by Faye, Amy
Except, he discovers, he can. Because he has to. A tiny girl—a girl small enough to put into his pocket, who would probably fit in all seriousness into his duffel bag if she tried—is standing in his way. If he didn't stop, he'd bowl her right over.
She looks angry, and familiar. Craig has seen her before, though where is a little hazy. She looks furious. She's got a lot of anger for such a small girl, he thinks, smiling.
"What do you think you're doing," she growls.
There's some kind of social order to all of this, Craig thinks. Some kind of social pecking order. Like a bunch of wolves going after the same piece of meat every day.
But this is totally outside of that. He can tell from the way that the girl, his arm still wrapped around her shoulders, reacts.
"Get the fuck out of here, bitch," she says. She sounds angry, now, too.
He should end this. Shouldn't let it continue.
"I don't know who you are, but just—I don't know you, please, get out of my way."
Craig reaches out a hand to ward off some kind of attack. It never comes. But when he tries to step around her, she steps to block him again.
"You're a damn menace, Craig Weston, and I'm going to stop you." She turns to the girl. "Get out of here. He's off-limits."
"Says who?" The girl in his arm shrugs the arm away and steps up. She's not a tall girl, but compared to the little one, she's a giant.
"Says me." The short girl, her fire-engine red hair falling a little in her face, looks like she's about to pop.
The other one, my pick for the afternoon, takes the challenge hard. Her hand comes around in a slap that carries her full weight. If Craig had hit someone that hard, they might be in the hospital, but the littler girl scrambles back up the second that she catches her balance.
"Hit me again," she dares. I'm starting to lose my appetite for the sex, and when the girl gets another slap, as hard as anyone could manage, I lose it entirely.
She goes down onto one knee, but now the fight's on. The little one hits hard with a closed fist and throws the bigger girl to the ground. Her attention immediately turns to me.
"Go home, Craig Weston, and don't let me catch you doing this shit again."
I look at her hard. I remember exactly where I saw her. She was at the bar, the other night, and she ruined what could have been a perfectly good evening.
I'll remember her face now. It was a little hazy through the drink and the sex that was on my mind, but now I'm sober as can be. The other girl gets up.
I can see like an animal she's debating how worth it this fight is to her. I shift my duffel to the other shoulder and start walking back to my dorm.
Alone.
The girl apparently decides that it's not worth the fight, because she catches up with me a minute later, but I've lost my appetite for her.
"Sorry, babe," I growl. My headphones slip back into my phone. "I don't go for that rough stuff."
The music starts playing again. My head aches, my body's feeling all wrong, and I haven't cum in three God damn days. I think it's a record, at least as far as I'm concerned.
But I don't want it any more, and apparently someone else has decided they don't want me to have it, either. Well, maybe she's right to think that. Maybe I shouldn't have it.
Maybe that's why she was there in the first place. Make sure that I didn't do something I'd regret.
The way she was looking at me, though, I don't think she has my best interests at heart. Well, whether it was intentional or not, she did be a big damn favor.
I'll have to thank her later, if she doesn't deck me first.
Chapter Eleven
Emma sulked all the way back to the library.
She really hadn't planned on getting all that mad. But just… it happened. Regardless of what she'd intended, it hadn't gone the way she'd wanted it to. Now she'd punched some poor girl right square in the face.
There's no excuse for violence. Sure, she didn't want to take a beating lying down, so to speak, but that doesn't give anyone the right just to be needlessly violent.
And that was what she'd been like it or not. She should've known better. Should've been better. Instead, Emma pressed her teeth together. She had let her temper get the best of her.
If she was going to do that again, ever in her life, she was sure as hell going to have to figure out a way to defuse the situation better.
After all, it was for the girl's own good. And now she was going back to… wherever the hell she came from, and she'd been punched in the face for Pete's sake. And why? Because Emma couldn't defuse the situation right.
She was still five minutes early, though, when she got back to the library. She settled herself into the same table she'd just left twenty minutes ago, rubbed her face where it had been reddened by the powerful slaps.
It still stung, even though it had been several minutes. She couldn't hardly imagine what would have happened if the fight hadn't ended. If Weston hadn't ended it, honestly.
Because as much as she might have wanted to, Emma wasn't going to end the fight, she was going to finish it, and that's a very different thing.
She might have lost a chunk of hair, the way that other fights had gone. You can always tell when girls get into a real fight because there's just clumps of hair scattered around the whole thing.
When your hair's that long, it's an obvious target, and getting it yanked out at the root hurts like seven hells. You'd practically have to use a knife to get something that hurts more.
The guy who slid into the chair across from her was tall. He smiled as she looked up.
"Emma Owens?"
"Yeah."
"We spoke on the phone, you said to meet you… ?"
"Yeah."
He reaches down beside him and pulls out a ring-bound pamphlet. It's ten pages long, well-designed for something that Emma had thrown together in an hour or two a few days ago.
"I just had a few quick questions," he begins.
She listens intently. She'd promised to help with anything that anyone didn't understand, and that didn't mean 'when it was convenient,' or 'but only when I didn't just get slapped twice.'
The questions were surprisingly simple ones, she found. Not like the last one. And more than likely, not like the next ones would be. But at least this time, she was going to have a pretty easy time.
She answered them, and thirty minutes later, she was chewing on the arm of glasses, tapping out a text to her five-thirty that she was available earlier than she'd thought, and they could come any time.
Five minutes later, and another student had shown up. The same ring-bound notes. It might have been overdone, binding them up like that. She could've gotten it done with a stapler. The lady at the print shop said it would be fine either way, so which would she prefer.
Well, ring bound had seemed smarter at the time, but now it seemed like the staple might have been the smarter option. Stapled next time.
This one had more questions. The questions themselves weren't the problem, of course. Answering them would have been pretty easy.
The problem at the root of all of it was that they were based on some fundamentally incorrect notions of what had even sparked the war in the first place. Of course, she didn't have any inkling of this.
In fact, she wouldn't be corrected on it. Well, hell. If you can't convince them they're wrong, and the reason they're not understanding is that they won't be convinced, regardless of what you tell them…
It simply wasn't worth the effort of trying to get her to understand. Emma repeated herself a third time, pointed to three separate primary sources (each referenced in the notes) that proved her right, and finally gave up.
The girl had come here to argue, not to be taught. Well, Emma's time was worth more than being argued with for ten dollars a pop. If the girl didn't want an A, then she wouldn't get one.
She could feel very good about herself when she argued with Peterson about it during his office hours, because Emma wasn'
t going to argue with her any more.
Another text. Whenever the last one's ready. Then she can go pick up some supper. Emma leans her head back and stares at the high library ceiling. It's impressive that they actually keep it clean, somehow.
The rest of the campus, the students have tried to destroy as best they can. But whether it's because the 'wrong' sort of students don't come in here, or because the ceiling is just too damn high, they haven't managed to mess that up yet.
Emma feels her phone buzzing in her pocket, but she's not going to check it. Either they'll come or they won't, but she's going to get her rest until then. At least a few moments to relax.
The sight of someone moving tentatively closer forces her to come back to reality, though. That'll be the next student. Emma sucks in a breath. Time to get serious. She closes her eyes a moment, and when she opens them, she forces a smile onto her face and turns to greet the new face.
"Oh," she growls. The smile fades. "It's you."
Craig Weston looks like he just stepped on a bear trap, and perhaps that's because in a certain very real sense, he might have.
"I just got a text from a tutor for American History with Peterson? I'm supposed to—"
Emma reaches into her pocket and pulls out a ten dollar bill. "Here you go, here's a refund. Sorry."
He looks at the money, and back up at her. She should apologize for what happened earlier. Whether he deserved to have someone get in his face or not, she had let it get so far out of hand.
He'd been caught in that situation, and she should apologize. But it was only a few short hours ago, and the anger doesn't take long to boil back up. She's not proud of it, but she's doing her best to keep her frustrations pent up, regardless of how easy it is not to.
"Look, I don't know what I did to piss you off, but…"
"No, look, you just. I just want you to go, okay? Take the money."
"Is your face okay?"
Emma's face lights up as red as her hair. As red as it had been earlier when that girl had slapped her so hard that her brain scrambled up like an egg.
"I'm fine. Are you going to take the money, or not?"
Craig's lips pinch together.
"I'd really like the help. I'd really appreciate it. Please. Look, I'll—I'll buy you dinner. In addition to the fee. Whatever you like."
"'Dinner,' huh? I'm not interested in the inside of your dorm room, Weston."
That was a lie. She had quite a bit of interest in it. But she tried to put enough frustration into her voice to hide that, and if she was being a little charitable to herself, it might have actually worked.
"No, I'm serious. Look, if you're uncomfortable with it, I'll just give you another twenty bucks, but come on. Please. I don't know what I'm doing, I just want someone to take me through it a couple of times and make sure I'm not missing something."
Emma could feel her resolve weakening. Everything she'd ever seen or heard about Craig Weston was that he could talk the pants off... well, just about anyone. The pants right off.
He seemed serious, though, about the tutorship. And if she was going to be tutoring people, then what right, honestly, did she have to turn away someone who wanted to learn?
A niggling thought remained in her mind, though. What if this was how it always started?
Chapter Twelve
The girl—Emma, Craig thinks he recalls; it's in his caller ID, but he's not going to check—isn't quite the scrapper that he'd thought. Not really. What she is, though, and what he didn't have any reason to think up to this point, is wicked smart.
He practically doesn't have to finish a sentence before she's already got her eyes off to the side, and she barely lets him finish before she starts in with an "Oh, okay, I see what you mean."
Because she always sees what he means. That's not to say that she always says she does. He'll ask a question, and she doesn't just understand what the answer is. She knows why he asked.
She knows what part of the lecture he wasn't listening to. If he wanted her to, she could probably have guessed what had distracted him, it seems like. Like she's less a tutor and more a wizard.
He sucks in a breath. This isn't the kind of girl he wants as an enemy. He thinks for a minute about what it must be like to—
The thought gets pushed away. He leans down over the notes to read where she's pointing. This close up, he can smell the shampoo she uses in her hair. It's sweet. Fruity. He ignores it as best as he can and reads the line.
"Oh, Jeez. You're right. It says it right there. I'm sorry."
"It's fine."
Her voice has calmed down a little. She doesn't sound like she's about to try to murder him, anyway, and that's a start.
Craig reads the line again. Part of him wants to ask another question. But the only way he can put it, the only way that he can think of, is 'but I thought it was different.'
It's not that he doesn't see she's right. Because she is. It's right there. Cited and everything. But why was he wrong? Why is it that he thought something else? Was he just dumb as a bag of rocks, or… ?
She's looking at him. Watching his face. He doesn't notice until he sits back, lets out a breath. There's something in her expression that he can't quite place. If it was anyone else, he might have called it concern, but she'd been ready to stab the hell out of him earlier.
So concern definitely ain't what she's got on her face, regardless of what it looks like. Craig takes a deep breath and tries to get the confused look off his face. His head hurts. But then again, it always hurts whenever he finds out that he wasn't anywhere near to correct the first time.
"Did you have another question?"
He thinks for a second about how to put it before he answers. "I mean. Not really."
Emma's look that probably wasn't an expression of concern deepens. "If you have a question, ask it. I can't help you if you don't tell me what the problem is, Weston."
Craig's face twists up. How to explain it? He leans his head back.
"I just don't know why I don't get it. How is this so easy for you?"
"It's not," she says. Dead flat. Whatever sympathy might have been in her voice before. "I study my tail off, and that's how I do it."
"But like. I don't… I don't know. I don't get it. I mean, you explain it, and I get it then, right, but not… I dunno. Don't worry about it."
"How many hours a day are you working on football?"
"I dunno. Between the gym, and the field… five? Six? Maybe?"
"And how many on studying?"
"At least an hour, most nights."
"So you think if you worked half as hard on your classwork as you do on football, you might get it done?"
His face twisted up. There was a logic to it. A logic that he didn't like one bit, because it wasn't like he was doing it on purpose. He spent as much time as he could muster, but that didn't still didn't count for a whole hell of a lot of time.
"I guess I see what you mean.
"Yeah?"
"But I mean. My day's full already, though. Like, there's no more hours in the day for me."
"Fine. Then you're doing the best you can. I didn't say you should study more. Just, if you studied more, you'd get it. You're not an idiot, Weston, you just don't know it."
Craig looks at the table. His eyebrows bunch up. "You think?"
"Sure."
He leans back and taps his thumbs on the table top. "Thanks, then. Emma, right?"
"You bet."
"Did you want to get something to eat?"
"I'm still not interested, Craig. You can go back to whatever you do in the evening."
"I didn't mean it like that, Emma. I just figured, you did me a favor. I thought I'd do you a favor. I can just buy you something to eat the cafeteria, no problem."
Emma thinks about it. Craig can practically see the wheels turning in her head. Emma Owens is the loudest thinker he's ever seen, in fact.
"I guess," she says, finally.
Craig's face turns int
o a smile. The same smile he's always giving girls. It almost feels weird, because as pretty as she is, for the first time in his life he's trying like hell not to think of her as some girl.
After all, all the other girls, they were looking for something. Emma's been more than clear—she's not looking for it, and he's barking up the wrong tree.
That doesn't make it easier to just not notice the way that her face lights up when she's annoyed, just like when she's happy. It doesn't make it easier not to notice the cut of her hair falling in her face.
It doesn't make it easier not to notice how easy it would be to just wrap her in his arms. She'd fit right in against his body.
But he won't do that. He's not going to do it, and he's not going to think about it, because she's not remotely interested. She's said so herself, and if she's not interested then he's not interested. It's as simple as that.
He slips the notes back into his bag and hefts it up onto his shoulder. The weight takes a moment to adjust to. It might have been heavy, but for Craig it's half the usual weight he has to carry without the duffel bag.
"You want me to carry your stuff?"
The words just slip right out before he even thinks about it. She's got a large bag, and he's got good shoulders. The thought seems so natural that even when he's already said it, it doesn't seem like something that needs much thinking about.
She looks up at him. She has to crane her neck to look him in the face, when he's standing. For a minute she seems to be considering it. Then she ducks her shoulder, slings the bag over it, and stands back up straight.
"I've got it." A minute later, almost as an afterthought, she adds, "Thanks."
She doesn't sound thankful. She sounds annoyed with him. Whatever he did, she's not super happy about it. But what the hell did he do? Nothing, far as he can tell.
That doesn't mean she's not annoyed, though. Craig Weston may not know what goes on inside a girl's head. He may not be able to read their thoughts, not exactly. But that doesn't mean for a second that he doesn't know how they're acting.
And Emma Owens is acting annoyed that he suggested it. Maybe she's one of those types who needs to do everything herself?