
“Studying?”
“I always am,” Kelly said. “You’ve been crying.”
Cody sighed. “I am a person, you know.”
“I just meant, why?”
Cody shrugged.
“You don’t know why you were crying?” Kelly asked as she sat on the edge of her bed.
“It’s just Brittany. I don’t know. I think she cheated on me.”
Kelly knew she had. Brittany hadn’t come home a couple of nights before, and in the morning she had let slip that she had been with a man named Brad from her American History class. “Haven’t you cheated on her?”
“Why do you assume that?”
“I just…” Kelly started, but she didn’t have a good reason, so she stayed quiet.
“No, I haven’t cheated on her. I wouldn’t do that. Did she cheat on me?”
Kelly was unsure of what to do here. Brittany was her friend, but she had cheated on her boyfriend, and Kelly found herself feeling sorry for the jock, as full of bravado, and himself, as he was.
“I don’t know,” she said quickly. She felt bad for the lie, but it wasn’t her place.
“I just…the girls I date, it’s always like this,” Cody said.
Kelly couldn’t help it. She felt the laughter coming. She tried to stop it, to swallow it back down, but she couldn’t. It exploded past her lips, a sharp, short bark of a laugh.
“Nice,” Cody said grumpily.
“I just…I mean, you date a certain type of girl, I imagine,” Kelly said, her cheeks burning.
“What type of girl do you think I date?”
“The Brittany type,” Kelly said, and they shared a laugh that time.
“You got me there,” Cody said.
“I love her, really I do. We’ve become good friends. But…she’s just…a certain type of girl, you know? She’s beautiful, but she knows it, and she enjoys attention, and she only has one or two things on her mind. Fun things.”
“So what kind of girl should I go for?” Cody asked.
“What do you look for in a woman?”
“Nice tits, nice body, nice face, nice legs,” Cody said, and then he laughed and buried his face in his hands. “That’s bad, isn’t it?”
“No. Not really,” Kelly said with a grin. “You have to be attracted to someone you date. But you should look for more than just that too.”
“What kind of girl are you?” Cody asked her.
“What do you mean?”
“Brittany is a certain type of girl. What kind are you? You’re pretty; you have nice legs. Why are you different?”
Kelly felt her cheeks burn once more. “I’m not willing to hop into bed with any hot guy who wants me too,” she said with a shrug. “I want to finish school and get good grades. I don’t care about drinking or having sex.”
“Why are you a business major?”
“My father owns his own business. He’s successful, and he’s happy. I want to do the same,” Kelly said.
“What does he do? His business, I mean?”
“He started a furniture store. He has eleven locations now, in three states.”
“Wow. That’s pretty cool. Is that what you’re going to do? Furniture?”
Kelly laughed and shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Then what are you going to sell?”
Kelly bit her lip and shrugged. “I don’t know. I have this idea, but…I don’t know.”
“What is it?”
The girl laughed, embarrassed. “I don’t know. It’s dumb.”
“Tell me,” Cody said.
“Cupcakes. I want to open a bakery maybe, but, like, freeze them and ship them out too. I like to bake. My grandmother taught me before she died.”
“You’re close to your family, huh?” Cody asked.
“Yeah.”
“I wish I was,” he said, and then he stood. “Here, come finish your work. I’ll leave Britt a note.”
Kelly nodded and went back to her desk while Cody borrowed a notebook and then went to sit on his girlfriend's bed. He scribbled for a while and then tore a sheet off. Kelly turned and watched him fold the note and set it on Brittany’s pillow. Then he scribbled something else down and tore it from the notebook as well. He stood and set the notebook down on Kelly’s desk, and then he began folding the paper he was holding.
“I’ll let myself out,” he said.
“Okay,” Kelly said. The guy wasn’t really that bad when he wasn’t being obscene and hitting on her. She watched him open the door and then turned back to her work. She frowned as she read the question again. Then something hit her in the side of the head, and she jerked backward. She heard Cody laugh, and then he pulled her door shut and was gone.
Kelly looked down to the floor to see what had hit her. It was a paper airplane. She bent in her chair and picked it up, unfolding t
he piece of paper and smoothing it out on her desk. She couldn’t help but grin. He had written a paragraph: the answer to the question she had been stumped by for so long. She rubbed her eyes and yawned. The guy wasn’t that bad at all.
Chapter Five
Kelly didn’t see Cody again until their next accounting class. Whatever he had written to Brittany had pissed her off, and she hadn’t had him around. As the days passed, Kelly found herself thinking of the football player more and more often. She’d lay in bed at night and think of him, and she’d try to study but couldn’t because she was thinking of him.
She was attracted to him. She had fallen for him, and she knew that was stupid. For one, she hardly even knew him, and for another, he was the exact kind of guy she knew she needed to stay away from, lest she end up like Jenna.
But as she sat down at her desk at the front of the room, nearest Professor Harrison’s desk, she found herself growing nervous. She was anxious to see the guy, and her palms were sweaty. He didn’t saunter in until right before class started, and she didn’t have time to say anything other than “hi” to him.
The class started, and it wasn’t long before Cody felt the need to entertain everyone, and at his own expense. The professor liked to pick on him, and he always played along, acting like a doofus. The professor brought up the hard problem Kelly herself had been stuck on for quite some time until Cody had rescued her, and though she knew Cody knew the answer, he pleaded ignorance and let the professor use him as the laughing stock for the first twenty minutes of class.
Kelly didn’t know why that made her so mad, but it did, and when class was over she hurried out of the room.
“Hey, wait up,” Cody called to her. She stopped and spun around.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Woah, are you mad at me?” he asked, holding his hands out.
“You knew the answer to that problem he gave us, and you just pretended you didn’t,” Kelly said angrily.
“So what? Why are you pissed off at me for that?” Cody asked her.
“I don’t know,” the girl said truthfully. “I just am.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It doesn’t make sense for you to act like a damned idiot when you’re not one,” Kelly argued.
“It’s just who I am, all right? It’s who I’ve always been.”
“What? A big dumb football player?”
“It’s more than just that,” Cody said.
“I know there’s more to you than just that. Why don’t you let everyone else see it? You bitch about the kind of girl you get, the kind you attract, the kind you go after, but that’s who you are, or at least that’s who you pretend to be. But you’re better, smarter. Let them know.”
“Fuck off,” Cody said suddenly, his anger rising. “You don’t know the first thing about me.”
Kelly was shocked by his sudden outburst. No one had ever cursed at her before. She felt stupid, like a little girl, but it brought tears to her eyes. She wiped them away quickly.
“You’re right,” she said, and she turned and hurried away. She didn’t look back, as much as she wanted to. If she had, she would have seen the wave of sadness that passed over Cody’s face and the regret in his eyes.
She had another class in half an hour, so Kelly went there early. She sat alone in the room, anger coursing through her body. But there was something else there too, something residing in the pit of her stomach. Her next class had started when she realised what it was: desire. And it wasn’t emanating from her stomach. It was pulsing inside her loins. She wanted Cody. He was brash and rude, funny and attractive—a million dangerous things all rolled into one package.
She wanted him badly. Kelly had felt this before. In high school there had been a guy named Brayden Booth. He had been tall and handsome and had played baseball. He had been a jerk, had dated around, had cheated on his girlfriends. He had shown Kelly the smallest bit of attention and then she’d been his. But she had thought about her sister every time she had wanted to lose her virginity to Brayden. She would just do the same here.
And the fact that she was a virgin, it kind of scared her. She knew the basics of course, but could a guy like Cody really be the kind of guy to experience her first time with? Surely he wouldn’t be caring, or understanding, or gentle. That was what she wanted for her first time, wasn’t it? A less experienced man, a man who would treat her more like a princess and less like just another girl.
Chapter Six
The same day Cody had left her in tears, Kelly found herself in the almost deserted food hall. It was late, almost ten, but Kelly had found herself eating dinner around that time for the last week or two. During normal dining hours the hall was just so damned loud. At ten, right before they stopped serving food for the night, the place was quiet. It was exactly what Kelly had been looking for, considering she shared a room with the queen of Ohio State and there were people coming and going each and every day.
Kelly was almost done with a plate of pasta and white sauce when she heard his voice.
“Hey, can I sit down?” Cody asked.
Kelly sighed and turned, looking at the man. “You going to yell at me some more?”
“I want to apologize,” Cody said, biting his tongue, since in reality he hadn’t yelled at her at all, only cursed.
“Fine. Sit,” Kelly said, and he did so.
“Late to be eating dinner, isn’t it?”
“I thought you were going to apologize.”
“Okay, I’m sorry.”
“For what?” Kelly asked.
“You don’t make anything easy on people, do you?”
Kelly laughed, despite the cold look in her eyes. “You aren’t very good at this.”
“I’m sorry for cussing at you. I am. I was…I was an asshole.”
“You were,” Kelly agreed. Cody laughed. “I eat at night because I like peace and quiet,” she explained.
“I’m starting to learn that about you.”
“I didn’t mean to make you feel bad, you know. I don’t know why I got so mad about you pretending like you didn’t know the answer to that question.”
Cody seemed to grow uncomfortable, and he waved his hand. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Hey, I was thinking, we have a bit of work to do before the next accounting class. We could work on it now, if you’re up for it.”
“Now?” Kelly asked.
“Sure.”
It was true. They did have to wrap up a few things for their imaginary company. They had settled on calling their company Fourth and Long, and they were a sporting goods store. Cody had pressed for that, and Kelly had gotten tired of fighting him on it. They needed to create a logo and find a real-world location they could pretend was their flagship store. Neither Cody nor Kelly were artistic, so they had been putting the logo off, but now they were running out of time.
“Okay,” Kelly said, nodding. “We could go to the computer lab or something.”
“How about your place? I mean, I figure Brittany is out.”
Kelly didn’t know if that was such a good idea. Of course Britt was out, and she probably wouldn’t come home until two in the morning, like usual. But the dorm room was so…private. Kelly didn’t think she wanted to be somewhere private with Cody. She opened her mouth to tell him no, but she surprised herself with what came out.
“All right,” she said. They got up and Cody threw her tray away for her, and then they walked across campus and to her dorm. She unlocked the door and led the way inside. She sat at her desk, and in the small room he could sit on the corner of her bed and be next to her, though facing the wrong direction.
“Thanks for taking this seriously,” she said. “I really want to ace this class.”
“Me too,” he said with a grin. “Second time’s the charm, right?” She giggled and then they got to work. An hour passed, and then another half an hour, and after that they had something to turn in. They had worked together on the logo and then foun
d an empty shop space nearby. After that they had gone online and worked out their opening inventory. Kelly was sure they had more work done than any other duo in the class.
“I should get going,” Cody said as he stood.
Kelly stood as well. “Okay,” she said, but she found herself wishing he wouldn’t go. She wanted him to stay. She needed him to go though. He had to leave, because if he didn’t, she was worried about what she would let him do to her.
He didn’t leave.
Chapter Seven
Kelly moved to the door, but Cody stayed by her bed. He reached for her arm when she passed, taking a hold of her gently. She stopped, letting herself be tugged toward him.
She opened her mouth, intending to ask what he was doing, but once she was facing him he bent and pressed his lips to hers. He tasted of his peppermint gum and passion. She kissed him back, her mind racing. She wanted him, wanted this, but she knew she couldn’t. She went to pull away, placing her hands on his chest, intending to push off him, but her fingers stayed there on the front of his T-shirt, feeling his hard pecs. She parted her lips for him and his tongue explored her mouth, slowly, sloppily.
He broke the kiss first, and she thought he would apologize, but instead he just moved his pouty lips down to her neck, one strong hand going to her hair and tugging her head sideways so he could have better access.
Kelly tilted her head back and closed her eyes, a contented moan escaping her lips. Her mind was like a car that wouldn’t start. It kept trying to, thoughts and ideas and images tried to chug to life, but his lips wouldn’t let them. She thought of Brittany, of the door opening, the girl coming in, hurt and angry. She thought of Jenna and her son. She thought of school. She thought of pushing Cody off, yelling no, slapping him. She thought of these things, but she didn’t do anything.
Cody’s hand that wasn’t entangled in her brown hair reached for her chest, feeling her through her shirt and bra. She wore shorts, and the skin on her legs erupted into goose bumps. Her nipples hardened, poking against the cup of her bra. She wanted his skin on hers, wanted his hands on her breasts, and she reached down and pulled the hem of her shirt up, stepping away from him as she slid her shirt off her body and let it fall to the floor. He grinned, and she smiled too.