Beneath The Skin (A College Obsession Romance) (3 page)

I bet her lips taste good.

Just then, her sketching stops—pencil pressed to the paper—and she turns her head slightly, as if sensing my attention. Her eyes drop to the jeans on the floor, then narrow at the discovery of them. I see the thoughts working in her face. Then, she turns her head towards me.

I jerk my face back behind the screen, my heart hammering like a prisoner behind the bars of my ribcage.
Did she just see me?
I clench my fists, the sweat making my underarms feel like jelly, and control my breath. I’m fairly certain that the whole class can hear the drumming in my chest. My heart is rattling the easels as we speak.

I wait, clenching my eyes.
You imagined it
, I convince myself.
Don’t worry, Brant. She totally didn’t see you.

But she sure as fuck saw my pants.

Every minute that passes is another minute that the professor, or a student, could notice my lovely article of clothing crumpled against that wall and … well, my little situation wouldn’t be made any better if my pants are taken away.

Not to mention that my phone is
not
on vibrate and could go off at any second.

My wallet’s in the pocket too
, I just realized.
Fuck me sideways.

Is class over yet?

The minutes tick by slowly. Plus, I’ve developed an untimely urge to pee, which is further exasperated by the fact that I’m naked and the AC just kicked on, pulling a torturously gentle breeze through the room and over my sensitive skin. I cross my arms tightly and wait, squeezing my legs together and begging the usually-merciful gods of lady luck to quit tormenting me and end the class already.

Someone gets up from their stool, then the evil footsteps approach.
No, no, no.
They stop just short of the privacy screen.
Oh, god, no.
I cup my cock and balls by instinct, bracing myself for the professor to catch me standing here and for my life to end.

Then a face emerges. I can’t even bring myself to look, clenching shut my eyes. Maybe if I don’t see them, they won’t see me.

When the presence doesn’t go away, I finally peek open an eye.

It’s her.

The hot girl from the back row.

And she’s staring at me with the intensity of some furious, feral creature. Her eyes are a rich, powerful green made all the more fierce by her thick black eyeliner. All her dark hair is pulled over a shoulder, spilling down her front and over her breasts. Good lord, she’s been amply blessed in that department, too.

She might call for the professor. She might simply call me out and watch me run. She could do any assortment of things that would bring my college career to a snappy, instant end.

So naturally, I respond to all that fear by giving her my signature cocky smirk, then nod my head upwards at her.

A look of amusement fills her striking, emerald eyes.

Then, as if I was nothing but a department store mannequin, she reaches around me and pulls something off the shelf—a brush, a pencil, a machete … I wouldn’t know, for all the care I’m giving it. Then, with a roll of her eyes, she leaves me, her footsteps fading until she’s returned to her easel.

And I’m still holding my junk … and now my breath.

The lady luck gods answer my pleas unexpectedly soon afterwards, and when the room is at last cleared, I make a dash for my pants, then slip on what remains of my shirt. And my dignity.

It’s in the courtyard outside that I catch up to her. She’s heading for the tunnel over which the School of Art sits. I have to make up for the awkward situation she caught me in at the very least. Maybe I’ll get a name out of her too, if lady luck’s still on my side.

Then tonight when I have her talked into slipping beneath my sheets, I’ll go all Picasso on that sexy ass of hers.

“Hey, hey, hey,” I sing, coming up to her side and keeping pace with her as she walks.

She regards me with nothing but half a glance and a smirk.

“Bad first impression,” I admit. “Really, you caught me in a—”

“For a second there,” she interrupts, staring ahead as we walk, “I thought you were the nude model for our life art lesson. That is, until I reminded myself that the class isn’t until Wednesday.”

“You think I’m a model? Is that what you think I am?”

“I know exactly what you are,” she says, still not looking at me, then cuts abruptly down a path to the left, her long, straight hair tossed like a whip at her back as she goes. The effect is so strong, I stop pursuing at once, frozen in place and watching her as she goes.

“What am I, then?” I call out to her, feeling smart.

The silent swish of her dark hair and the sway of her tight ass is my answer as she fades into the distance. I feel a tightening in my stomach, as if her very existence was a gauntlet thrown at my feet. It’s going to take quite an impressive act to get her attention; that much, I can tell.

Something about the way she puts me off really gets me hard.

An hour later, I find myself under a big oak tree just outside the University Center, and I’m sharing two halves of a foot-long bacon sub with one of my roommates, Dmitri.

“W-Wait, wait,” he stammers, poking the bridge of his black, thick-rimmed glasses with a long pale finger. “You were …
naked
?”

“Ass-out, balls-out naked.” I’m talking through a mouthful, which Dmitri hates. Maybe that’s why I do it. “And this hot chick in the class came back to grab something, and—”

“Saw you.”

“Saw me,” I confirm. “And she was … she was smokin’. Did I ever mention how many hot girls are at the School of Art? Best decision of my life, switching to photography.”

“What’s that? Your ninth major so far? Tenth?”

“No idea. Doesn’t matter. The art school is girls galore.”

“But what about the dancer? I thought you and her—”

“Dude, she’s nuts. Well, she’s nice, but nuts. Must be all the five-six-seven-eights. Crazy people count to themselves, right? I mean, it’s really more of a friends-with-benefits thing anyway.”

“Does
she
know that?” he asks. I don’t answer, staring down at my sub and determining where to take my next bite. “I had a dancer friend my freshman year. Male, gay, his name was Ian,” he goes on. “He went all weird on me after I wrote a piece about a ballerina who turned into an albino tarantula and ate her dance instructor. I was inspired. I thought it was a good idea at the time.”

“You and your poems,” I tease through my next mouthful.

“It was a
short story
piece. I’m not a poetry major. How many times do I gotta tell you? I’m a
creative writing
major.”

“But you write poems, too. Hell, you take
poetry
classes.”

“And you gotta take
Art History
as part of your curriculum. Are you a
History
major?”

“No.”

“Case and point.” Dmitri whips off his glasses and runs the back of his wrist across his sweaty forehead. “This damn heat. So tell me,” he mutters, popping his glasses back on, “you just wear that thing around your neck to look smart? Or are you planning on
actually
taking pics sometime this semester?”

“Shit, this old thing?” I tease, lifting the staggeringly expensive camera hanging around my neck. “It’s really just an excuse to hit up the girls. All I gotta tell them is I’m shooting for the campus newspaper, or doing a piece on college life. Girls eat that shit up, bunching up and looking all cute, their tits pushed together …”

Dmitri shakes his head, biting off another healthy chunk of his sub. His judgments of me are written all over his smirking face.

“You change paths with the wind,” he gripes. “Don’t you have, like, a goal? If you keep swapping majors every semester, you’ll be lucky to graduate before you’re 30. What were you last year? Engineering? Or was it Psychology? I don’t even remember.”

“Maybe I should switch to Theatre. I could annoy the shit out of Clayton and Dessie.”

“And risk running into Chloe again? No way.”

“Good point,” I snort. Chloe is this weird goth girl I messed around with for a week or two last year before she got all clingy and I lost interest. She didn’t take the rejection well.

“So … you and the dancer are totally done?”

“We weren’t really ‘started’, so to speak …”

“I get it.” Dmitri leans against the thick trunk of the tree, his sandwich lowered to his lap. “You’ve had your fill. Tossing her aside and looking for the next lucky lady.”

“You make it sound so … bad.”

“Dude, I know you. It’s your routine. Half the female population of Klangburg University’s been victim to it by now.” He chokes back a laugh. “Maybe the big ol’ man-whore’s losing his charm.”

“Not according to the she-demon who just rode me for an hour behind a privacy screen in the art room. I’d say my
charm
was pretty spot-on,” I boast with a sneer.

Dmitri snorts at that. “You’re good-looking, Brant, but you’re not
that
good-looking.”

But even as he says it, I see the lie in his black, beady eyes. He’s always been into me, I can tell. And really, who can blame him? I make a pretty hot roommate. Sometimes when we’re watching TV, I’ll pull off my shirt just for my own amusement while Dmitri sneaks glances throughout the whole movie or Netflix show we have on. I act like I don’t notice, but I do. I may not be into dudes like Dmitri is, but I like the attention no matter where I get it from. I’m used to it.

“There’s nothin’ wrong with playing the field,” I tell him, tossing the last bite of my sandwich in and leaning back in the grass, propped up by an elbow. “Imagine what kind of messed up world we’d live in if we all, like, married the first person we banged.”

Dmitri guffaws. “You’re looking for a
wife
now?”

“No, no, no. You kidding me?” My words shower the grass in front of me with breadcrumbs and bits of bacon. “Nah. I mean, say you go into a candy store and your eyes grow double at all the gumdrops, right? Sure, go for the gumdrops if you want, get your fill. But if you fill up on those colored little gooey sweets, you’ll never know the ecstasy waiting for you in that chocolate aisle nearby. Or how many flavors they carry of …
candied
apples
. Or the Swedish Fish.”

He squints at me. “We still talking about candy?”

“Point is, you need to
try
before you
buy
.”

Dmitri frowns. “And what about all the diabetics?”

I sigh, staring at my roommate. “You’re not diabetic.”

“I’m playing with your metaphor,” he explains.

“Dude, you’re not a
sexual
diabetic, either. We’re young. We’re alive. You cannot tell me with a straight face that you have
zero
interest in sex, Dmitri.”

He lifts the sandwich back to his mouth, ignoring my question as the black sleeves of his shirt fall to reveal the blue-and-red tattoo that runs up his right forearm. Though you wouldn’t know it from his long hands, Dmitri is a short fellow with choppy black hair he’s let grow out a bit over the summer so that it comes down his forehead in haphazard spikes, some of which jut out unevenly over his eyes like thorns from a rosebush. If it weren’t for his black, thick-rimmed glasses, he’d be in danger of poking his eyes out with his own hair. The guy is not bad-looking by any means. He could get tail if he’d just step out of his damn room and apply himself. Everyone, males and females alike, dig the brooding-tortured-artist thing. Doesn’t he get that? I’d kill for an ounce of his creative depth. I have the creative depth of a thimble.

I squint at him. “I mean, you do have a dick, don’t you?”

Dmitri is almost successful at not choking on his sandwich. After a second of sputtering, he says, “You’re gonna run out of women, Brant. Then at night, the only thing you’ll have to cuddle with in bed are shadows and cold sheets.”

“Is that a poem?” I ask, still squinting.

“No. It’s your love life. And it’s ending, one woman at a time. And yes, I
do have a dick
.”

“Ah, c’mon,” I say, laughing at him. He’s so easy to rile up. “Just messing with you. Hey, want to grab some dinner later?”

“You’re about to learn a sobering lesson, Brant,” he bites back as he pulls his black button-and-patch-covered bag over a shoulder, the material of his grey-and-black-checkered shorts swishing as he stalks away. “A sobering lesson!” he calls out over his shoulder halfway across the field. I just lean back and wonder if he owns anything at all that isn’t 90% black.