Adrian Lessons (6 page)

“You were in my apartment Friday night,” I say, straightening. “Remember?”

Her eyebrows come together guiltily as she does. “Oh, right. I guess I just assumed you were visiting, or…ugh, I don’t know.”

We get in the elevator together and there are two very powerful minutes of elevator music and awkward silence.

But I don’t get out on my floor.

“Isn’t this where you live?” She keeps her thumb on the door’s open button.

I think fast. Panic is unfurling in my stomach. I’ve waited four years to see this girl—I can’t screw fate over by letting it end like this. “Do you have an ice pack in your apartment? I think my face is swelling.”

The guilt I successfully banked on flowers in her cheeks. “I guess so.” She takes her thumb off the button.

Cleo’s apartment is the mirror image of mine, except covered in girl stuff. A potted flower, an actual poster from The Notebook, and romance novels…everywhere.
Kiss of the Highlander
is balanced on top of the windowsill.
Seducing a Duke
is nestled in with the shoes by the door.

“That’s all my roommate Marie’s stuff,” says Cleo shortly, rummaging in the freezer. I swear I see a frost-coated book fall out. “She’s crazy about romance.”

She withdraws an icepack, wraps it in a rose-patterned tea towel, and crosses the room. I watch uncertainty flicker over her features as she holds it to my face.

Coldness seeps into the spot that’s not actually very sore, but I’m not paying attention. Her face is so close. Her eyebrows are a few shades lighter than her hair. Her eyelashes are surprisingly pale too, almost translucent. I swallow. “Cleo…”

“You can borrow it,” she almost squawks, shoving the ice pack at me, and I’m gratified to see a blush spread over her face.

I can’t help myself. Another grin leaps to my lips. “Hey, here’s an idea. Why don’t you come down to my apartment—”

It’s the wrong thing to say.

“Jesus, you’ll stop at nothing,” she snaps, dumping her backpack on the kitchen table.

“To what?” I widen my eyes innocently.

“To get me in your bed!”

“It’s seven p.m. on a Monday night. You really think that’s what I’m going for? Come on, Clee…”

I use the nickname unthinkingly—lots of people called her that in high school—but it makes her flare like a sunrise. “Oh, so it’s Clee now? You barely know me!”

I know her more than she could believe. “Cleo, then.”

She opens the front door. “Sorry I slapped you. Now goodbye.”

“But we’ve barely talked,” I smile, trying not to let on that I’m pleading. “You haven’t told me anything about your illustrious career of writing erotica for a living.”

“That’s because it’s none of your business.” I’ve either brought up something she didn’t want to think about or she’s just reached her limit, because she’s trembling with irritation. “Look, I’ve had a completely shit day, all right? The last thing I need is to be hassled by a guy in my own apartment. And I don’t write erotica, I just write the sex scenes for my roommate’s romance—”

She freezes, her hand flying to her mouth.

“I can’t believe I just said that,” she whispers. “You better not tell anyone or I’ll—”

“It’s too late, Cleo.”

The voice belongs to neither of us. The door to the left of the living room opens, and standing there is a short girl with curly dark hair. She stares at me for a second, then at Cleo, before bursting into tears.

“How could you,” she wails at an impressive decibel before slamming the door again.

Cleo repeats the word “shit” so many times it sounds like she’s telling me to shhhh. Then she grabs my arm, steers me out into the hallway, and shuts the door.

I stand quietly outside her door as realization sinks in.

I finally ran back into the girl of my dreams, and in less than a day, I’ve made her hate me.

~5~

CLEO

“I heard he can give a girl an orgasm that lasts for an hour.”

“I heard he made Chelsea Kennedy come so hard she squirted across the room and onto a picture of her grandmother.”

“I heard he models in Paris and had sex with Scarlett Johansson.”

They all round on me at once.

“So why won’t you go out with him?”

“Girls, girls,” I laugh as four pairs of hungry eyes bore into me. I resist the urge to run screaming for the rest of my life. “We’re getting off topic. This is Psychology Club, not Why-Won’t-Cleo-Bang-the-Hot-Guy Club.”

They confer for a moment, heads together, before turning toward me and nodding in unison.

“We’re okay with the name change,” says Tanisha Melville, a sophomore with the world’s biggest hipster glasses.

“I’ll order the new T-shirts,” chimes in Elise Brown, our secretary, who always has at least two pencils in her hair.

“We’re not going to let this go without some sort of explanation,” adds June-Ann Weatherbee, who is Southern, weighs two hundred pounds, and has more sex than any of us combined.

I wave my hands, privately plotting my escape route if they do decide to kill me after all. Jump over the couch, triple-backflip over June-Ann’s head, and out the window like Catwoman. “Fine…I’ll tell you what really happened. I went to his apartment…”

They lean in closer.

“And I opened his fridge…”

Elise accidentally bonks heads with Tanisha.

“And that thing was a mess. I’m talking milk that was two days expired, stuff in Tupperwares that should definitely have been thrown out by then, and the vegetables in the crisper were probably moldy.”

Tanisha blows air out her mouth. “I thought you were going to say his fridge was full of human heads.”

“Oh, it was. I was getting to that! Heads galore. Like Macy’s was having a clear-out sale on heads and he got there first on Sunday morning. All the heads.”

“You totally made up his messy fridge.” Elise scowls.

“I have writer’s block, okay? Nothing I come up with is any good,” I moan.

June-Ann offers what I think is meant to be a gentle pat, but instead is a wallop that nearly separates my ribcage from my spine.

“Honey, even if he has thirty heads in his fridge, you still need to ride that pony. Have you seen him? That boy is the stuff of legends.”

“I am
not
going out with a boy who has sex with a ton of girls for the sole purpose of getting really good at sex and running some bogus advice column about it.”

“You don’t need to marry him. Just screw him!” declares Elise. I stare at her. Elise is so conservative that she once forced June-Ann into one of her sweaters when she thought her top was too low cut.

“And take detailed notes so we can we get off to them later,” says Tanisha primly.

June-Ann groans. “I would lick that boy until he forgot how to speak English.”

I can’t explain the real reason I’ll never be able to have a one-night stand with Adrian, as much as that sentence is making my uterus wave picket signs and lodge a formal complaint with my brain.

It would be too embarrassing. The campus sex god in bed with the campus—

“Back to the topic at hand,” I bark. “We’re analyzing Marie to figure out how to get her to forgive me, remember?”

“Right. Marie.” Elise scribbles studiously in her notebook. “Textbook anxiety disorder, trust issues, so you’re going to have to prove to her that she can still depend on you.”

“Nah, I don’t think she’s got anxiety. She’s obviously a sociopath,” says Tanisha happily. “She’s going to use this situation to her best advantage, so whatever she asks you to do, just do it.”

Elise pokes her with a pen. “You think everyone’s a sociopath.”

“Everyone
is
a sociopath.”

“
What is that,
” roars June-Ann, and we all stop to instinctively cower. June-Ann is pointing at my bag, which has slipped open to reveal its contents.

“A tampon?” I try.

“Besides the tampon. Cleo Reynolds, don’t you dare lie to me. Adrian King gave you that flower.”

I knew I should have thrown it away. It’s just that yellow roses are my favorite. Although there’s no way Adrian could have known that.

I shrug, knowing June-Ann can smell lies like she can smell fear. “Yeah, he left it outside my door this morning with a note asking me out again—”

“HE GAVE YOU A ROSE…!”

Tanisha and Elise huddle together for safety. June-Marie grabs a copy of
Introduction to Psychology
and beats me with it, chasing me out of the room. “Get out of here. You’re an insult to women everywhere!”

So much for the Psychology’s Club’s help.

I trudge down the stairs, pausing to stick the stupid rose upright in a bookcase. It looks a little lonely, so I make it a note that says ‘Free to a good home.’ Then I add, ‘Warning: may contain traces of playboy.’

Since this morning, Adrian has asked me out three times. Once with the rose. Once during lunch, when he showed up in the dining hall, deposited a strawberry cupcake in front of me—again, my favorite—and left without a word. Two rolled-up movie tickets were stuck in the buttercream frosting.

Five girls congratulated me on my way out of the hall.

The last time was an hour ago, in the library. I was innocently reading when he came up behind me, put his arms over my shoulders, and seductively whispered, “Dinner, this Friday?” into my ear.

At least, he got to the “Dinner, this Fri—” before I screamed and accidentally punched him in the nose.

His only response to my desperate apologies and attempts to mop the blood of his shirt was a “In Japan, a nosebleed is considered a sign of attraction.”

I’m surprised I’m not in the middle of a full-blown facial period.

Any other day, the fact that Statham’s resident sex guru has become inexplicably obsessed with me would take greater precedence in my life.

But Marie still hasn’t spoken to me since yesterday.

Nor does she speak to me the day after that.

Or the day after that.

It’s sort of fascinating, sharing an apartment with someone who won’t speak to you. You can follow them around the kitchen for an hour while they make dinner, enumerating every single thing you love about them in detail—from the cute ankle hair they always miss while shaving to the drool spot they leave on their pillow every morning that miraculously always conforms to the shape of Kentucky—but they still won’t acknowledge your presence or put a piece of garlic bread into your open and waiting mouth.

Amazing.

I changed her phone alarm music to
To Forgive
by the Smashing Pumpkins. I tried to make her pancakes. Admittedly I set the stove on fire, but at least the firemen were hot. I’ve offered her cookies, booze, apology letters, Adrian’s movie tickets, my body, and a pony. Eventually I got fed up and sat on the edge of her bed, chanting “Marie Marie Marie Marie” for twenty minutes while she calmly read her book.

The girl has a will of steel.

I understand why she’s mad. I did the one thing I swore up and down and sideways that I’d never do—admit that I write her sex scenes.

Our freshman year at Statham, we were assigned roommates. She was a shy, romantic bookworm who spent the first week of school hiding down our room, and I was a weirdo who spent the first week with my head in a toilet.

Because I had the flu! Not because I was drinking my little freshman heart out. You’re so judgmental.

Okay, I was also drinking my heart out, but that’s beside the point.

Anyway, everything changed between us the night I came home and found her on my laptop. And not just on Facebook.

She had found the motherload.

My erotic fiction folder.

After I tried and failed to convince her that it all belonged to my sister-friend-mother-great-great-aunt-twice-removed, and that I would NEVER write about Daenerys Targeryen sucking Robb Stark’s cock until they both passed out (that was my
Game of Thrones
period) she turned to me, and that was when I got my first taste of Business Marie.

Business Marie shoved my face in her computer, scrolled through a seventy-thousand-word romance novel, and showed me the blank pages where the two characters needed to be banging, blowing, and licking or something of the like.

“I can’t write it,” she’d said. “But you can.”

She promised to give me a third of her advance if the book ever sold. I did it mostly out of pity, and because writing sex comes to me as easily as water—or used to.

Imagine my surprise when, five months later, she landed a sixty-thousand-dollar deal with Harper fucking Collins.

That’s right.
Sixty thousand.

Which isn’t a normal advance for a first time author, just so you don’t decide to quit your day job. Somehow her book got caught up in a vicious bidding war with Penguin, and suddenly…dollar signs.

She made me swear I’d never tell anyone that I wrote her sex scenes. She said she’d lose all credibility as an author, especially considering the first book did well enough to warrant a sequel.

And so I never told.

Until Adrian.

Curse that gorgeous green-eyed bastard.

In my heart, I know it’s not actually his fault. But something about the way he looks at me makes me want to spill all my secrets.

Even the secret I swore would stay locked up inside me until the day I died.

“Cleo!”

I look up. I’ve been meandering across campus, lost in thought. Tanisha is waving at me. She and a few other girls are stretched out on a hill, enjoying the last of the September sunshine, textbooks lying neglected in the grass.

“Has she broken down yet?” asks June-Ann, lying on her back under a tree and peeking out from between her fingers.

“No,” I sigh. “Although this morning I covered her bedroom in little paper hearts that say ‘Cleo + Marie 4ever’ and I think I’m wearing her down—”

“Not Marie!” June-Ann says in horror. “You. Regarding the Sex King.”

“Adrian?”

“How many Sex Kings are there at Statham?”

I raise an eyebrow.

“I’m a sex empress,” June-Ann clarifies.

“Right. Well, first of all, you shouldn’t say ‘she’ if you mean ‘you’, that’s very misleading. Second of all, no, I have not broken down yet, and the Sex King is the least of my concerns right now. My best friend hates me!”