Option two, Dillon and Syd could ‘stay together’ for a few more weeks until it seemed they were stable, thereby pushing off the break-up. I wasn’t going to see Syd again for six weeks because of her schedule and mine, and after this one ‘date’ on Tuesday night, she and Dillon wouldn’t see each other either. But her team would spread enough positive buzz about them that it would seem like everything was okay. Sydney and Dillon would also send semi-flirty messages to each other on Twitter, and hopefully the press and the fans would calm down.
Syd and I had talked about it at length, and in the end, I told her it didn’t really matter what the outside world thought as long as it didn’t affect us. I wasn’t planning on telling anyone except Jake and my parents that I was dating her anyway. I knew that if word got out around the fraternity house that someone would unintentionally leak it to someone else, and it would probably blow up in my face. My friends definitely did not have the same level of discretion that hers did.
And I had no desire to deal with photographers taking my picture and fan girls begging me for autographs or chances to meet Sydney as I walked to class. So in the end, we chose the less invasive option. I’d tell my brothers who I was dating once Syd and I decided to go public, which would probably be at the Teen Choice Awards in August. She wanted me to go with her. We had time, and I wanted that time for it to be just us. I didn’t want our relationship on display to be over-analyzed and scrutinized and ridiculed. I hated that it would come to that, but if I wanted to be with her, it was what I had to put up with.
“Yeah, man, we saw the pictures online,” Trey said. “How in the hell did you ever score a girl as hot as Sydney Chase?”
“I told you. He’s her best friend,” Jake said, elbowing Trey in the ribs.
I knew I could count on him to keep his mouth shut. In two years he’d never told anyone how I felt about Sydney.
Trey laughed. “I always thought that was bullshit and you just thought she was hot.”
“Dude, there’s a picture of us right there,” I said, pointing to the shelf above the desk I used for studying and Jake used for storage of the books he bought but rarely cracked open.
Trey shrugged, his eyes still glued to the game as he battled his way through a tunnel. “I figured you met her at some event. You know, like how Jeff is always stalking celebrities and shit.”
I rolled my eyes again. “Don’t compare me to that creeper. I don’t go to award shows hoping to meet celebrities and get their autograph or steal the mail from their mailboxes just so I can say I got Steven Tyler’s water bill.”
Trey and Jake laughed at what we all teased one of our brothers for on a regular basis. He was notorious for his collection of celebrity autographs, and he had a particular affinity for Aerosmith for some odd reason. I thought he was going to kiss me when I gave him an autographed picture of Sydney the year before after her last tour. And I knew he might be an issue if I ever chose to bring Sydney by the house as my girlfriend. Of course we were a long way off from that.
“How come I’ve never had a best friend who was as hot as her?” Trey asked, his eyes darting toward the picture of Syd and me at her concert the previous year.
Yeah, okay, so I could see from that picture how he would think I’d met her at some fan meet-and-greet. She was dressed to go on-stage. But I had a hundred other pictures of us from over the years, from before she’d made it big, and now I had a hundred more on my phone from the past week. There were ones of us together that we’d taken, ones of just her when she didn’t think I was looking, and my favorite, one of us kissing in bed just that morning.
“Because you screw every girl you meet,” Jake said to Trey, like it was the most rational reason in the world.
“You’re one to talk ass– aww, damn! I died,” Trey said, throwing his controller across the platform. The carpet stopped it from going too far.
Jake just laughed as he continued forward without his partner.
“And I’ll thank you very much for the hot blond you screwed last night who had a hot blond friend just for me,” Jake said, and Trey threw up a lazy high-five that Jake paused long enough to smack before he took out three wolves who were trying to kill him in quick succession.
“Did you even learn her name, dude?” I asked him, swallowing the last bite of pizza from my first slice.
“Uh, Lisa?” Jake questioned, giving me an answer he didn’t sound too confident about.
“I don’t think that was it,” Trey said, laughing at Jake.
They had issues.
Trey turned back to me then. “So, did you really not hook up with her at all?”
Hell yeah, I did. And it was fan-tastic!
“Naw, man. I’ve known her for twelve years. We’re just friends.”
“How can you be just friends with her? She’s so hot!”
I know. And I’ve seen her naked. #happyface
I fought the smile that wanted to burst onto my face. “It’s not like that with us,” I told him.
He shook his head and then stopped mid-shake. Then he started nodding. “I get it. She doesn’t think of you that way,” he said, echoing what I’d thought was my reality for so many years. “It’s probably because you’re all nice and shit.”
Jake nodded, as if he didn’t know just how wrong Trey was. “This is true.”
“Girls don’t like nice guys. It’s why I get laid so much,” Trey continued.
“Me too,” Jake piped in.
“They want guys who’ll treat them like shit,” Trey told me, as if I didn’t understand where his train of thought was headed. “You should treat her like shit. Then you could get laid.”
Such an idiot.
I rolled my eyes for a third time, realizing that I did that a lot when Trey was around. It was like he and Jake made each other dumber. Alone I could handle either one of them, but they fed off each other when they spent too much time together, and when that happened, I always felt myself actually losing brain cells.
“Aww, fuck! I died,” Jake called out as his game ended. He turned to Trey. “Let’s go get beer.” He looked back at me. “You in, playboy?”
I shook my head. “Nah, I’m good. I have class at eight, so I’ll probably go to bed early.”
“Such a good little student,” he teased like he always did when I told him I was going to study or go to class.
Jake was one of those people who, for as dumb as he seemed, he was actually really smart, but he didn’t study. He got mostly Bs and Cs, but he didn’t care, because he was just going to work for his dad’s medical supply company when he graduated. If he actually studied, he could probably give me a run for my money, but he didn’t have the drive to actually apply himself.
“Some of us don’t have the luxury of riding on Daddy’s coattails, and we have to actually get an education that’ll help us not have to clean toilets when we grow up,” I said sarcastically, and that made Trey laugh.
He actually studied and legitimately cared about school, but he’d never scheduled a class before noon, so if he stayed up late drinking, it didn’t matter.
“Well said, bro,” he said as he hopped down from the platform. “Tell your girlfriend I said hi when you’re jerking off to her picture later.”
I shot him the finger, and he just laughed as the two of them left the room.
* * *
Four weeks into the summer semester I was about to lose my mind. My girlfriend was in Oklahoma, and I was in hell. Saying that I missed her was an understatement, and without talking to her first, I went ahead and made an appointment with an advisor.
I sat down to talk to him on a Friday afternoon where the temperature outside was two degrees away from one hundred, and the humidity was about on par with that. And having trekked halfway across campus from Turlington Hall, my polo was soaked through, and I was freezing from the ice cold air conditioning by the time he called me into his office.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Thompson,” he asked, closing the door to
the small box he called an office on the second floor of the building overlooking one of the entrances to campus.
I was looking out the window at the cars driving by on thirteenth street, remembering when I’d first come to the university for freshman orientation. My mom had come with me, and she’d gushed about how beautiful the campus was, how warm it was in Florida and how much fun she knew I’d have going to school there. She’d done two years at a community college in Washington to get the degree she needed to be a dental hygienist, so she’d missed out on the collegiate experience. I had a feeling she might have been living vicariously through me just a bit, or at the very least she just wanted me to have the opportunities she never did.
In fact, she was the one who initially told me I should rush a frat. I’d never had any inclination to do that, but she got me thinking. I convinced Jake to check out rush with me to see if it was something he wanted to do too. We’d gone to two houses, and neither of us was overly impressed, but then when we’d walked into the third house, and the guys were really cool, we’d just kind of stayed.
I had a lot of good friends in the house, and I’d never regretted rushing. Transferring would mean giving up the guys I’d grown close with, especially my pledge brothers. But it also meant possibly changing majors. One of the reasons I’d decided to go to Florida in the first place was because of the university’s reputation for undergraduate programs in the varying science fields. I was excited about the courses I’d get to take in the next two years. I also knew a lot of the professors, and I already had one who’d offered to write me a letter of recommendation for law school.
I had so many things going for me at UF, including the fact that I really liked Gainesville and being a Gator. These were all things I’d put in the con column when I’d thought about transferring. And there was just one thing in the pro column – Sydney.
“Mr. Thompson,” the advisor said when I hadn’t responded.
“Huh?” I said oh-so-eloquently as I looked up at him.
He steepled his fingers under his chin. “What can I do for you?”
I cleared my throat, buying time, because once I said this, it would be out there.
I hadn’t told Jake. I hadn’t told Trey. I hadn’t told my mom. No one knew. Truth be told, I was afraid if any of them knew, they’d talk me out of this decision. Was I wrong? I wasn’t sure. I was usually the most level-headed guy in most rooms, but sometime in the past six weeks, because that’s how long Sydney Chase had officially been my girlfriend, I’d completely lost my shit.
My grades were fine, and I was acting normal to the outside world, but inside, I was thrashing violently against the urge to drop out of school and join my very hot, very successful, sexy-as-hell girlfriend on her worldwide tour.
It was insane. I couldn’t do that. I had goals. I wanted to be a lawyer and save the planet. I couldn’t do that without a college education, and I sure as hell couldn’t do that if I dropped out. Besides, I was not going to live off of Sydney, and I only had like a hundred and fifty dollars to my name. That wouldn’t last me long.
Thankfully I hadn’t gone too far over the edge. But I was at the point where I was looking at other options to ease some of the internal turmoil I was experiencing.
“I’d like to look into transferring to UCLA?” I finally told the advisor, not sure why it came out as a question.
Okay, I knew. It was because it was such a huge decision, but a long distance relationship was no bueno. By transferring I’d be doing what I could to make my life – and my relationship with Sydney – more manageable. Syd lived in L.A. I did not. I was going to fix that.
Of course there was one small problem I still had to face. I pretty much had a full-ride to the University of Florida via a partial academic scholarship and other smaller scholarships and grants. I did not have a full-ride to UCLA, and it would cost me roughly $35,000 a year to go there. That was a big difference, and my parents didn’t have the money to be able to afford to pay for me either. I was already prepared to take out loans for law school, but undergrad hadn’t been worked into my financial plan. It was a bit of a sticking point, but it wasn’t causing me to back out of the idea completely.
The advisor was looking at me like I was a few grapes short of a fruit salad. I hoped he didn’t ask me why I wanted to transfer, because I knew just how lame ‘my girlfriend lives there’ would sound. Of course, he didn’t know Syd, so he couldn’t really weigh in on how lame my decision truly was.
“Mr. Thompson, you do realize that it’s June,” he said instead.
“Yes, sir,” I said, wondering if he was joking. I wasn’t a moron. I knew what the date was.
He started typing things into his computer. I waited.
“The application deadline for UCLA was November 30th.”
“Oh.” Shit. “Okay, so what does that mean? I can’t start in the fall?”
Sydney would be on tour during September and October. I’d see her in July and August between breaks in semesters, and then she was coming to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving. I could also probably convince her to come visit me for a week in early November. Then I’d be on winter break halfway through December, so maybe I could push this off until January.
“Not this fall,” he said crisply.
“Okay, so I’ll transfer in the spring then. I’ll get all of my paperwork in by the 30th. Done.”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible Mr. Thompson.”
I really hated that he kept calling me Mr. Thompson, and I wasn’t sure why.
“Uh, why not?”
“UCLA doesn’t allow students to start in the spring or summer semesters. You’d have to wait until next fall.”
What are ‘Things I should have looked into first before making this appointment for two-hundred’, please Alex.
“Next fall! That’s insane!”
My voice was doing that high thing again that made me sound like a screechy girl.
“I don’t make the rules,” the advisor said, obviously not impressed with my reaction.
“But I got accepted when I was in high school. Doesn’t that count for something?” I asked hopefully.
The advisor shook his head. “No, unfortunately, since you’re now considered a junior, transferring is your only option. But you could look into that for next fall if you wanted.”
I felt my shoulders slump. “I’ll be a senior next fall,” I grumbled.
I understood how detrimental it would be to transfer as a senior. I could lose credits, my graduation date would be pushed back, not to mention it was over a year away. It wouldn’t do shit to help my current situation.
“What about USC?” I asked, imaging how much more expensive it would be to go there.
He typed some things on his keyboard again and then shook his head. “They don’t accept students for spring semester unless you’ve already been accepted for the previous fall, and the deadline to apply was December 1st.”
Son of a bitch!
“Okay, well, thank you for your time, I guess,” I mumbled as I got up to leave.
“Mr. Thompson,” the advisor called out as my fingers wrapped around the doorknob.
“Yeah?” I said, looking over my shoulder at him.
“You’re obviously a bright young man, and your grade point average shows that you have excelled during your time here. If you continue on this same path, you’ll graduate with top honors. I know things come up in life that make us think the grass might be greener elsewhere, but it’s not always the case. If you’re intent on moving to Los Angeles, there are many other schools you could consider, but I wouldn’t be so quick to give up what you have here.”
I nodded, knowing he was right. I’d purposefully set myself up to be able to get into a variety of law schools. If my LSAT score was high enough, I’d have my choice of where I’d want to go. Why was I so okay with jeopardizing that?
I was a love-struck moron. That’s why.
I started to sweat again once I got o
utside, the heat washing over me along with the frustration I felt. I ran a hand back through my hair and looked around the campus as I settled into the fact that I would be there for the next two years. And I was good with that for a lot of reasons, and in truth, the parting words the advisor had left with me made sense. But they didn’t fix my current problem. I wasn’t exactly sure what to do about that now.
Realizing that I was close enough to The Swamp to walk there, I called Jake.
“Hey,” I said glumly when he answered.
“What’s up, dude?” he said sleepily. It figured he’d be napping.
“You want to get beers?”
“Sure.”
“Good deal. Meet me at The Swamp.”
“On my way.”
No questions necessary. That’s why I loved Jake at times like this.
* * *
Several hours and several Coronas later, I was loose-lipped and chatty.
“I tried to transfer today,” I told Jake.
He paused, beer at his lips, and eyed me with raised eyebrows. “Tell me you’re fucking with me.”
I shook my head and finished off my fifth beer. “Nope. I tried, and I failed.”
I proceeded to tell him everything the advisor had told me.
“Okay,” he said, once I was finished, seeming entirely flummoxed by the whole notion the I was willing to transfer schools to be closer to Sydney. “But listen, I know you think this is it, that you guys will be together forever, but you’re twenty! Er, I mean you’re twenty-one.”
He’d obviously realized the error of his ways, but thankfully there were no door guys or managers around to hear his slip up. Neither of us wanted to get kicked out or have our excellent fake IDs confiscated. And if caught by a cop for underage drinking in Gainesville, we’d be arrested. Not what I needed on my record, thank you very much.
“Nice save,” I muttered, wondering if we shouldn’t just venture back to the house. Or maybe a big fat cheeseburger and another bucket of Coronas would round out the evening nicely. I grabbed the menu the waitress had left on the table. “I’m hungry.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” he said as I looked around for our waitress.
Only With You Page 26