Tuesday I arrived at the Atrium like the bad bitch I knew myself to be. This was my group and if Clem wanted to bite off the edges then let him. However, Victor had not arrived and neither had Jon and Steven and I managed to say hello to a few of the guys before I saw Clem. He was staring at me. Of course, he was. That's all he did. Stare. My intent was to walk past him and ignore him but he stepped towards me, a very first for him. I paused and looked at him.
"Becka," he said. "How are you?"
I stared at him for a moment and then I hefted my bag up. "Good."
I watched as he took a deep breath and shoved his blond hair back from his face. He was still, to my eyes, incredibly handsome. Aloof and distant, a statue. Untouchable, not like Victor who was solid and had the warmest, kindest brown eyes. Clem was cold and remote, untouched and unreal. I realized that I could not envision being intimate with Clem much less seeing him naked.
"You look very good, Becka. Beautiful."
My stomach froze and then I smiled. I let out a bark of a laugh and he looked startled. I realized I had never once been myself around him. Not once.
"Jesus Christ, Clem. Do you have any idea how much I wanted to hear that back in High School?" I shook my head at him.
He looked embarrassed and looked away then back at me. The morning sun made his hair seem hay-white. "Yeah, I was an asshole then."
"Yeah," I nodded then I shrugged. "Are you still an asshole now?"
He gave me a weak smile. "Sometimes."
"I appreciate the honesty," I said.
"I wanted to tell you," he walked closer and there was an intimacy in his stance that I had not authorized. "I did really like you. Even before Alvin but... I didn't do anything and he did and..."
I stared at him and I felt more people arrive around us but all I could smell was Clem's perfume. It was the same as it had always been. He smelled like an Abercrombie store.
"Well, he was my friend, you know," he said.
I took a sharp breath and a step back, still looking up at him. "Victor was right."
"Victor?" Clem's brows furrowed. "You and he seem to be close."
"We are."
"Just don't forget what he did in Prom," his tone was tight and there was an underlying note of anger.
I stared at him and I felt this indignity rise in me. What a disgusting weak jerk.
"I remember it perfectly well," I said.
I smiled a sardonic smile that he wouldn't recognize. He would never know the tones of my face. Let him think what he liked, let him think he was saving me from someone. I knew the truth, I knew it all now and what I knew above everything was that I missed my friends, not the Patty Girls. But Victor and Steven and even Jon. I looked him up and down and then I turned to find my three guys staring at us. I realized they were waiting, tense, to see if I needed them to interfere.
"Take care of yourself, Clem." I patted his chest and walked away.
There was a sort of purging of myself in that moment, as I walked towards the people I had chosen. I had been so jealous of Yara and her butterfly wings that I had not realized that I had the capacity to fly all along. I had long been a butterfly acting like a worm.
"I thought we were going to have to rescue Clem," Jon smiled as I reached them.
"Nah," I smiled at them, a true Becka smile. "I let him live to fight another day."
Later on, after my first class, I was looking for the boys when I heard my name being called. I had spotted the three musketeers, but I turned and saw, to my utter delight, Jackson. His hair was buzzed short and he looked incredibly tanned. His usual polo and khakis present he looked down at me with a smile on his handsome face.
"Jackson, hey," I smiled.
"Hey, I noticed your name was called in Environmental Science yesterday," he said. "You didn't come."
"No, I didn't."
"Yeah, we're in the same class." His jaw was so incredibly sharp I could dice cucumbers on it. "If you want I can share my notes with you tomorrow before the next class. There's a shit load of info."
"Oh yeah, absolutely," I said. "That's very nice of you!"
"Sure, of course. I'll see you later, I've got to pop into Advising," he said and I watched him walk away.
I couldn't wrap my head around anything today; I had gone from a morning with Clem to an afternoon with Jackson. And Jackson was so hot, my ovaries were at near explosion. I was going to have all of his white babies.
Then I turned back to find Jon and Steven mock-miming a sex scene. I didn't even look at Victor.
"Stop it, you idiots," I growled at them.
Jon kept mimic pounding into a willing Steven whose head was tossed back in ecstasy. "Ugh, cowboy take me away!"
"Stop it, he's going to see you!" I looked to see if Jackson was anywhere, but he had disappeared into the crowd. "You are so immature!"
Jon stopped with the pounding, plastering an easygoing smile on his handsome face. "We're just messing with you, Becka, you're so easy. But for real, white boy wants some carne asada."
I let out a dramatic sigh and punched his arm. "Do not call me carne asada, cabron!"
Jon let out a delightful peel of laugher as he danced away from me and they started walking towards the stairs. I watched as Jon and Steven spotted girls to flirt with when Victor stood next to me and I could feel the intensity of his gaze.
"What did pretty boy want?" He asked.
"His name is Jackson, you know this."
He looked nonplused.
I raised a brow at him. "He wants to study together tomorrow."
"That's when you and I study." He stared at me with a hurt look.
"We'll study today, Victor. What's the big deal, you and the boys are always chasing some tail -" I touched his chest, ignoring the hard muscle under the white tee. "And someone wants to be with me, be as flexible as I am with you. You're a shit wingman."
I turned and kept walking, leaving him behind. Suddenly it was feeling quite like it went from being Jon, Victor, Steven, and me to just Victor and me and it was a bit too much. I didn't belong to Victor and Victor most certainly did not belong to me. We had spent too much time together lately and lines were being blurred left and right.
×××
I had been trying to read over the same paragraph on classical conditioning when I felt Victor enter the library. When he stood before me I kept focused on the page even as he stared down at me. Finally, I looked up and gave him a tight smile. He didn't look happy at being there, his entire body was tense, knuckles white over the red Gatorade in his hand. Today was his usual intense workout day, a flagellation for all the shit he'd allowed himself to eat over the weekend. I knew this but I wasn't going to miss the study session with Jackson because Victor was determined that we needed to study together.
"Hey," I said.
He sighed, walked around the table, and pulled out the chair next to me. He sat down and I watched as he took out his book, notes, and laptop out of his bag. His movements shifted all of my colored pens and highlighters on the table.
"How many colors do you need?" He grumbled.
"I have a system," I defended, grabbing them before they rolled off the table. "Orange is words I don't know, green is important information, pink is concepts I don't understand, and yellow is for everything else."
He watched me as I gathered my colors and stuffed them in my furry pink bag so they would not disperse all over the library floor.
"You're such a nerd," he said and when I turned to glare at him, I found him smiling slightly. "I don't mean that in a bad way, I remember when you and Yara would pass little notes to one another all the time."
I missed those stupid notes and I still missed Yara.
"What did you two even write in those notes?"
"The silliest things, who looked hot that day, what guy greeted me, what church activity we were going to," I admitted, biting on the end of my pen.
"Really? What did you guys say about me?" His shit-eating grin had me shaking my head.
"Nothing. We didn't like you."
He looked utterly offended. "What?"
I stifled a laugh, glancing at the librarian who always glared at us. "It's true, we thought you were full of yourself."
His mouth opened. "I've always been super nice to you and your girls."
"We figured it was because you were trying to get into one of our pants," I continued, smiling at him.
He looked utterly confused. "I can't believe it."
I turned to him quite suddenly. "You know that not one guy asked us to prom and that's why we had to all go as a group? Not one guy and Yara was Homecoming Queen!"
Victor did a little 'well that makes sense' shrug. "I'm not surprised."
"Why, why did not one guy ask us?" I insisted, still perplexed about the entire thing. I thought at least Mercy or Yara would've gotten asked.
"Well because you ladies were serious."
"Serious?"
"Yeah, like we had to go the extra mile for you guys, you didn't drink, hang out past your curfew, you were always together like a pack, The Patty Girls. It meant something." He took a deep breath. "Plus, and don't get mad when I say this -"
"I'm already mad." I glared at him.
"Well, the thing is, we knew we wouldn't get laid, that's the truth," he said and looked almost afraid of my reaction which he should be because I felt my face heat.
My mouth fell open. "So it boils down to sex."
"Everything boils down to sex," he said philosophically.
"We were not 'easy' or whatever term you want to use and that meant you were not going to spend money on a limo, a tux, dinner, to not get laid."
Victor nodded quite seriously. "Yeah."
I let out a frustrated breath and looked away. "Unbelievable."
"I told you not to get mad me," he pointed his pen at me. "I had a girlfriend. It's those other guys you should be mad at."
"Victor, I'm mad at you by association," I said.
"Because I'm a guy," Victor held back a laugh.
"Yes, I hate you and your dick."
"What the hell did he do to you?"
"Nothing because apparently I'm not that type of girl," I said sweetly. "Which is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard, by the way."
"Look, whether you want to admit it or not –"
"Hey, sorry to interrupt." We were interrupted by a young guy who looked utterly sick at the prospect of speaking to us. "But we're trying to study over here, and you guys are talking a lot."
"Oh." I looked over at the table next to us and every student was staring at us. Fuck. "We're sorry."
"Yeah," the guy said.
It was Victor whom he stared at and I realized he was in awe of him; the guy must've gone to school with us and I felt bad for not remembering him. He dressed badly and he had a nondescript face. I swear I had never seen him before.
"Look, I get it, I argue with my girlfriend all the time too."
I scoffed and Victor turned to me. "He is not my boyfriend."
The guy glanced at me, up and down, and then back at Victor and flushed bright red. "Oh man, yeah, of course, my bad."
Victor's entire demeanor changed, he gave the guy one of his tight smiles, the asshole smile he used for when people he didn't know spoke to him. His dark eyes looked down at the guy as if he were a roach on this earth. I realized he was completely different around those that didn't know him, he put a literal wall, and I'd been behind the wall for so long now that I didn't even know the guy others knew. I didn't even see him.
"We'll keep it down." That voice was that of Victor Manning, all self-assuredness and pomposity with a slight tinge of 'get the fuck out of my face'.
The guy seemed to want to scramble away and die as he shuffled back to his table. I glanced at Victor from the corner of my eye and leaned into him.
"Why would you do that to that poor guy?"
I saw a small quirk of a smile appear on his mouth. He held it in, running his hand through his black hair.
"I only said we would keep it down." He glanced at me.
"You know what you did." I smiled, shaking my head.
He shrugged. "I don't like it when people I don't know talk to me."
I shook my head and turned back to my notes. "Antisocial."
"What?" he asked, but he had heard me.
"Oh, a personality disorder I'm reading about in my psychology book." I smiled at him, shaking a green marker to his face.
He scowled.
Recommended 90s Playlist (will grow with each chapter)
1. Gettin' Jiggy With It - Will Smith
2. Kiss The Rain - Billie Myers
3. Come Baby Come - K7
4. Tubthumping - Chumbawamba
5. Bitch - Meredith Brooks
6. Something to Talk About - Bonnie Raitt
7. WannaBe - Spice Girls
AUTHORS NOTE: If you enjoyed this story please follow me on Tiktok (isabelleolmo) or Instagram (isabelleolmobooks) to follow my journey as I publish my first novel!
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