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She lifts an eyebrow. What?

I glance from Bridget to Krishna and back to Bridget. Mouth the word, Fucking.

She nods.

“No shit?”

She makes a circle with her left hand, thrusts into it with the index finger of her right, smiling at me with her eyes.

“No shit what?” Krishna wants to know.

“Nothing,” we say in unison, and for a second it’s just like it always was between us. Easy.

I pick up a piece of garlic bread and shove it into my mouth.

I’m fucking ravenous.

Ten more minutes, I tell myself.

I have class tomorrow.

I’ve got work in the afternoon, Frankie to talk to, my whole life to sort out.

Ten more minutes, and then I’ll go.

Dinner did something to me, though. The bread was frozen and burned, the soup so salty it about sucked all the moisture out of my body, and for dessert a cheesecake that Bridget made Krishna from scratch.

It was good. The food and the company, the way I could close my eyes and almost pretend I was an ordinary college guy eating dinner with his friends, drinking a few beers, joking around about big sausages and who’s gonna do the dishes, talking about nothing.

Ten more minutes. Ten more.

Instead, I take my cup back to the keg and draw another beer.

I have just enough to drink to push my guard down, and the music keeps it there—club music, dance music, loud throbbing anthems, and dark catchy songs that make people want to huddle in corners and talk real close together and put their hands on each other.

The house fills with people. I know a lot of them—people I’ve sold to, drank with, handed paper bags of muffins at three in the morning. Old lab partners, group project partners, girls whose names I know because Krishna hooked up with them, girls whose names I know because they’ve tried to hook up with me.

I let it infect me. Noise and heat, girls and sweat. The house gets loud, the music gets louder, everybody’s got a red plastic cup and something to say. Every time someone raises a hand and shouts “West!” over the crowd—every time someone presses another cup into my hand—I let myself take it.

I’m drinking and talking, laughing with some dude whose name I can’t remember, leaning a palm against the wall, dipping down so I can hear this chick named Sierra who seems to know me though I’d swear I’ve never talked to her before. I’ve got a view down her shirt but her tits are just tits and mostly what I’m doing, even when I’m not doing it, is watching Caroline.

I like the way she looks. The way she laughs.

I like the way she moves when she’s weaving through bodies with her drink held high, the way she jokes around with Krishna and Bridget and her other housemates, the way that even though she’s not all that tall she looks like the tallest girl in the room because she holds herself so straight.

She holds herself like she matters, laughs like she cares, smiles like she’s somebody.

Regal. Caroline’s regal. Always has been.

Always will be, and nothing I do or say to her is going to change that, because she wasn’t lying when she said she wouldn’t cut off her hair for me.

She knows who she is deep inside herself. I can break her heart, but I can’t break her pride. I can’t break her. She’s not ever going to let that happen.

Fuck, I want her.

All the time, like a virus, a disease I caught, except the other way around—like a cure I caught a year ago, and it’s inside me, winding through my veins, pumping through my heart.

It’s easy to take it.

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
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