“Where are you going?” Amber asked, poking her head out of Brad’s room.
“With Cori to take Tara home,” Cori said matter-of-factly.
“Okay,” Amber replied. “Let me get my purse. Who’s Tara?”
I headed toward the parking lot to pull my car around, but not before looking back toward Josh.
He was watching me, and my stomach clenched, and my heart pitter-pattered.
Damn it.
Chapter Nine
Josh
Luke declared himself officially off risk for the night and, in fact, declared that someone else could take risk for the rest of the semester.
I tried my best not to laugh. I failed. It was a valiant effort, though.
Luke took things too seriously. All’s well that end’s well, right? At the end of the day, no one was hurt. So why not laugh about it?
Of course, if I had to deal with a bathroom doorframe that now had to be replaced, I might not think it was so funny, either. Good thing I wasn’t house manager. I wouldn’t know the first thing about fixing that, anyway.
“Come on, man,” I said, putting my arm around his shoulders. “The girls are taking Tara home. Let’s do some shots, and then Brad can drive us to Waffle Hut.”
“Wait, why me?” Brad protested. “What if I want to take some shots?”
“You weren’t on the front lines of that shit back there,” I said. “We earned those shots. You’re driving.”
Brad didn’t protest again—wise man—and I pulled out a bottle of Jack Daniels. Luke quickly threw back two shots, then rotated his neck, stretching it out.
“I am so tired of dealing with this shit,” he said.
“Cheers to that.” I poured him another shot while Brad—like the good boyfriend he was—texted Amber to tell her our Waffle Hut plans.
Brad tucked his phone into his pocket. “The girls will meet us there.”
“At the next meeting, I’m voting no to more parties,” Luke said.
“That won’t pass,” I said. “Thanks to your wonderful recruiting skills, our pledge classes have been so big that us old guys are out numbered.”
“Fuck me,” Luke grumbled.
“No, thanks,” I said cheerfully. Luke ignored me.
“If I had known we’d end up having to cut the damn door open, I wouldn’t have wasted nearly an hour trying to reason with that dumb girl.”
“Hindsight is twenty—”
“Shut up,” he growled at me. I laughed.
Brad shrugged on his coat. “To Waffle Hut!”
Even though I got to the car before Luke, I let him ride shotgun. Because I was nice like that.
Surprisingly, we beat the girls to Waffle Hut even though they left way before us.
Shit. Bri was driving an old little Toyota. The roads we took weren’t bad, but what if there was black ice on campus? What if they slid off the road after taking Tara home, and were stuck in a ditch somewhere?
There are no ditches on campus, dipshit, my intelligent side pointed out.
Yeah, but there are lots of trees. What if they hit a tree?
Most people had an angel and devil on their shoulders. Not me. I had smart and stupid.
Panic filled me, and I fumbled with my phone. Before I hit send, I stopped myself. What if they just hit traffic? Then she gets distracted trying to answer my call and ends up in a tree?
I stared at my phone, paralyzed.
Brad and Luke were calmly sitting in the front, talking about basketball or something. How were they so calm? Their girlfriends were out there, possibly unconscious in a car crumpled up like an accordion against a tree.
I was half a second away from asking them what we should do when Bri’s little Toyota pulled into the spot next to us. I leaned back against the seat and exhaled.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
I’d never been a paranoid drunk. I wasn’t even that drunk—a little buzzed maybe, sure. I needed to pull my shit together.
“Ladies,” I said, stepping out of the car. “To what do we owe your late arrival?”
The girls looked at each other like they were sharing some kind of inside joke and then busted out laughing, leaving us guys staring at them, feeling like idiots.
“Get a table,” Amber managed to get out between cackles. “It’s a long story.”
“Can’t be that long,” Luke muttered. “At least not as long as that stupid girl was locked in the damn bathroom, and not as long as it’s going to take me to fix the fucking door.”
Man, maybe Luke should have taken a few more shots. He was normally laid back, but I guess with this and last week’s holes in the wall, he’d hit his limit.
Cori laced her fingers with his and poked her lip out in a pouty face. Luke smiled and kissed her. She had that effect on him. No matter how shitty his day was, seeing Cori was enough to make him happy.
I looked away.
I’d never begrudged my brothers their girls. Luke and Brad were good guys, and they deserved them. It was a little annoying that they didn’t want to hang out as much, but I got it. Maybe if I had a girl like Cori or Amber, I might not want as much sausage fest time, either.
I’d never wanted to be tied down. For one thing, I liked girls too much. Girls, as in plural. There were just so many of them. How could I settle on one? That was just my nature—it was in my DNA.
But for the first time, I wondered if maybe I just hadn’t found the right one yet. I’d had a shitty couple of weeks with this academic probation shit. How nice would it have been to have someone who could cheer me up like Cori cheered up Luke? It might not be half bad. Of course, if I dated someone like Cori, she’d never have let me slip low enough to get on academic probation in the first place.
Or Bri. Bri never would have let me slip so low.
Fuck. Inviting her to this party had been a bad idea. She was clustered with the other two girls, and she looked like she belonged there, like she belonged in our little group.
She was the missing piece.
That had to be the alcohol talking, right? I mean, who falls for his academic counselor?
Certainly not this guy.
The hostess led us to a table, and I wisely sat across from Bri, instead of next to her.
“So,” I said, “tell us this long story about Tara.”
Bri smiled, a twinkle in her eyes. “It’s funny now, but it wasn’t at the time.”
Fuck. I’d sat across the table from her to put some much needed distance between us, but that also meant I had to look right at her. And now, with the thoughts that were running through my mind, I had no business looking at her.
“Tara bitched the whole way home about Jake—who, by the way, sounds like a complete asshole,” Amber said. “And then when we were about a block from campus, she just passes out. Like, dead to the world passed out.”
“We tried everything we could to wake her up,” Cori said. “Everything.”
“So finally we decide to just carry her into her dorm,” Amber said.
“But she’s a lot heavier than she looks,” Bri chimed in.
“The dorm has a key card. No problem, right, because we just took it out of her pocket,” Amber said. “Except the elevator in the dorm is broken, so we have to carry her up three flights of stairs.”
“When we get almost up to the third floor,” Cori said, “she slipped out of our arms a little.”
Amber laughed. “What she means is we flat out dropped her.”
“It was an accident,” Bri chimed in, guilt obvious on her face.
“She’ll probably have some bruises in the morning,” Amber said with a chuckle. “And I don’t feel bad about it.”
Cori just sighed and shook her head.
Amber shrugged. “It’s not our fault. She’s lucky we’re so nice. After all the trouble she caused, we should have left her ass propped up against the outside of her dorm.”
“Anyway,” Cori continued. “We put her in bed and moved a trash can next to he
r in case she pukes.”
“Hopefully she will,” Amber said. “Or she’ll have one hell of a hangover. She’ll probably have one anyway.”
Our server came to take our orders, and we ordered the usual. This wasn’t our first three a.m. visit to Waffle Hut as a party of six—the two couples, me, and whatever girl I happened to be seeing at the time. Sometimes, if I was between girls, it was just the five of us.
Luke just shook his head. “Sadly, that isn’t the craziest thing that’s ever happened at the house.”
Brad laughed. “Yeah, remember when Josh fell off the roof?”
“It was only a couple weeks ago, so yeah,” Luke said drily.
“Hey, I helped you fix that gutter that broke,” I said.
“Why were you on the roof anyway?” Bri asked incredulously. “I never got the full story.”
“Someone—was it you, Brad?” Luke said.
Brad shook his head. “I know better than to mess with Josh’s guitar stuff. I roomed with him freshman year, remember? I made that mistake once. I learned my lesson.”
I stuck out my chin. “Someone threw my lucky pick up onto the roof, so I had to get it.” I’d done a lot of stupid things, but this one wasn’t my fault. Not entirely.
“Your pick?” Bri wrinkled her nose. “You mean that little plastic thing you use for strumming a guitar?”
“Yeah.”
“So you climbed on the roof. At night. In the winter.”
“Don’t forget ‘while drunk,’” Brad so helpfully added.
I shot him a dirty look. “I wasn’t that drunk.”
Cori’s face erupted in a grin. “Yes, you were.”
Great. Now she was selling me out, too. “Thanks a lot, Cori. I thought you’d be on my side.”
She put her hands up. “Sorry. I tell it like it is.” She grinned.
Irritation flared within me. Normally I didn’t care who knew about my exploits. I was the first to admit I’d done some pretty stupid shit, and most times I was the one telling the stories. But suddenly I didn’t want what some might consider my “shortcomings” advertised.
What Bri might consider my shortcomings.
Fuck! Why did I care so much what this chick thought of me? That’s all she was: a chick. Somehow she’d ended up on some sort of pedestal in my mind, like she was more than just a girl. Keep it in perspective, man. In a couple months, I’d be off academic probation, and we wouldn’t have to irritate the shit out of one another in our bi-weekly sessions. It was doubtful we’d even see each other again.
Suddenly it felt like a boulder had lodged itself in my gut.
I’m just hungry. That’s all it was. Hunger. Where was our damn food?
“Ooh, do you remember the time Josh—” Amber started. By the look on her face, the story wasn’t going to be a flattering one. God only knew which one she had on her mind.
“Totally kicked butt at that charity talent show?” Cori finished. She not-so-subtly kicked Amber under the table and opened her eyes wide, looking over at Bri, then back to Amber. Amber’s eyes shone understanding, and she nodded slightly.
Real smooth, ladies. Weren’t girls supposed to be better at this sort of thing?
Brad laughed. “You mean the one where we forgot to tell him about it, and then he went on stage and played something anyway and picked up some girl out of the audience in the middle of it?”
That wasn’t exactly how I remembered it.
Amber elbowed Brad and gave him the same bug-eyed look that Cori had just given her.
Christ. They were killing me.
“I mean, we’ve all done stupid shit, right?” Brad said, and Amber smiled, pleased that he had taken her hint. “Like the time I…” He scratched his head—literally—trying to come up with something.
“Aww…it’s okay, honey,” Amber cooed. “You’re boring and lame, but I like you that way.”
Luke grinned mischievously. “There was the time Cori punched that girl in the face in the party room.”
Bri gasped, unable to contain her shock. I wouldn’t have believed it, either, if I hadn’t seen it for myself. Cori was pretty badass.
Cori covered her face with her hands. “Can we never, ever bring that up? Like, seriously forget it ever happened?”
“Who was that girl, anyway?” Luke asked, putting his arm around Cori.
Oh, shit, here we go again.
“Josh’s flavor of the mo— Ow!” Brad yelped as Amber elbowed him extra hard in the rib cage.
“We’ve got to even the score here,” Cori said. “Josh, why don’t you tell some embarrassing stories about them?”
I leaned back in my chair, my lips slowly stretching into a joker-like grin. “I’ve got one. So, Brad and I lived in Yancy Hall the first year that it was co-ed. One morning I hear some sort of ruckus in the hallway. I was still in bed because, you know, it was only ten. But I dragged my ass out to see what the hell was going on. And there I find Brad, butt-ass naked, running down the hallway with nothing but one of those brown paper towels from the bathroom dispenser covering his junk.”
“What?” Amber said. “How have I not heard this story before?”
“How does that even happen?” Luke asked incredulously.
“Someone took my towel!” Brad said. “The hallway was empty when I started running. I thought I could make it.”
“It gets better,” I said. Brad’s shoulders slumped, and he looked miserable. But payback’s a bitch. He didn’t even try to curtail my story. He knew I had no mercy when it came to embarrassing freshman year stories. They’re just too funny not to share. “A tour from a Catholic school was coming through right at the time. A girls’ Catholic school.”
“No…” Bri said, incredulously. “What are the odds of that?”
“Apparently pretty good.” I grinned. “So anyway, picture the backdrop of plaid Catholic schoolgirl uniforms, and Brad’s just hightailing it down the hall, holding onto that damn paper towel so tight it rips.”
Everyone was laughing hard by that point, so hard, in fact, that the server who came to deliver our food started laughing, too, even though she had no idea why. I guess laughter really is contagious.
Poor Brad. He was a hopeless son-of-a-bitch when I first met him. I mean, I think he even went to prom with his cousin or something. He’d come a long way in the last few years.
“The story’s not over,” I continued once the server left. “Some girl actually filmed the whole thing on her phone.”
The color drained out of Brad’s face, and he gripped the tabletop. “What?”
“Didn’t I ever tell you about that?” I couldn’t keep the grin off my face if you paid me.
“No. No, you most certainly did not.”
“By this point, I feel sorry for poor Brad. It was only the second week of school, right? So I start chatting with the girl right away, and ask if I can put my number in her phone. She hands it to me, and I ‘accidentally’ delete the video. I did end up dating that girl for a few weeks, though, so I guess I have you to thank for that, Brad.” I held up my glass of water in a toast.
Bri yawned. “Sorry. This is late for me. I can’t remember the last time I stayed up until…” She checked the time on her phone. “Holy smokes! It’s three a.m.?”
“I know,” Cori commented. “I keep telling myself that I’m going to do the responsible thing and just go to bed, but somehow I keep finding myself here at ungodly hours. You know, I don’t think I’ve ever actually eaten here at breakfast time.”
“Don’t look at me,” I said. “I prefer to eat breakfast at noon. So, by that schedule, this is actually my dinner.”
Bri yawned again. “Sorry. I’m old and lame.”
“How old are you?” Cori asked. “You’re a grad student, right?”
“Twenty-two,” she said.
“That’s not old at all,” Cori said. “That’s actually young for a grad student, isn’t it? Did you graduate early?”
“No. My birthday is in Augus
t, so I’ve always been the youngest in my grade.”
“Huh,” I said. “My birthday is in August, too. August fourteenth. But I’m always the oldest. My parents didn’t think I was ready for kindergarten, so they held me back another year.”
At least that’s the story they told me. I suspect the truth was that my mom forgot to sign me up. She was flighty like that, and she actually flew the coop permanently shortly thereafter.
So Bri was only a year older than me, almost exactly. Somehow she seemed light-years more mature.
“What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done?” I asked her. “You’ve heard plenty of stories about me.”
She shook her head. “Nothing comes to mind. I’m pretty lame.”
“Come on, There’s got to be something.” I prodded.
“Leave her alone, Josh,” Amber said. “It’s not such a bad thing to have a boring past. I mean, I’m not proud of the fact that I once climbed out a restaurant window to escape a particularly horrendous date.”
Bri’s jaw dropped. “You can’t be serious.”
“Hand to God,” Amber said.
“It’s true,” Cori confirmed. “She was on the phone with me while she did it.”
“Wait. This one time I skipped gym class in high school. I’m not the most athletic person in the world.” Bri sat back, looking proud of her “crazy.” I had a hard time keeping a straight face. This girl needed to live a little bit more.
And she would if I had anything to do with it.
“That’s better than me,” Cori said. “I’ve never even skipped class.”
“We’ve already established that you punched someone out,” Amber reminded her. “You’re good on the crazy.”
“I told you—I’ve pretty much blocked that night from my memory. It doesn’t exist for me.”
“If you hang with this crew,” Luke said to Bri, “get ready for an increase of crazy in your life.”
She grinned. “Who knows? Maybe next time I’ll be the girl locked in the bathroom.”
Next time… I kind of liked the sound of that.
Chapter Ten
Bri
Josh grabbed my check. “I’ve got it.”
Wanting More (Love on Campus #2) Page 9