Rough Guy: Providence Prep High School Book 3

by Allen, Jacob

  And I knew exactly how I’d say hello.

  * * *

  Just because I knew how I’d say hello, though, didn’t mean I felt confident about it.

  I must have changed my mind about a dozen times from the moment I hung up with Nick to when I stood at the entrance of the library. I was crazy for giving this guy a second, third, whatever chance this was. This was crazy! It made no rational sense, and I hated that. Even when I felt like this was a risk worth taking, I couldn’t accept that I couldn’t make logical sense of it.

  But maybe the emotional roller coaster, after dipping so low, was now rushing back up, and since I was on it and not detached, I wanted to see how much further it went. Maybe because Nick had admitted some parts of him, I was feeling much closer to him. Maybe I was just fucking crazy and Emily and Jackie were going to have a field day when this was all said and done.

  Who knew? I sure didn’t. I wanted to say I gave up on trying to know, that I gave up on trying to make sense of it, but that wasn’t in character for me. I’d never stop trying to make sense of things, no matter how many poets and authors and musicians wrote about love and romance being some mysterious force that no one could describe.

  I sat on the front step of the library when I saw him emerge from an Uber. He pursed his lips nervously when he saw me—I’d never seen him so nervous. I had never felt so nervous before. I was telling myself that I had to go through with this. I had to stop thinking about this. If I thought about it, it was only going to make me crazier by the second. I just… had… to… do… it.

  He got close to me. He put his hands forward.

  I raised my hands. The fire in my stomach was out of control; if normal people felt butterflies dancing in their stomach, I was feeling the entire world’s population of butterflies in me.

  I put my hands on his cheeks. I could feel his stubble. It was just thick enough to feel gentle, but not so thick or sharp as to cause pain. I leaned my face forward, closer to his.

  This was all so fast, so confusing. This was so awkward.

  But it had to be quick. I had to do it.

  I closed my eyes. Do it. Samantha. Do it.

  And I kissed him.

  It felt nice.

  And finally, I could say that I had kissed a boy.

  Crazy, right? I had avoided admitting that I’d never kissed anyone for so long. It was like the nerd image with having kissed someone was something I could own. Without it, it felt… embarrassing.

  But that was all over. I’d had my first kiss, ever, and let me say, it felt good.

  It felt great.

  It felt like I was long overdue to have actually kissed someone. But I suppose that it was best that I did it with someone I seemed naturally compatible with like Nick.

  It was perfect.

  And then, it wasn’t.

  Nick’s hands, resting on my back, went down to my ass and squeezed. I was willing to push some boundaries. That was one I wasn’t.

  “Don’t push your luck,” I said, pulling back from the kiss.

  “Hello to you too,” he said with a chuckle.

  He pulled me back in for a kiss. It still felt good, and this time, he did manage to keep his hands off me. This one felt much better.

  “I’ll try and warm you up a little better,” he said. “Shall we go get ice cream?”

  Warm me up better? What are you even saying, Nick? That you think I’m just going to do whatever you say after you flirt enough?

  “Sure,” I said.

  Unfortunately, while I’d come in excited and nervous and all sorts of feelings in anticipation of what might be, I was now feeling very differently about this encounter. I was feeling guarded, and it was hard to feel attracted to someone when I was guarded.

  He did put his hand around the lower part of my back, and it sent a jolt of electricity through my body that reached to my toes. I felt my breath catch, and my hand went around his lower back as well. Was that right? Was that weird? It sure felt right, but I didn’t have any experience—how would I know any better?

  I tried not to overthink it as we got to the ice cream shop.

  “Stay here,” he said. “I’ll get you your ice cream.”

  “But you don’t even know—”

  “Vanilla, banana split, and raspberry?” he said, smiling.

  How in the hell did you remember that? I couldn’t say if it was one of the most flattering things that someone had remembered about me, but it was certainly the most surprising. Birthdays, favorite restaurants, those were all easy. But ice cream flavor favorites?

  “You’re good.”

  “I know,” he said, leaning forward to kiss me.

  He was a little love drunk right now. But I was so positively flabbergasted that he remembered my favorite flavors that I didn’t mind.

  I sat outside, watching him wait in line, smiling at him whenever he looked back at me. It was nice not having to pretend I wasn’t looking at him anymore. It was nice that we could drop the pretense of being distant.

  But I wasn’t all in yet. The ass grab was still a turnoff, and it made me wonder if he was serious about being apologetic or just wanted to fuck me. I was physically attracted, sure, but that didn’t mean I was going to fuck him tonight. Actually, I was not going to fuck him tonight, under any circumstances.

  No amount of “warming me up” was going to work. Ugh, talk about a line I’m going to be thinking about the rest of the time here.

  When he sat back down, once again, he kissed me. Even though we’d kissed several times already, I still felt a rush of excitement. I literally felt like my skin was glowing when he did that. If he kissed me the rest of the night, I wouldn’t mind one bit.

  The question was, of course, if he was going to stop at kissing or if he was going to try and do something more.

  “Sorry it took me so long to say sorry,” he said just before his first bite of ice cream. “I guess it took me getting told no a second time for me to do it.”

  “More like I had to tell you to say it for you to do it,” I said. “But it’s all good. Better late than not at all. Besides, it got you to kiss me.”

  “This is true,” he said.

  And it got you to grab my ass.

  “Why did you apologize, Nick?” I asked.

  “Hmm?”

  I had a feeling he hadn’t misheard me. I wondered if he just needed time to collect his thoughts.

  “Why did you apologize when I asked you? Was it just so you could kiss me? Or did you mean it?”

  “I meant it,” he said with such immediacy that I believed him. “When I did it… there was a rush of pulling it off that felt sickly thrilling. But when I realized what I might have done to your college dreams and such, I realized that I might have severely erred. That’s not something that makes me feel good. So no. It was genuine.”

  “OK,” I said. “Good. I wouldn’t have wanted you to have apologized just so you could kiss me.”

  “Oh, that felt good, don’t get me wrong,” he said with a laugh. “But I said it because I was wrong.”

  I was in unchartered territory for me, so when he confessed that it felt good, there was a part of me that wanted to say “ah ha! I knew that’s why you did it!” But the better part of me overrode that impulse and believed that he was telling the truth.

  “So then why did you grab my ass back there?”

  And that was said because, well, I had no filter.

  “We were getting into it,” Nick said. “I figured you had called me because you wanted something like that to happen, and I like being bold.”

  “That wasn’t bold, it was rude.”

  Nick looked flustered, stammering over his words for a few seconds before he seemed to finally get what he was searching for.

  “I mean, I’m sorry I did it so soon. Yes, I could have pulled myself back. I probably should have waited—”

  “Waited?” I said. “So you were going to do it anyways?”

  “No, it’s not somethi
ng I planned. It’s not like I said, ‘ok, after ten seconds, I’m going to grab her ass, and then I’m going to grope her,’ no, nothing like that.”

  I did not think things would start to fall apart as quickly as they were, but the more I was hearing Nick talk right now, the more uncomfortable I was beginning to feel. It was as if Nick wanted to make things as intensely awkward as possible by describing what he was going to eventually do.

  I mean, sure, if we were to get right to the point, sex was probably going to happen with my first boyfriend. But Nick was not my boyfriend, and I didn’t even know if this qualified as a date. For him to just say that this was what we were going toward…

  It just seemed awfully presumptuous. I needed to not be so much of a prude, sure, but to go from my first kiss to the first time having sex in the span of a few hours was… the first kiss was a lot as it was. To add in sex would have just driven me haywire.

  “Well, do me a favor and just please slow down,” I said. “That was my first kiss, and—”

  Oh, shit. I shouldn’t have admitted that out loud. He’s going to mock me for that so hard.

  “Really?”

  But he didn’t speak in amused shock or as if he was going to run with that fact to bully me. Instead, he just seemed genuinely surprised.

  “A girl as attractive as you and as smart as you, no guy has ever taken an interest in you?”

  “Well, yes, they have, but I’ve never been interested.”

  “Huh. Wonder why I’m different.”

  I don’t have any more of a clue than you do, Nick. I’ve given up trying to use my brain on this one.

  “Well, in any case, I don’t mind slowing down,” he said. “But this is a two-person dance, remember.”

  “What, us?”

  “I mean, you just used the word us, no?”

  I did, but…

  I guess I hadn’t really thought about what came after the kiss. I had been so nervous and so fixated on that as a barrier that I’d never bothered to consider what laid on the other side. There were milestones, yeah, but what did those look like to us?

  Or, for that matter, did we even have to advance past the kissing? I mean, if we were to get involved and keep exploring our feelings for each other, sure, but just thinking that far ahead…

  “I just mean that while I’m happy to slow down, I can’t stop dead in my tracks,” he said. “You are attractive and we have been doing this dance for a while, so—”

  “And where does that dance end?” I asked.

  Nick shrugged. It wasn’t a fair question, I knew, but I think it was fair to see what kind of an answer he would give.

  “I dunno,” he finally said. “Probably sex. See where we wind up in school, see—”

  What I said next wasn’t something I was proud of, mostly because I knew it was an oversimplification of what Nick was thinking. Had he not grabbed my ass the way he did when we first kissed, I wouldn’t have said it.

  “So this is about sex, then?”

  “It’s a part of it, sure.”

  This was all… this was all so fast. Yes, Nick wasn’t asking me to fuck him here, but I mean… just thinking about it…

  “Are you thinking about it?”

  And there we go.

  “No, no, no!” I said. “This is all, just… this is just to get laid with me, isn’t it? So you can say you got me?”

  “I…”

  Nick’s refusal to give an immediate denial was something I took as confirmation of what I suspected.

  “I should have known better.”

  I needed to detach to make sense of this.

  “Are you serious right now?” Nick said. “I came all the way out here to kiss you and have ice cream. I decide to be a little bit honest that eventually I’d want to have sex with you, and you react as if I just said I plan to kill your Mom?”

  “I’m sorry, Nick,” I said.

  I knew I was going to look back on this and say I handled it poorly. I was going to think at some point that I should have just accepted it would come later, not then.

  But that wasn’t the case then.

  “I’m gonna go,” I said, standing up and finishing my ice cream.

  But Nick wasn’t willing to let it go so easily.

  “Come on, Samantha,” he said. “I apologized. I said I screwed up. I was honest. I wouldn’t have sex with you without caring about you. I just want to see where things go between us.”

  I was trying to get away from him. I didn’t want to say anything more right now. The more he tried to explain things to me, the more confused I was going to get. I just…

  I was a mess. I was a hot mess. And Nick wasn’t helping matters.

  “Samantha, you cannot be serious,” he said. I could hear his temper starting to snap. Good. Give me a reason to walk away more. “Where are you going?”

  “Home,” I said. “I’m sorry, Nick. If you care about me, you’ll leave me alone right now.”

  “I took an Uber drunk to see you!”

  I ignored him.

  “Goddamnit, Samantha! I am trying really hard to keep my cool, but you’re not acting nice right now. Because I said something would happen eventually? Do you really think all I want is to just have sex? I want to go out with you. I want to get to know you. I want these things, Samantha. Sex is just one of many things.”

  I continued to ignore him.

  “Fucking hell,” he grumbled.

  He finally stopped following me. I looked back to see him walking in the other direction, head dropped, likely cursing me out.

  Maybe that was why I pushed Nick away as much as I did. It didn’t just have to do with him being a jerk. It had to do with me knowing, on some level, I was so awkward that as soon as I kissed a guy, I’d find a way to sabotage it. Just thinking about the next step felt like too much, too fast. How fucking weird was I?

  Apparently, so fucking weird that I could get a Broad Street Boy to kiss me and I’d run away at the slightest, most subtle hint of possibly having sex.

  Everyone in my class was desperate to get laid. Even Emily and Jackie had hooked up with Adam and Kevin relatively quickly. And it wasn’t like I didn’t want sex. I thought about what it was like to have a man inside of me, filling me, making me come.

  But presented with the opportunity…

  I got in my car quickly, turning the music on as loud as it could go. I begged to not have to think about what had happened today anymore.

  But I had a feeling, knowing Nick, that this was just about to be the reigniting of my problems with him.

  14

  Nick

  That’s the third fucking time this girl has rejected me like this.

  At this point, anger at Samantha wasn’t the predominant emotion. It was certainly there, sure, but it wasn’t what most overwhelmed me. I was mostly just pissed at myself and how stupid I’d been.

  Stupid to think that a girl as weird and strange as her would take kindly to sexual advances like this. Stupid to think that a girl who had rejected me twice would magically change her mind on the third time—if anything, she had only played me. She’d kissed me… only so she could push back in an even more embarrassing fashion down the road.

  I just stood there with my ice cream in my hand, wondering why I’d put so much effort into remembering things about her. Why I’d bothered trying to make amends with her. Why I’d done anything at all for her.

  Well, one thing was apparent. If this was how Samantha wanted to be, there wasn’t a goddamn thing I could do to change it. But there was a lot of things I could do to change how I reacted to her.

  For starters, there wasn’t going to be any apology to Principal Collins for what I had done. The truth would die as soon as we graduated from Providence Prep. Samantha would forever be known as the “liquor girl” on campus. If she didn’t like that, tough shit. She should have thought about that first.

  I was also done pursuing her in any fashion. No more putting myself in detention so I coul
d spend time with her. No more offering walks. No more drunken texts.

  It was a damn shame, too. Much as I hated to admit it, much as it made me sound like a massive fucking dork, I still thought she was cute. A bitch, but a cute bitch. I would’ve gone slow for her. Maybe if slow had lasted a while, I would have found a couple of girls on the side to satiate my sexual appetite, but then again, if we were going that slow, we wouldn’t be exclusive.

  Regardless, I was past anger. I was past all of it.

  Except the part where I wondered what could have been. Because as much as I found Samantha’s erratic behavior disgusting and disappointing, I was also left wondering where the good side of her was, the side that was so smart, kind, and straightforward—the kind that would have lent itself well to something more.

  OK, I was a little pissed I had to call a second Uber home. My parents might have paid my bills, but that didn’t mean I enjoyed having spent the time to get rides to and from my house like so.

  And as it turned out, getting left at the ice cream shop may have been the most enjoyable part of my evening, because as soon as the Uber dropped me off, my father was waiting for me at the front door. He apparently had no interest in giving me the chance to even get into my house.

  “So let me get this straight,” he said with a snort. “First you walk in without saying hello to your mother or I. Then you leave without saying goodbye. I have to come out to the front porch as soon as I hear your friend drop you off just so I can get a courtesy greeting?”

  I was still not exactly sober, so I made sure to keep some distance to avoid raising too much suspicion with my father. Of course, given I’d already quit basketball and had earlier arguments, I wasn’t exactly on steady ground even without raising suspicion. I was admittedly an ugly mess.

  “It’s been a busy day, sorry,” I said.

  “A Friday is a busy day for you?” he said, folding his arms across his chest. “What the hell are you really doing, Nick?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just busy with friends and such.”