But K.C.’s energy is contagious. Wherever he goes, he’s the life of the party, because he has this ability to attract everyone’s energy. We’ve been friends our whole lives, getting into trouble together our whole lives. He was always the instigator; I just played along, even if sometimes I paid a higher price.
“Nico, I did it, man,” he says in a low voice, like he’s telling me a secret. “I got the job.”
“You got the...oh!”
A light bulb goes off. It’s the club gig at Venom, the hottest new spot in LA that basically pretends to be New York in the middle of California. I don’t know what that means, exactly, but choosing K.C. to be their DJ every Friday night is a good idea. He couldn’t be more New York if he tried. It also makes him a genuine name in the business.
“Yo, man, congratulations!” I shoot him a fist bump. “That’s amazing, mano! When do you start?”
“Next month.”
Lula brings over our chicken, and K.C. whistles at her as she goes. She looks back with a raised eyebrow. She’s dressed like a million other girls on the block with the gold chain around her neck, her hair pulled into a tight brown bun, and her nails done long with crazy designs on a few of them. If there’s one thing that girls in this neighborhood do, it’s their hair and nails.
I think about Layla. She was trying to look a little like a girl from the block last night, and it was working for her, no doubt, but I think she looks cuter when she’s a little more low-key, the way she dresses at the office. Even more when she’s wearing barely anything at all.
“Hey! Earth to Nico. Where the fuck you at, man?”
I blink. My food is sitting in front of me, untouched. “Sorry. Just lost for a second, I guess.”
“I know that look,” K.C. says as he shoves a forkful of beans and rice into his mouth. “You got some last night, didn’t you?”
I don’t say anything, just take a bite of my food. Unfortunately, K.C. can read me like a book.
“Oh, shit! Was it that NYU girl from the law firm? You finally hit that, bro?”
Yeah, I told him. K.C. and I don’t have secrets, although right now, I’m kind of wishing we did.
I just shake my head. “No, no. It’s not like that. We just hung out last night. We had a good time.”
“Valentine’s Day, man? I can’t believe you fell for that. NYU must have some serious game.”
I think back to Layla’s interactions this week––the way she tried to flirt with me in the office, but usually got just as tongue-tied as I did. The way her big blue eyes watched my every move. The way her body shook when I touched her.
No, it might have started a little like a game, just like it always does when you first meet someone. But by the time we were sitting across a table from one another, neither one of us were playing anymore. We were just trying to keep up with what was happening.
“Oh, shit,” K.C. says, interrupting my reminiscing. He gives me a knowing look as he drains his beer. “It’s like that, huh?”
I frown and just shake my head. “Nah, man. It’s cool. She’s just cool, that’s all.”
“Uh-huh.”
I ignore him and focus on my food. The melt-in-your-mouth chicken doesn’t really taste like anything right now. But I can’t hide from K.C. He knows exactly what I’m thinking and why.
“Yo, did you tell her about––”
“No,” I say quickly. “It hasn’t come up.”
There’s another long look from my friend.
“Nico, if you changed your mind, I kinda need to know,” K.C. says. “They can find somebody else, but you can’t blow them off last minute.”
I stab at my chicken. I really don’t want to talk about this right now. I managed to stop thinking about it all night last night, and I really don’t want to worry about it today when I see Layla again. It occurs to me that maybe I should just call it off. That maybe I should tell her I thought about it, and the timing’s no good. That I can’t get into a relationship right now.
But then I remember the fact that when we kissed, it was like a lightning bolt ran through both of us. That when she touches me, my heart and my cock feel like they’re going to explode. I already know she isn’t someone I’m going to be able to ignore for the next three months. Not when I’ll be seeing her beautiful face every damn day.
Maybe there’s a way around it. Layla’s a girl who seems down for a good time––shit, she and her friends built curtains around their beds. Don’t tell me that’s just because they like to sleep with privacy. I know the truth, even if the thought of Layla bringing another guy back to her room makes me want to cut someone.
But it also makes me remember the score. For a girl like her, I’m just a good time, nothing else. I need to remember that.
“You don’t have to worry,” I assure K.C. “Nothing’s changed.”
~
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Layla
“I don’t know how you talked me into this today,” I grumble as I leave the cycling studio at the Student Athletic Center. “You guys were out later than me. I was counting on you just wanting to sleep all day and ply your hangovers with coconut water.”
“A workout a day keeps the goddamn cellulite away, babe,” Quinn quips far too cheerily for my taste as she takes a large drink of said coconut water.
Her mom, the pearl-wearing wife of a state senator in Massachusetts, is so hyped about Quinn’s relatively new workout obsession that she sends her daughter a crate of the stuff every month to keep her hydrated on the treadmill. I don’t know. Regular water always worked for me.
We are both covered in sweat after hauling through a grueling spinning class at the Student Center. Despite her snoring, Quinn bounced out of bed just after eight and yanked me out the door with her to class so that Jamie could have some time alone with the guy who had escorted her home the night before. Shama, it turned out, had just gone home with Jason.
“You could also say it’s payback for not letting me get a glimpse of Mr. Perfect,” Quinn says with a smirk. “I had to listen to you getting busy with FedEx Guy all fucking night, and I don’t even get a glimpse of his ass come morning? So not fair, babe.”
I smile, happy that Quinn’s nasty reservations about Nico seem to have disappeared since last night.
“Well, whatever your intentions, the end result is also that I am allowed to have a scone this morning at Reggie’s,” I say as we walk into the locker room to shower and change out of our sweaty clothes. I pull out my wallet and count the cash I still have left for my spending money for the week. I have two wrinkled dollars. Shit. “Maybe not. On second thought, tea and oatmeal at home will be just fine.”
“Isn’t that, like, all you’ve been eating for the past week?” Quinn asks as she wraps herself in a towel.
We walk into the showers in our flip-flops. I rush into one of the stalls so she can’t examine my face while I ignore her question.
“I get paid next week,” I call to her over the roar of the showers and the curtained barrier between us. “I’ll be able to go shopping then.” I don’t like to talk about money with the girls—especially not with Quinn—in part because that would mean disclosing the fact that I am not particularly good with it.
The truth is, I unfortunately haven’t managed to budget particularly well over the past few years—to be honest, it’s really more a problem of spending the cash set aside for essentials on things like bar covers. Every weekend I tell myself that this time I’ll stay in, study, and save my money. And every weekend there is some great new place to see, new music to hear, people to meet. How many nineteen-years-olds in New York City can resist that? So I figure this is the time in my life where I can actually handle the tradeoff—meager living for the sake of a rocking social life—because when it really comes down to it, the contents of my cupboard are not going to give me memories I’ll cherish for the rest of my life.
“You’ve been losing more weight, babe,” Quinn calls over the roar of the showers w
ith a hint of reproach that I suspect has more to do with envy than actual concern. Her obsession over her own weight has been deflected onto us more than once. “You need to take better care of yourself. You’re gonna make yourself sick.”
I mimic her words ungraciously to myself under the steam of my shower. It’s easy for her to say. Unlike my roommates, I don’t have parents who send me spending money. It was a point of pride in the beginning, when I’d see my roommates gleefully open checks each month that would cover any and all extraneous expenses. I told myself I was the one with character; I wasn’t just the average rich kid whose parents did everything for her.
Eighteen months later, those checks are still coming for all of my friends, who have the time to commit to unpaid internships because they don’t have to work for real money in the most expensive city in the country. It’s a hard pill to swallow when I’m expected to work twenty-five hours a week on top of my course load just to pay for food, books, school supplies, transportation, my cell phone, and student health insurance. Nor do they have to, as I will probably have to do this week, walk the forty blocks between school and the dorms in the freezing cold just to save the last two dollars in their wallets. I wouldn’t mind being spoiled just a little.
I really hope it doesn’t snow again this week.
But there’s always a bright side, right? If my parents weren’t so hell-bent on teaching me “good American values” (in my dad’s thick Brazilian-accented English), I wouldn’t have gotten that job, and I wouldn’t be meeting up with a certain gorgeous FedEx courier in a few hours. Just the thought of his thousand-watt smile brings one to my own lips. I’ll make the best of my accidental diet and wear my super skinny jeans—the ones I bought on a whim, that I can only fit into when I’ve had the stomach flu.
“I’m fine,” I say loudly so Quinn will be sure to hear. I finish rinsing the conditioner out of my hair and turn off the water. I wrap myself back up in the towel before stepping out of the shower. “Healthy as a horse.”
Quinn soon joins me, and we walk back to our lockers to get dressed.
“I’m serious, Lay,” she says. “You hear about it all the time. Don’t you remember how many kids in our dorm last year got the flu? Knocked half the floor out because everyone was too busy partying to take care of themselves.” She grimaces. “I do not miss the shit they fed us in the dining hall, that’s for sure.”
I have to agree with her on that count. Tea and oatmeal is infinitely preferable to the slop they fed us last year. I lost ten pounds within a few months of entering college just because I hated the dorm food so much. But honestly, what girl isn’t okay with losing a little extra here and there? The battle of the bulge is real, my friend.
Quinn and I sit in the back of the subway car so we have a little privacy to talk. I love that I have the kind of girlfriends who aren’t shy about details. She wants to know everything, from the size and shape of his dick (I can’t tell her exactly, but I have a pretty good idea) to the expression on his face when he came (also not something I could say yet, although we both came close a few times). Like the best friend that she is, she sighs appropriately where she’s supposed to, demonstrates obvious shock when I tell her that all we did was tease each other all night like horny high school students, and reacts with surprise and frustration when I mention that he left early this morning.
“Wait, what? He stayed the entire night and then just bounced at the crack of dawn?”
We emerge from the train station on Canal Street, diving immediately into the usual droves of tourists in Chinatown. The street is typically busy for a Saturday morning, and we maneuver in between other pedestrians until turning off onto our street.
“He said he had errands to do. I think he was kind of embarrassed,” I say as I sidestep a small pile of snow that’s littered with cigarette butts and empty beer cans.
Quinn scrunches her lips together, running a hand thoughtfully through her dark Shirley Temple curls. “You don’t think that’s kind of weird that he just up and left? Like he was trying to ditch you or something?”
“I really don’t think so,” I insist. “We didn’t actually have sex or anything, so it’s not a ‘fuck and run’ situation.”
Quinn chuckles. “Oh, what would we do without the knowledge of Liz Phair? But seriously, Lay, you don’t think he’s trying to play you, just up and going the way he did? I’m only asking because I don’t want you to get hurt. FedEx guys can be dangerous too.”
Annnnd she’s back. I should have known that Quinn wouldn’t be able to hear about last night without casting her pessimistic spin on the situation.
We push through the glass doors into our building and flash our IDs to the security guard sitting at the stairs.
“Hey, Bill,” we both greet him. He looks sleepily at us through his glasses as we pass, but doesn’t answer.
“It’s really not like that. We’re meeting up this afternoon again,” I inform Quinn once we are in the elevator. “Honestly, I think it’s more that he was weirded out by being in a dorm. I mean, imagine you’re twenty-six, you live on your own, and then you go home with a chick who has to pull a curtain around her bed when you’re getting busy.”
“Dudes don’t care about shit like that,” Quinn retorts. “They care about the getting-busy part, not the privacy. Any one of them would get down in the middle of the street with the right girl. Some of them do.”
The elevator doors open to reveal a girl stepping out of one of the doors on our floor. She bears the tell-tale signs of a walk of shame: short, tight skirt carrying the wrinkles of a night spent on the floor, hair mussed and tied back awkwardly, smudged black makeup under her eyes, and high stiletto heels hanging from her fingers. She gives her date, a junior named Mike standing in his boxers and a wrinkled t-shirt, a quick kiss before darting past us on her “walk of shame.” Mike watches her leave with a very satisfied grin before nodding a hello at us as we pass.
“What’s up, ladies?” he asks, looking Quinn and me up and down while licking his lips. “Have a good night? I know I did.”
I scowl at him. “Dude, gross.”
“Keep it in your pants, Mikey. Nobody wants whatever venereal disease you’re spreading this week,” Quinn shoots back at him.
Mike shuts his door, but not before muttering “bitch” just loud enough that we both can hear it.
Quinn looks back to me with a knowing look. “Like I said, babe. Dudes don’t care.”
~
After showering and doing a load of laundry with Quinn in the basement, I find myself sitting at my desk later that morning, split between figuring out my finances for the month and doing my reading for my British Literature survey. We are reading Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, which is long, written in Renaissance English, and not particularly motivating me to focus. I sigh and pick up the stack of bills that arrived in the mail this week.
Ten minutes later, Quinn walks in to find me banging my head on my desk and groaning into the oak surface.
“What’s up, buttercup?” she asks as she sets her laundry basket on the floor and begins putting away her folded clothes.
I shuffle the bills underneath the rest of the papers on my desk and look up. “Nothing. You know, the same old poor college student bit.”
“You need to borrow money?”
It’s the same charade we go through every few months. It’s hard keeping up with these girls, but I don’t like having to sacrifice my social life just so I can have a few extra dollars in my savings account. No, it’s not the “grown-up” thing to do, but I’m just a college student—what do I really have to save for? I also don’t like playing the “get free drinks” game with men in bars like Jamie does; it makes me feel cheap. But I’m in college in New York City—I’m supposed to have fun, right?
“No, thanks, I’ll manage,” I mumble into my papers, just as I always do. Quinn always offers, and I always decline. It’s become an awkward routine over the last year and a half.
“
You really need to start managing your money, honey,” Quinn says, coming up to rub me on the shoulder supportively. “Take a couple of free drinks here and there. Hell, my dad sent a little extra this month—why don’t you just take it? Use it to pay off some of these bills.” She lifts up one of the credit card statements shoved under my books. “Jesus, Layla, does that say what I think it does?”
I snatch the bill away and shove it back into the pile with the rest, suddenly as protective over them as a guard dog.
“It’s fine,” I snarl. “I don’t need your help, Quinn. Don’t worry about it. It’s no big deal.”
“Layla, thousands of dollars of debt is a big deal, and you’re behind two payments. If you keep letting that go, it’s going to ruin your credit. Seriously, just let me help you out—”
“I said it’s fine, Quinn! Seriously, it’s none of your business.”
I slam my book shut and thrust it into the messenger bag that hangs off the side of my desk chair before locking the stack of bills into the front drawer of my desk. I stand up in a huff and sling the bag over my shoulder, only to be met by Quinn blocking the exit.
“Layla.”
“Quinn.”
She doesn’t leave room for movement, and we stare at each other with our arms crossed. Quinn and I can both be stubborn asses at times, and this appears to be one of them. I place my hands on my hips and glare at her, but she doesn’t budge. Yep, that’s us: stubborn as freaking mules.
“You need to talk to your parents about this,” she states clearly. “I know your folks want you to learn to stand on your own and all, but I really don’t think they understand just how expensive this city—”
Ignoring just how childish it makes me, I blow a raspberry, and Quinn finally steps back to avoid my spit, giving me the space to flounce around her and grab my down coat from the closet.
“Layla,” she calls out as I stomp out of our room. “What are you, five?”
Shama and Jamie are in their room studying too, but I can see a flutter of movement from their desks as they notice the scuffle. It’s not uncommon for Quinn and me to butt heads from time to time, so they know the signs.
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