Shameless King

by Maya Hughes

  Heath laughed and held his hand up, trying to catch the server’s eye to order another round.

  “Speak of the devil, looks like her shift is starting.” He turned, grinning at me. Why is he grinning at me like an idiot? Well, a bigger grin than usual. So what if Mak was starting? No big deal. I tramped down my initial reflex to scan the room for her.

  I turned in the booth to see her hurrying past the bar. No matter where she was going, she was always rushing like there were only so many hours in a day and she was determined to cram an extra three hours’ worth of studying into each one.

  She shrugged off her coat. The buttons of her shirt gaped open a bit, and I caught a glimpse of a black bra underneath. My mouth watered as I imagined toying with her nipples and getting the peaks nice and stiff before teasing them with my tongue and teeth until she begged me to fuck her. She always smelled like books and strawberries. Like you were out reading in the middle of a field under the summer sun. I bit back a groan as she got ready to start her shift. These thoughts kept creeping up on me. Hitting my when I least expected it. Her lips when she asked a question. Her leg when she jiggled it while reading. Her ass when she bent over to pick up something out of her bag. Mak was a one-woman wrecking crew, and my self-control was slipping.

  She greeted the bartender and other servers. It wasn’t often I got to sit back and watch her. Wrapping a half apron around her waist, she darted into the kitchen, and I drifted back to the conversation the guys were having.

  Coach had them go over tapes for the game coming up in two weeks. October was right there, and I needed to be on the team. Heath and I usually looked forward to a chance to go up against two Kings, Ford, and Colm, who used to play at Boston College, but they’d turned pro over the summer.

  Everyone stopped talking and stared at the end of the table as baskets of fries and burgers passed down the row. Makenna had a tray piled high with our food balanced in her hand.

  “Hey, your other server had to go. I’ll split the tip with her, so don’t worry about that, and I’ll be right back with your drinks,” she said, hurrying away, not making eye contact with me. Her ignoring me brought up some irrational, ugly feelings I didn’t like. She was treating me like any other person, not like we hadn’t been huddled together over the past three weeks for hours on end at her request, working away. The guys dug into their food, but I couldn’t touch mine. She reappeared with our drinks, sliding them across the table.

  “Books, I was just telling the guys how surprised I was that I was carrying so much of the workload this semester. I’d have thought coming from Stanford your work effort would be a bit more nose to the grindstone. She’s always staring at me and getting lost in my eyes. Then she’ll go off on tangents about how irresistible I am and how she can never really focus around me.”

  I grinned up at her as her eyes narrowed behind her horn-rimmed glasses. She slid my drink toward me with enough force that it hit my hand and sloshed half of it over the rim and directly into my lap. The guys burst out into guffaws as I grabbed napkins to wipe the beer off my lap.

  “Whoops, sorry. I must have been lost in your eyes and got distracted.” She made a poor attempt at stifling her smirk.

  “By my eyes?” I tucked my hands under my chin and batted my eyelashes at her, and she rolled her eyes.

  “No, by the giant booger in your nose.” She gingerly rubbed her nose with the back of her hand.

  My hand flew to my nose, and I glanced at the guys at the table, ready to give them hell for not telling me, and their laugher got even louder. I’d been played.

  My gaze snapped to Mak, who stood there like nothing had happened. Like she hadn’t busted my balls in front of the guys and managed to keep a straight face. And all I wanted to do was bend her over that table and show her how she could make up for my bruised ego.

  “Let me get you some napkins.” She spun around to the bar, but I didn’t miss the smile she cracked and tried to keep under wraps. Laughing along with the guys, I took a sip of my drink, but my eyes never left her.

  “You two bicker like an old married couple.”

  My head snapped at the junior’s words as he crammed half a burger into his face.

  “Yeah, she’s pretty cute. Maybe you should ask her out,” Heath taunted as he ate some of his fries. He knew our high school history and wanted to rub it in a bit more.

  “Certainly wouldn’t hurt your grade as long as you didn’t break up with her until after the semester was over.”

  My gaze darted to Preston.

  “Are you seriously entertaining the idea that I ask out and date Mak to help me get a grade?” I stared wide-eyed at him.

  He shrugged. “All I’m saying is, if you decide to get your dick anywhere near her, you better make sure you don’t fuck things up before the end of the semester. You need her a hell of a lot more than she needs you.” He took a giant bite out of his burger like that was the end of that conversation.

  The guys threw out a few more one-liners, and I laughed along. Makenna was not into dating anyone and definitely not me. I mean, even if she were interested, we were like oil and water. She was too uptight, and apparently, I was breathing, which was enough to make her not want to be around me.

  That said, I found myself craning my neck as she moved around the bar from table to table. She had a kind smile for most tables and brought their food and drinks out quickly. No matter what she did, she always tried to do her best, which I respected, even if it annoyed the hell out of me sometimes.

  One day she’d snap and lose it if she didn’t have a little fun. Sometimes when we were staying in her cubbyhole of books, little bits of her hair would fall out of her braid. It was so strange how all together it looked red, but when those strands landed against her face, they looked blonde.

  And when she took her glasses off to rub her eyes, sometimes she’d leave them off. Those little indents on the sides of her nose would stay there. She’d glance over, catching me staring, and her pink lips would turn down at the corners and she’d repeat what she’d been saying, but I would be lost for a second staring at her eyes. Like warm pools of water you couldn’t wait to dive into.

  I could barely drag myself away from staring at her ass. I tried not to think about her as anything other than my study partner, but my mind wandered to what she had hidden under her prim and proper exterior.

  We finished up our food and got the check. She was rushing around as the crowds picked up. I should probably stop teasing her so much. Maybe I would, but it was so damn fun. If that was the only way to get her attention, then maybe I’d keep it up because I wanted to make sure she was thinking about me as much as she’d invaded my thoughts. Driving me out of my mind with the need to touch her bit by bit.

  She grabbed the folio off the table and waved to me and the guys as we left the bar. I shoved my hands into my pockets as everyone split up after leaving. Heath and I headed back to the apartment. I zipped my coat up against the slight chill in the air. Summer was over.

  He rambled on and on about some new plant species project he was working on in botany. Why? I would never know, but I kept zoning out and wanting to go back to Three Streets to maybe ask Mak in person when our next study session would be.

  We’d only had one the night before and had one planned for right after class, but maybe I could needle her a little and get her to agree to one sooner. I’d barely put Heath’s car in park outside our house when he jumped out of the car and rushed inside. Sometimes inspiration struck him, and he zoned out to the rest of the world. I shot Mak a quick message. She might not see it until after her shift, but that was cool.

  I could wait.

  12

  Makenna

  I stacked my papers neatly in the corner of my desk in the study room and put the caps back on my highlighters. My color-coded study method hadn’t failed me yet. I tucked my index cards into the box where I had them all categorized by class and glanced at my phone, checking the time. He wasn’t late ye
t, but he certainly wasn’t going by my five-minutes-was-on-time policy.

  It had been like pulling teeth to get him to go over the midterm this early. First a random text asking when our next session would be, which was weird, and then he was all evasive when I tried to nail down a date.

  I wanted to wrap my fingers around his neck and squeeze until he stopped being so difficult. Maybe he had all the time in the world to do this stuff, but I was on a tight schedule. It was a relatively easy class, at least compared to my advanced pre-med courses. I couldn’t let his worry-about-it-later attitude get under my skin and screw me up. My plans were set. All I had to do was not trip and the finish line was in view.

  My phone pinged, and a message bubble popped up.

  Mom: Having fun, honey. We hope you are too.

  There was a video attachment. It was like they were trying to become YouTube stars or something. They’d sent me videos of them riding the rollercoaster on top of a hotel in Vegas. White-water rafting in the Grand Canyon, and the latest one was them bungee jumping off a bridge in Colorado.

  It was a camera attached to their helmets as they shimmied to the edge of the ledge with their arms wrapped around each other. The grins on their faces were contagious. There was a countdown from one of the people beside them, and then the rushing whoosh of air as they leaped from the ledge screaming, “We love you, Makenna!”

  I got a vicarious falling feeling, leaning back in my chair as the ground came rushing at them. And then it wasn’t as they were snapped back up by the elastic cable attached to them. Their adventures were laugh-out-loud, scream-inducingly amazing. I was glad they’d gotten this time together before things took a turn. Tapping out a reply, my heart swelled with happiness for them. I put my phone on silent and went through some of my notes.

  My other classes were piling up. I’d gotten special permission to take extra courses to try to keep myself on track for graduation. If I had less than eight credits to take in the summer, I could still walk during graduation. And then there was the matter of medical school.

  I needed to get a 3.55 GPA here. They’d let me into the BA/MD program because of the strength of my course load at Stanford, but my GPA didn’t come with me. I was starting over. A few of my classes hadn’t had someone get an A in them for nearly a decade, so I’d have to be happy with an A-. This meant things would be tight grade-wise.

  If I got anything lower than a B+ during the semester, I was sunk. The first semester at Stanford had been rough. Leaving my parents and the memories I’d tried to hide from hadn’t made adjusting as easy as I thought it would. Getting a B in any of my classes would mean I might not get to keep my automatic spot in the med-school program.

  The promises I’d made myself and the promises I’d made Daniel on the gurney beside him fired up that extra bit of determination I needed to power through this and accept whatever I needed to, to achieve his goal—my goal. It was mine too, wasn’t it? After all these years, it was hard to figure out if I was doing anything for myself anymore.

  I checked my phone again. Exactly five p.m. At this point I was used to Declan always being a few minutes late. I adjusted my schedule to compensate.

  Tapping my foot against the chair, I looked over our notes. Our midterm paper outline was almost finished, but we needed to go over a few last things. I slid my hand into the front pocket of my bag where I’d put my thumb drive. My stomach sank. It wasn’t there.

  My throat tightened like I was breathing through a straw. I grabbed my bag off the floor and picked it up, frantically turning it upside down. Nothing. Not even a crumb fell out.

  That thumb drive had all my sources for this paper and data from my lab assignments. Some of the computers in the basement labs had terrible Wi-Fi connections, and we had to save to flash drives instead of saving them to the cloud. I backed everything up. Everything. Always, but I’d had a shift at work that I had to get to straight after and then I’d passed out when I got home.

  I’d planned to save it when I got back to the apartment tonight, but it was gone. My mouth went dry as I scoured my desk. No paper, notebook, or regular book went unturned. How could I let this happen? Tugging at the collar of my sweater, I flopped down in the chair, squeezing my hands to the sides of my head trying to think. There wasn’t enough time to redo the lab experiments before that assignment was due. My chest was tight, and it was hard to breathe.

  The chipper voice from outside meant Angel had intercepted Declan. Taking a deep breath, I swung the door open and stopped short when I saw not only Angel out there with Declan, but Seth.

  “Hey, Makenna.” Seth gave me a small wave. “Angel and I were asking Declan how he thinks the season will be going.” Seth’s big smile dimmed a bit when I didn’t smile back. I pushed down the panic, trying not to look like a maniac in front of everyone.

  “Are you a hockey fan?” I crossed my arms and stepped into the doorway. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Angel’s pink sweater-covered arm gesturing wildly like she was the conductor at a symphony. There wasn’t time for this right now. I needed to find that drive.

  “Huge fan. My dad and I watch the games all the time. I used to play when I was younger. Not at his level, of course, but a little.” Seth’s gaze darted to Declan with stars in his eyes. I fought the urge to race out of there without a word, leaving everyone behind. Trying to keep my face as neutral as possible and not show my annoyance and near panic attack, I turned to Declan and Angel. She’d moved on from just flailing her arms around to actually resting her hand on his arm as she talked.

  I hated how that little flare-up of something hit me right in the stomach. I wasn’t one of those girls. Catty. Territorial. Bitchy. I’m sure he’d had his run of many girls on campus, but this was our study time and I didn’t want to be there any more than he did.

  “I need to go to my apartment. We can reschedule this. I need to go.”

  His head popped up, and his eyes went wide before he nodded.

  “I can go with you there. It’s cool. We should tackle this thing and get it done.” His easy and sudden acceptance at working on this almost pissed me off. Why couldn’t he have been this cooperative before we had to send like fifteen messages to get this arranged? Every one of my texts had been met with another question, like he didn’t want our messaging chain to end.

  “Okay, I’ll be right back.” I let the door close behind me and nearly screamed in frustration. Why did I say okay? The urge to race out of there and get him away from Angel catch me off guard.

  I thought about going back out there and saying never mind, but Seth and Angel were both still standing on the other side of the door. It would make me look even more like an idiot if I went out there and told him no. Packing up what we’d need for our paper, I jammed everything into my bag and left the safety of my study room.

  “I’m ready. Bye, Angel. Bye, Seth.” I walked past Declan without even looking back. He said a hurried goodbye to the pair and followed me. Not feeling like being confined in the elevator with him, I went left and took the stairs, jogging down the steps like I could outrun my stupidity. Declan’s footsteps thudded behind me reminding me that I couldn’t.

  The faster I found the flash drive, the faster I wouldn’t be ready to curl into a ball and cry until graduation. If I ever graduated. I clenched my jaw through my annoyance. People moved out of my way as I blazed a trail off campus to my apartment complex. Declan kept up with me like he was going for a Sunday stroll. Damn him and his ridiculously long legs.

  Taking the steps to my apartment two at a time, I raced inside and into my bedroom, leaving him out in the living room, dropping my stuff and going through everything on my desk. Despair clawed at my chest like an angry animal looking to go straight through me.

  There was no clutter. There weren’t piles of clothes and other stuff for anything to get hidden under, so where the hell was it? I picked things up that I hadn’t moved all semester except to vacuum.

  “Hey, Books.” Declan’s voice
came from the living room. I didn’t have time for his teasing right now. I’d deal with him in a bit.

  “Makenna.” His voice was closer in the hallway. I pulled back my bedspread and searched under my bed. Not even a dust bunny.

  “Makenna Halstead.” His voice boomed from the hallway.

  “What?” I snapped from my hands and knees on the floor.

  “Were you looking for this?” He waved the navy and white thumb drive in front of him, and I let out a startled cry. Jumping to my feet, I held my breath not wanting to believe it until I had the drive in my hand. He dropped it into my hand.

  “Oh my God! Where did you find it?” I clutched it to my chest with numb fingers. My heart hammered against my ribs as I wrapped my hands so tightly around it I was afraid I might crack it.

  “It was out on the kitchen counter on a giant piece of neon green paper with a black circle around it.” He led me out into the living room, and I spotted the oversize sticky note stuck on the counter with the circle with nothing in it.

  Found this by the front door. Figured it was yours. Tried to call but couldn’t get through. Hope you didn’t freak out too much when you couldn’t find it. -Fiona

  The note was scrawled across the paper.

  The lab also had terrible cell reception. I sagged against the counter, blinking back tears. For those few minutes everything had been spiraling out of control, and now that I had the drive in my hand, it was like everything was okay again. Such a small thing. I stared blankly at the counter when another piece of paper slid into view.

  “I know you’re still in freak-out mode, but I wanted to give you this. I know I’ve been a pain in the ass, so I made sure I did all the technical references and yes, I made sure to use the proper format.” Blinking back my tears, I peered over at him and nodded. My throat was too tight to trust with words.

  Without thinking, I threw my arms around him, squeezing him. I was a split second from kissing him full on the lips. It was our senior prom all over again.vPressing my face against his warm shoulder, I breathed in his soap-and-something-more smell. My lips were less than an inch from his skin, my face on his soft black Henley.