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“Into?” Hayes suggests.
Well, I guess there’s a word after all.
“Yeah. Into.”
“That’s what’s been screwing with your head lately?”
I shrug. Yes seems too honest of an answer. No would be a lie.
“Is there a point in telling you to just man up and tell her?” he asks.
I snort out a grim laugh. It’d be so much easier if I was a coward afraid of coming clean about my feelings to somebody. This is about coming clean to myself about my newfound fascination with Lake. A whole different ballgame.
“You don’t really look like somebody who’d be all torn up about asking somebody out. Unless… Is she, like, taken or something?” His eyes widen a tiny bit. “Fuck, don’t tell me you’re into a teammate’s girl. ’Cause I’m telling you right now, if that’s the case, you need to get over it, and fast. That’ll just fuck things up for everybody.”
“It’s not that. It’s just somebody I… It’s complicated. It’s not somebody I’d usually go for.”
“As in she’s not your usual type?”
“Something like that.”
He eyes me thoughtfully. “Did I miss the part where you were looking for a lifetime commitment all of a sudden?”
I blink. “What?”
He shakes his head and claps me on the back. “You’re overthinking this. You’re twenty-two and in college, man. You wanna try something different? Now’s the time. If it doesn’t work out, you’ve at least taken care of the curiosity and don’t have to deal with it anymore.”
I blink some more.
When he puts it like that, it sounds pretty reasonable.
Try something different.
Yeah.
It’d be different, all right.
LAKE
It’s been a long day.
A long week.
A distracted week.
Because of Ryker.
It takes sheer grit and stubborn, angry willpower to banish him from my thoughts.
That’s a bald-faced lie, by the way.
He seeps in like poison, but when he does, I do my best to push him out again, and for that, I think I deserve a pat on the back. I’m a man of simple solutions, which means I spend a lot of hours with earbuds in, because I figured out that if somebody else is talking in my ear, it’s easier to force my brain to stay in the no-Ryker lane. That’s not to say it’s easy in any way—it’s not. I have to make myself very purposefully concentrate at all times, because the moment I let my mind wander, he’s there again. It’s hard work to stay alert for a week straight. Exhausting and thankless because there’s no reward at the end of the road. Nothing to strive for.
It also helps a bit that I have a week of tests in front of me. Organic Chemistry on Wednesday. Cell Biology on Friday. That and two lab reports, so I spend most of the time when I’m not in class or at work in the library.
On Saturday evening, I’ve parked my ass in one of the quieter aisles in the science wing. Close enough to the group study carrels that the voices coming from them create a nice, white noise-like wall around me. I’ve never been able to concentrate in total silence, which is why I gravitate toward the library. Yeah, everybody knows you have to be quiet, but there’s always a hum of human interaction in the air.
I stick to my desk for the whole evening, only leaving my designated spot for a few minutes at a time to stretch and raid the vending machine. By the time closing time rolls around it feels like my eyes are full of sand—dry and gritty and uncomfortable from staring at the laptop screen for so long—my brain feels like it’s too full to retain any information anymore, and I’m starving.
