Unexpected Lover: College Romance Book 1

by Scarlett Archer

  Isobel looks mortified, but says nothing further. Peter feels under the table and squeezes her hand tightly, letting her know that he’s there and that she’ll be OK. She squeezes back, and plasters a smile on her face.

  Once the food is served by and increasingly disgruntled Josie, they begin to eat in complete silence. Peter wishes he had thought to put some music on, or could think of a topic of conversation that couldn’t backtrack into his mother being mean.

  “Lovely weather outside, isn’t it?” John comments, points towards the window, that has rain hammering down on it.

  Isobel smiles appreciatively.

  “It’s practically beach weather.” She tells him.

  John laughs, but it turns into a coughing fit when Josie throws him a look of disgust. Isobel picks up on the exchange and looks down at her food. Peter feels desperately sorry for her, but he doesn’t know what to do.

  “Now that I’ve had a bite, I can definitely say that it’s good.” Isobel tries, bravely.

  “It’s too salty.” Josie responds.

  “Salty!” Peter says, clicking his fingers. “That reminds me of something. Sorry, mom, but I need to talk to Isobel in private about something, before I forget.”

  Josie looks at him curiously, but shrugs and nods. Jake bites back a smile, and Peter knows that he caught the joke, even if they’re not on speaking terms right now.

  Peter leads Isobel into his room and indicates for her to take a seat on the bed, which he now realizes he didn’t make after he fell asleep earlier.

  “It’s tidier now.” She notes, looking around the room with approval.

  “Yeah, uh, my mom made me clean it.”

  The makes Isobel raise an eyebrow, but she chooses not to say anything about it, weird as it sounds. Instead, she looks up at Peter with her eyebrows raised.

  “Salty?”

  Peter laughs and sits down next to her.

  “Yeah. My mom. She’s, uh, very particular. I just want you to know that it’s nothing personal against you.” Peter explains. “She’s just always been like this. She’s made my dates cry, in the past.”

  “Why does she do that?”

  Peter considers her question. There are a lot of reasons that her mother could be acting the way she is. Maybe it’s because she only wants the best for Peter, or maybe it’s because she’s bitter.

  He’d rather go with the former, since he can’t think of his mother doing it purposely to hurt him, even though it certainly feels like that sometimes. When he was younger, around fifteen, he accused her of trying to ruin his life, after she made one of his girlfriend’s break up with him. Now, he’s not so deluded with teenage angst, he can look past that.

  “She’s trying to weed out the weak, I think. I think she’s trying to find someone who she likes, rather than who I like. Don’t hold it against her. She’s just trying to be a good mother, in the worst way possible.

  “I can understand that. Not personally, but I can at least empathiesz.”

  “Excellent. Think you can hold out for the next half an hour?”

  “We’ll have to wait and see, won’t we? I can at least promise not to cry.”

  Peter stands up and holds his hand out for Isobel. They re-enter the kitchen and sit down at the table. Peter feels calmer now, than he did before. A little less nervous. Hopefully, Isobel’s mind has been put at ease, too.

  He wants everyone to have a good time, but he can’t help it if his mother insists on being difficult and Jake won’t stop sulking. As long as Isobel is smiling, that’s all he cares about.

  “So, Isobel, do you watch baseball?” John asks, as he sets down his fork.

  “No. I’m not really much of a sports person, but I have a weird guilty pleasure.” She admits. “I really like rugby.”

  John looks at her in surprise and Jake seems confused. Only Josie offers no reaction. She continues to eat delicately, looking disgruntled. Peter wonders if John had a word with her while he was in his room. Hopefully, this will limit the amount of needlessly horrible things she’ll say.

  “Rugby? What is that?” Jake asks, breaking his silence.

  “You don’t know?” Isobel regard him curiously, and Jake’s face burns red.

  Something clicks into place and Peter’s mouth opens into a little ‘o’. Jake spots this, and gives him a warning look. Peter hadn’t even considered the possibility that Jake had liked Isobel. In fact, he’d rather vainly been thinking that Jake didn’t want to share Peter with someone else. Now, that just seems ridiculous.

  “It’s similar to football, but without the padding, and it’s not just about making yards.” She tells him. “You’ve got to get it over a try line, and you’re basically just trying to run with the ball from one end to the other.”

  “It sounds quite basic. I reckon I could play.” Jake says, puffing his chest out a little.

  Isobel laughs, and then covers her mouth, mortified. Jake looks offended, and Peter has to stifle a laugh of his own. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see his father biting back a smile.

  “I’m so sorry. That was mean. I wasn’t laughing at you, just the idea that the game is simple. It’s not.” Isobel blushes, and Peter smiles reassuringly. “It’s too complicated for me to really go into, because I don’t really understand all the ins and outs myself.”

  “You’re a fan of a sport that you don’t know the rules to?” Josie asks, harshly.

  “In a nutshell? Yeah.” Isobel replies.

  “Do you know what country it is from?”

  Peter had hoped this wouldn’t happen, but Josie really likes to question people endlessly about things until she can prove that they aren’t as knowledgeable about it as they’d like to think. However, Isobel has openly admitted that she doesn’t even know the rules properly, so what is his mother trying to prove?

  “England.” Isobel replies, coolly.

  “I thought it was in that other part of the U.K? Wales?” John says.

  “No. I think it’s the national sport of wales though. It got to Wales in, like, the eighteen-hundreds? Some man took it to a tiny town called Lampeter and it spread from there.”

  “What other countries have rugby as it’s national sport?” Josie persists.

  “I’m not sure. I think probably New Zealand. And I’m sure one of my friends told me Madagascar, but I’m not certain.”

  “Hm.” Josie doesn’t seem satisfied with any of the answers, but Peter can’t figure out what she would have wanted to know.

  It seems a little redundant to call her out for her behaviour now that the meal is almost over, but he’ll save those words for later. The moment they have all finished, Peter helps carry the plates to the sink and Isobel begins rinsing the plates.

  “No, no, no.” Josie says, smacking their hands out of the way. “I’ll do that, just like I have to do everything else in this house.”

  Isobel seems ready to protest, so Peter grabs her arm and pulls her from the room. No one will benefit from an argument.

  “I don’t understand.” Isobel mutters as she sits down. “We were offering to wash up, so why was she acting like we’d forced it upon her?”

  “Eh, mothers will be mothers.” Peter tells her, settling on the desk chair.

  “Your father seems to like me, at least.” She says, in a questioning tone.

  “Yeah, my dad isn’t judgey like my mom. If you’re nice, he’ll like you. And I wouldn’t worry about Jake either. He’s just been feeling extra sulky today.”

  “I feel bad for laughing at him.” She admits.

  “Don’t feel bad. He knows you weren’t actually laughing at him.”

  Isobel bites her lip and her eyes widen, as though she’s done something really bad but doesn’t feel too guilty about it.

  “I was.” She giggles. “He’d never be able to play rugby. He’s not the right build. I didn’t mean to laugh at him though. I know that makes me an awful person.”

  “You’re not an awful person.” Peter tells
her.

  He moves from the chair to the bed in a flash of movement and his lips find hers. They kiss and fall back onto the bed. They know that can’t take it any further, but if Isobel has been felling like Peter has since he left hers, then she’s been counting down the minutes until they could kiss again, too.

  CHAPTER 07

  His lips are as soft as I remember, and I really have to rein myself in, before I get to into it. We can’t do anything, not at his house while his parents are here. From the furious way that he’s kissing me though, I can tell that he’s as anxious to make up for lost time as I am.

  We fall away from each other, gasping for breath, and laughing at ourselves for our erratic behaviour.

  “This is going to sound stupid,” Peter begins, “but I’ve missed you.”

  “And I missed you, so it can’t be all that stupid.” I reason.

  We lay, staring at the ceiling, as our heart rates slow and our breathing syncs. I can almost hear his thoughts, because I think they mirror mine. I think we both wish we were at mine, so that we had the freedom that an empty house brings.

  Here, with his parents around and his best friend in the next room, we’re limited in what we can do. Really, kissing is as far as either of us feel comfortable going.

  Peter sits up and looks down at me. I feel like he could read my soul, if he wanted to. I wouldn’t mind him doing just that, but I’ve lied about who I am, and I don’t feel quite ready to admit that to him.

  “I need to talk to you about something.” He says, and I feel my heart squeeze.

  Oh god, he knows that I lied and he’s going to call me out for it and we’re never going to talk again and I don’t think I’m ready for that kind of disaster. He’s going to hate me forever now. Why did I even think it was a good idea? Why would I lie about something like that? If he knew I went to college, we would have so much more to talk about, so much more in common, and I’ve lied to him and ruined that connection.

  Why am I like this?

  “I want to talk about something that’s been playing on my mind for the past few months, but haven’t really had anyone to talk about it with, since I don’t think anyone else will understand, but you might.”

  I breath a subtle sigh of relief, since this can’t be about me. We’ve barely known each other a week.

  Gosh, it feels so much longer than a week. Is it possible to develop feelings for someone so quickly? Does he feel the same way, or does he just see this as a part of college life? A spring break fling?

  “I think I want to quit medicine.”

  I sit up, shocked.

  “What?”

  “Well, remember the conversation we had a few days ago, where you said you wanted to be a model and I said I wanted to study chemistry?”

  It feels like that was years ago, but it was so, so recent that I can barely get my head around it. I blush at the thought of admitting that I ever thought about that as a career option.

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “Well, I wasn’t joking. My life has been laid out for me by my mother. She’s decided everything for me. My hobbies, my academic choices, my college, my major, and, as you’ve seen tonight, she’s even trying to decide who I should spend my life with. It’s exhausting, but I’m too old for her to make those decision for me now. I just want to be me, and she won’t allow it.”

  I nod, feeling increasingly anxious. What is he saying?

  “Well, I’ve decided to take a handle on things. I’ve made up my mind now. I don’t want to study medicine anymore. I want to study chemistry. I need to talk to my dad about it first. If he says yes, I can go into it easy, but if he says no, then I’m going to do it anyway, I’ll just have to pay my way.”

  “Aren’t you a little late to be sending in applications?” I ask, my stomach squirming uncomfortably.

  He shakes his head and walks over to his desk, where he pulls open his top drawer. He grabs a handful of paper and brings them over to the bed. I shift, so that we’re sat together with our legs hanging over the edge of the bed.

  He unfolds each of the letters and shows me what they are. Each one is an acceptance to study chemistry at multiple colleges across America. Not one of them is within an hour of here.

  I know it’s selfish for me to worry about how this will affect me, especially because this is such a difficult situation for him, but I guess we’re all naturally selfish sometimes.

  “This is amazing.” I say, struggling to keep smiling. “These are really good schools!”

  Peter rubs the back of his neck nervously, and nods.

  “Yeah, I was pretty surprised when they said yes. I kind of hoped they wouldn’t, simply because it meant I didn’t have to go through the process of telling my parents I wanted to swap. But that would’ve been the easy option. I want this.”

  I read and re-read the letters, just so that I have time to compose myself. I’m happy for him. I truly am. But this means he’s going to move away. I won’t see him again. It’d be a bit dramatic to say it breaks my heart, but it definitely hurts a little.

  But then again, I can’t expect him to factor me into his big life decisions. We’ve known each other for days. This has been on his mind for months. And if it’s something he wants to do, it’s certainly not something I should get in the way of. It’d be more than selfish. It would be cruel.

  “So, why chemistry?” I ask, hoping to get a better idea of who he is before he’s taken away from me.

  “I’ve just always had a fascination with it. I used to love it when I was in school. One of my teachers failed me repeatedly, after I told him that I wasn’t going to pursue it anymore. My mom flipped out and thought it was because I’d been published in a journal, but he was just trying to make her think that medicine wasn’t my calling so that I could tell her about my chemistry love.”

  I listen intently, amazed by how little I know him.

  “When my mom sent off all my college applications, I had no say in what was put on them. She wrote my personal statement for me, telling them how I’ve always loved medicine, and how my morals tell me I should put that to good use and to help people with my gift. I felt like a fraud when I received my acceptance letters. Worse part was how I had to pretend I was happy with it.”

  I’ve never seen him look so disheartened before. I can’t even begin to imagine what it would be like to have such controlling parents. My parents were very open with my life choices. They were undoubtedly proud of me for what I decided, but I have suspicion that they would have accepted me for any choices I made.

  To have your mother decide every aspect of your life must be so suffocating. I don’t know how he’s dealt with it for so long.

  “Are you not worried that you’ll be behind? Like, everyone else you’ll be studying alongside will have been studying chem for a long time now, and you’ve had a least a year away from studying chemistry.”

  “I’m very worried,” he admits. “But, without sounding full of myself, I’m rather confident in my abilities. I think I’ll cope perfectly well. I’m quite smart. At least, the colleges think so.”

  “What did you write in your statement to them?”

  “I told them the truth. How my mother has been running my life for too long, and how my passion for chemistry won’t die. How I need to do this, otherwise I’ll live a life of regret.”

  I nod. He sounds like he’s really sure of what he wants to do. I’m glad for him. Sad for myself, but I understand him now. I see why this is so important to him. He needs this, and I need to support his decision.

  “I think you’re doing the right thing.” I say. “I’ll do anything I can to help.”

  “You saying that is all I need to hear. Thank you.”

  He kisses my forehead, and he takes my hand.

  “Shall we go back to yours?”

  I stand up with him, and we leave his apartment, waving awkward goodbyes to his parents and Jake, who is sitting on a bean bag, playing phone games and looking more like a s
ullen teenager than a grown man.

  Maybe having Peter’s parents about does that to people. I know that when I go home, I always act slightly less mature than I would normally. They just bring that side of me out. It really doesn’t help, since I’m trying to show them that I’m independent and able to function in society without their help.

  We walk out and into the street, where the wind has picked up considerably, and I realise that I’ve left my light jacket behind. I don’t want to be a nuisance, and I don’t want to see his mother again, so soon after saying goodbye, so I don’t say anything.

  I brave the walk, and we arrive at my house.