She Laughs in Pink (Sheridan Hall #1) (4 page)

He lifts his head, and his red, glassy eyes answer my question. “Do me a favor, Jules. Please keep me away from the room five weed girls. I’m gonna get myself kicked off the team.”

“I’ll do my best,” I say. He leans back and I point to his lap. “May I?”

He opens his arms, and I sit, simmering from the contact between my backside and his thighs. He rests one hand on my knee and puts the other around my waist. “I’m really glad you’re here with me,” he says. I smile, aware of every inch our bodies are touching. “I never thought you’d be right down the hall.” My head spins. I’m not sure if it’s because of my closeness to Ben or the alcohol. “I’m glad we’re together, too.”

I knew he’d be surprised by me being at Sheridan. When I’d received my acceptance, I’d emailed housing with a letter from my therapist then put on the performance of my life via Skype to the sympathetic housing assistant.
I just lost a sister. Ben’s my rock—my best friend. I’ll be away from home for the first time, and I’ll need to be near him to succeed. Is there any way for us to be in the same dorm?

I shift in his lap and touch the scar over his left eyebrow. “I remember when you got this.”

“Hurt like a motherfucker. Remember all the blood?” He covers my hand with his, rubbing the scar in circles.

“It wasn’t pretty, but the scar makes you look tough.” I trace it with my finger but focus on his hand against my thigh.

Ben smiles, our eyes meet, and I lose myself in him. I’m back in high school, and he’s protecting me from the world. I put my hands on his shoulders and bend my head down near his. When he doesn’t object, I keep moving toward him. My heart races as his lips graze mine.

He doesn’t pull away until I attempt contact with his lips again. He lifts me and stands up. I drape my arms around his waist, but he peels me off and takes a step back. “Jules, I can’t do this.”

“Why not? I thought since we’re here together…maybe we can…you know, be together.” Even though I want all of Ben, I’m willing to settle for a friends-with-benefits scenario. I can work out the details once I have him.

“You’re too special to me.” He’s said this before, and it annoys me every time. It’s as though he’s determined to keep me out, but I can’t figure out why. “Look at you. You can have any guy on this campus.”

“I don’t want any guy on campus except you.” I draw close to him and touch my finger to his chest.

He grabs my hand, and his red eyes pierce mine. “We’ve talked about this.”

For four years I’ve let Ben reject me. Tonight though—whether it’s being at college, or the alcohol, or the Jersey air—it pisses me off.

He tries to walk away but I block his path. “I want a reason,” I say. “Right here, right now, Benjamin Riley.”

“No.” He turns his back and tries to walk away.

I follow. “Yes.”

He paces a few times then stops to face me. “Fine,” he barks. “You want a reason?”

I don’t answer. I glare and wait.

“You scare me, Jules.”

My jaw drops.
Huh?

“You’re not simple. You’re complicated. You're difficult, challenging, beautiful, and you exhaust me. I love you, I do. You’re my best friend, but I can’t be with you. Not like that. Are you happy now?”

I’m not sure if I’m shaken more by his words or the tone and volume of his voice. I just stand there, mouth gaping, hearing the words over and over in my head:
challenging, difficult, not simple, exhausting, exhausting, exhausting
.

Ben’s staring, waiting. I take a deep breath and whisper, “Go away.”

His eyes pop. “Jules, no—”

I cringe at the sound of his voice. “You wanted simple. This is simple. Go. Away.” I sit in the chair he vacated and drop my head into my hands. When I lift it again, he’s gone.

As my anger rises from the tips of my toes to the crown of my head, I stand and kick each cabinet. I lift a coffee mug from the sink and fling it as hard as I can at the opposite wall. It flies over the couch, missing the television by inches, and slams into the wall. Stupid mug doesn't even break, but the act of throwing it and hearing it hit the wall satisfies me.

Until Chase’s face pops up over the back of the couch.

I sigh in defeat and shake my head at the ceiling.
Fuck my life.
I wait for it because I know it’s coming.

“I warned you about the tree.” He wiggles a finger at me and sinks back into the couch, laughing.

I decide to hate him, for real this time. “Fuck you, Chase.”

I march out of the lounge to room one without a word to anyone, throw myself into bed, plug in my ear buds, and hide under my covers.

Tomorrow. I'll fix it all tomorrow.

Chapter Four

Chase

I wake up with a wicked a hangover and a girl in my twin bed. Blurry details flash through my mind:
Tina. Art major. Second Floor. “Hey, I like the purple streak in your hair!”
She moves and her leg brushes mine. She’s dressed,
thank God
. I roll away and rub my head, fighting off the letters N-L-P, which repeat in my mind.

Ben breathes heavily from his side of the room. I need water. And Advil. And an excuse to get rid of Tina.
What the hell happened?
I remember talking with her in Winston’s room. Juliet let Rocco and Frank grope her for a while before continuing on her never-ending quest for Ben. She may have told me she hated me. I’d excused myself to go to the men’s room and then hid in the lounge.

The lounge.
Juliet and Ben. Ben had called her difficult and exhausting and beautiful. For some reason, he’d said those words as if they were negatives. In my opinion, those traits are what make her so fucking awesome.

I sighed. I’d told myself I wasn’t going to fill my college days with alcohol and women, yet here I am with a strange girl wedged between the cold wall and me, and what is bound to be another awkward, hung over morning.

She rolls toward me and yawns. “What time is it?”

The light shining from my phone makes my head pound. “Early. Six. Go back to sleep.”

“I’m gonna go up to my room. Thanks for letting me sleep down here. I really didn’t want to see what my roommate had planned with her new…friend.”

“No problem.” The weight on my shoulders lifts at her amicable tone.

She rubs her eyes and scans the room. “Where are my shoes?” She rolls over me and climbs out of my bed.

After a joint effort, we find her shoes in the dark. When she has everything, I walk her to the door. I squint from the bright lights in the hallway, and shut the door behind us so Ben won’t wake up.

“Thanks again for letting me stay. I hope I didn’t disrupt your sleep too much.”

“No, I slept like a rock.” It’s the truth. Out cold. Drugs and alcohol will do that to a person. Fuzzy bits of a discussion about Caravaggio and her trip to the Louvre scramble in my brain like the pieces of a puzzle. “Did you tell me last night that we have Art History tomorrow morning?”

“Yep. Want to walk over together?”

I stiffen at the sound of a door closing down the hall. Of course it’s Juliet, walking toward us in her pajamas. She looks as miserable as I feel. Her hair’s messy, her face is pale.
Ah, the morning after.

“Hey,” Tina says to Juliet as she passes. Juliet scowls as she pushes open the door to the ladies’ room.

When the ladies’ room door shuts, Tina raises her eyebrows. “Friendly.”

“Early,” I say. She deserves a pass after Ben crushed her hopes last night.

“Whatever. I’ll knock on your door tomorrow morning.”

I nod and hurry into my room, shutting the door to avoid seeing Juliet on her way out. Clearly, she has the wrong impression about what happened with Tina and me, and I don’t know why I care. Well, I know why I care, but I don’t know why she seems to care. Maybe she doesn’t. All I know at the moment is that it’s too damn early to figure out what goes on in a woman’s head, especially a woman like Juliet.

I lay in bed, happy to have it to myself, and hear Ben groan. A drawer opens and he rummages through his clothes.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” I say.

“I’m glad you did. I have practice. I’m hung over as shit. The hippies next door will be the death of me. Today’s gonna suck.” Ben throws a pair of shorts from his drawer to his bed. When he finds the pair he’s looking for, he slams the drawer. We both grab our heads at the sound. “Sorry.”

My brain screams. “Damn, everything’s so loud. Maybe we can make a pact not to let each other do that again for a long time.”
Hello? New Life Plan? Chase calling.

“Deal.” Ben grabs his shower stuff and hesitates at the door. “Who’s the girl?”

“Tina. An art major. Lives upstairs.”

“Nice.”

“You were talking to Megan a lot last night.”

“Megan? Oh, right. I almost forgot about that after the Juliet disaster.”

“What Juliet disaster?” Okay, so it’s kind of a lie. There is nothing about not lying in the NLP though.

“I can’t talk about it now. If I don’t get into the shower I’m gonna pass out, and I have to be on the field in, like, a half hour. Listen, could you do me a favor?”

“What’s up?”

“Could you check in on Juliet today? I’m worried about her. I think she was pretty pissed at me last night. If you have time, maybe you can hang with her or something?”

Ben’s concern is evident. My interest in Juliet, apparently, is not so evident. There’s nothing I want more than to hang with her. But me wanting to hang with her is not the problem. Her wanting to hang with me is. “Yeah, sure,” I say with a shrug.

“She flipped out last night.”
I remember
. “I’ll feel better knowing she’s not alone, festering. When she gets pissed, crazy shit happens.”

“What do you mean?” I can’t help it. I want to know everything about her.

“I have a million examples,” he says.

“How about one?”

Ben scratches his head and squints an eye. “Okay. When we were in high school, during our sophomore year, the school threatened to eliminate the arts program. Nobody really cared except the art people. No offense.”

“None taken.” I’m too hung over for the soapbox, and I’m anxious to hear the story.

“Jules freaked out. She started petitioning and going door-to-door in town. Called the local newspaper and wrote letters to the editor about the importance of the art program. Even showed up at Board of Ed. meetings and literally was like a tornado blowing through the school. In the end, I think they kept the program just to get her to back off. I couldn’t believe it.”

“She’s pretty feisty, huh?”

“Or crazy, depending how you look at it.” Obviously, Ben sees it a little differently than me. I prefer feisty, driven, incredible. “She did ballet on the outside, but that had nothing to do with the art program. Still, she wouldn’t give up on it. The more they resisted, the angrier and more motivated she got.”

“Does she always get her way?”

Ben thinks for a second. “I’ve never seen her not get her way. She’s scary when she has a cause.”

“So you’ve said. I think you’re her current cause though.”

“I think so, too, God help me.” Ben laughs as he leaves the room.

Ben’s more of a mystery to me than Juliet. How do you reject someone like her? Someone who radiates nothing but love for you? I’m sure there’s drama in their past that I know nothing about, but when someone like Juliet—colorful, beautiful, determined Juliet—begs you to love her, how do you say no? I’ve talked to a lot of girls and each has her own positive attributes, but one thing’s for certain—Juliets don’t grow on trees. It’s less than twenty-four hours since she was the Yoga Hottie on the train, but I’m hooked.

I wonder how to handle my “favor” to Ben and know I’ll have to come up with something big.

I grin when I think up the perfect plan.

Juliet

I can’t sleep. My head hurts from drinking too much, for one thing. For another, I can’t stop replaying the fight with Ben in my head. I hate that he doesn’t love me the way I am. I need to win him over, but I can’t change who I am.
Can I?

I hide under my new comforter dreading the day ahead. Then my phone buzzes with a text from my dad. I text him back to let him know I’m fine, shut the phone off, and throw it across the room onto my mystery roommate’s bare bed. Just as I’m about to close my eyes again, there’s a knock on the door.

I drag myself out of bed, lumber to the door, and open it.

“Morning, gorgeous.” Chase is awfully chipper for a morning-after. Blatantly, he checks me out. I’m half naked and look gross, but I don’t care. Morning isn’t my best look. “Nice jammies.”

I yawn and give him the finger as I hop back into bed and pull the comforter over my head, hoping he’ll disappear. The door creaks closed, and I think he’s gone. Then the bed shifts from his weight.
Ugh.
Imagines of his smirk when I threw the mug his way last night flash through my mind.

“How are you feeling?”

I stick my hand over the top of the comforter and give him the finger again. “I feel like shit, Chase. Go away.”

“No. Let’s talk about last night.”

I wiggle toward the wall, hoping it will swallow me up. “You mean about how you slept with the weird girl from the second floor?”

Chase pulls the comforter down, exposing me from the waist up.
How does he looks so good so early in the morning?

He frowns. “That’s not nice. She needed a place to crash because her roommate was hooking up.”

“That’s what the lounge is for. It’s none of my business anyway.” I pull the comforter up to my chest and sit up, cross-legged, facing Chase. He smells good, too—clean and soapy.

“Speaking of your business…” He lifts his eyebrows and cringes, which is exactly how last night feels to me. I think he’s going to push me to talk, tease me about being pathetic, or bad-mouth Ben, but he doesn’t. Instead, he says, “We can talk about it if you want.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

I huff and resume hiding, pulling the comforter over my head as dramatically as I can. He pulls it off. “About today,” he says. “As beautiful as you look with your tee shirt and full B cups and bed-head, you have to get up and come with me.”

“They’re small Cs. And no.”

“Yes,” he demands. “I have to show you something.”

“I have big plans.”
Total lie.

He crosses his arms and studies me. “What plans?”

“I have to sulk about my rejection. Then strategize. Then go to the bookstore.”

Chase runs his hand through his black hair, and I admire how it flops back into place. “You can sulk and strategize with me. Then I’ll take you to the bookstore.”

“I’m not supposed to go to strange places with strange men. That’s what Dolch said last night. Do you want me to text him and report you?” I point to my phone, which still sits on my absent roommate’s bed.

Chase walks over and picks it up, then taps the screen. “There.” He throws the phone to me. “I put my number in. I’m not a stranger anymore. Don’t forget, you threw a mug at me last night. We’ve been drunk together. You’ve already told me you hate me.”

“Yeah, all in one day. You’re very annoying.” I try to remain miserable but can’t suppress my grin. I may hate him, but his smell is intoxicating. I want him to come closer so I can fully inhale him.
I need a man.

“You’re already under my skin after one day, Juliet Anderson. We have a whole year to go. Now get your amazing ass out of bed and take a shower. I want to get going soon. Wear something comfortable. Preferably cute and tight, too.”

“Yes, sir.” I almost forget about Ben when I flirt with Chase.
Almost.

“Text me when you’re ready, gorgeous.” He winks. We stare each other down until I point to the door. Finally, he shakes his head and leaves.

I stand and stretch as my body yells at me. My bones creak, my muscles are tight. My body craves daily ballet. The creaking and tightness are its revenge.
At least I can make myself look good even though I feel like crap
. If I can’t be with Ben, I’ll take Chase’s attention. Any guy who calls me gorgeous and compliments my ass is okay by me.

I peruse my wandering clothes pile, which has traveled to my desk, and pull out a khaki miniskirt and a navy, short sleeve polo in an attempt to look College Preppy. I place them on my bed and snap a picture, then search my contacts for Chase. He put his name in as “Sexy Train Man Chase.” I giggle as I type,

Cute enough?

I have no idea what we are doing or where we are going.

I receive his reply a few seconds later.

I approve
.

I text him back.

I’m going to take a hot, steamy shower.

My phone beeps with his response.

Tease.

I gather my shower products and peek into the hallway.
All clear.
I leap across the hall to the men’s room. It seems stupid to walk all the way to the ladies’ room when I have a perfectly fine facility two steps away.

The shower helps with my hangover. I dress and blow-dry my hair straight. Fearing the humidity, I pull it back into a ponytail and then apply some lip gloss and mascara.
Fuck Ben Riley
. The mirror tells me sulking time is over. Strategizing is about to begin—after breakfast. I’m too hungry to seriously strategize.