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she’d be reasonable about it. No matter the outcome, there was only one thing I could do at the moment.
I took off at a fast jog and ran across down hallway after hallway until I reached the east wing. After I bolted up the stairs, I rounded the first corner and stopped in front of the door I should have entered fifteen minutes before. As I expected, it was closed and looking more than a little intimidating. With a lump in my throat, I walked to it and pushed it open slowly, fully expecting the class to fall silent, followed by me getting embarrassingly reprimanded for being late by the professor in front of everyone.
I breathed a quietly audible sigh of relief. She was writing on the board and almost every student was scribbling notes in notebooks or on iPads and tablets. I saw an available seat a few paces away from me, near the door in the back row. Without even scanning for any other seats, I dashed over and plonked my ass down, just as the professor turned around from the board to continue with her lecture.
Breathing hard from the run across campus, I leaned back in the chair, silently thanking every deity I could think of that I hadn't been busted for walking in late. The class was huge, so the professor thankfully didn't even notice there was now an extra body in the room.
I slid my backpack to the floor, opened it, and got my tablet out so I could start taking notes, too. That’s when I looked at the person sitting in front of me and I almost fell off my chair.
Brooke.
My heart started racing and I fumbled with my tablet, which dropped to the floor and clattered noisily. That got everyone's attention, you know… the attention I’d been trying to avoid. Everyone turned their heads to investigate the sound—including Brooke, who looked right into my eyes as she turned around.
I have no idea what emotions ran through her mind when our eyes locked, but I imagined it was a cocktail similar to that which ran through my own head: surprise, shock, confusion, and definitely attraction.
I was even more surprised to see her cheeks turn a gorgeous shade of red to match what felt like my own face was doing. That’s right, I blushed. Something I almost never do. Brooke hurriedly averted her eyes from mine and turned around without saying or doing anything else.
She didn't look at me again for the rest of the class and I tried to keep my mind off of her while I took notes and did my best to pay attention—which was almost impossible with her lush, flowing hair and the delicate curve of her exposed shoulders mere inches from me. But, as if that wasn’t enough, the real kicker came at the end of the lesson.
The professor wrapped up her lesson by addressing the class. “As you all know, we're going to be doing a lot of practical lab work this semester,” she started. “And, that means that every student in here is going to have to have a lab partner. Now, what I don't want is for you to be working with your friend or someone you already know well. That, I'm afraid, will lend itself to fooling around in the labs and wasting of valuable time. So, I've taken the liberty of running all of your names through a computer program which has randomized partners. I'm going to read the list of names and who you are partnered with, and I want you to make a careful note of who your lab partner is going to be for the rest of the semester. Now, unless there is an extremely prudent reason that you cannot work with the person you've been assigned to—and I'm talking serious issues here, people, serious issues. Not 'I don't like them' or 'they're not fun' or any other wishy-washy nonsense like that—you will be partnered with this person for the entire semester. Understand?”
We all mumbled monosyllabic responses of affirmation.
“Good. I'll start.” She began reading out the names. I sat bolt upright in my seat, wondering with suspense who I was going to be stuck with for the rest of the semester. My pulse began to race as soon as she read out the first name and it happened to be mine.
“Emerson Reed, your lab partner is Brooke Baker. Could you both raise your hands please?”
I thought my heart was going to explode, my pulse was hammering so hard in my chest. Brooke and I both raised our hands, but she didn't even turn around to look at me.
“Good. Next, Jonathan Biln, you're with David Henderson. Could you two raise your hands? Yes. Fran Corleone, you're with…”
The professor's voice began to fade out as I thought about what had just happened. Brooke, the Ice Queen, was going to be my lab partner. This was gonna be interesting.
Chapter Seven
Brooke
As soon as the professor said Emerson’s name with mine, my blood ran cold. What the hell? I mean, seriously, what the hell? Of all the names her computer program could have randomized, it had to put me with the one person I'd been trying to avoid like the plague.
As if it hadn’t been enough of a shock to see him walking into the lecture hall and taking a seat right behind me. I'd imagined a jock like Emerson would be taking business or marketing or sports management classes—anything but advanced chemistry. But there he was. And so, for the rest of the class, I'd had to sit there, feeling super uncomfortable, with him literally breathing down my neck.
After the professor dropped her bomb, there was absolutely no way I could avoid contact with him. Not only did he live next door to me, but he was also my lab partner for the semester. The entire semester. Absolutely perfect. Why couldn't life have been kind and just partnered me with the uber-nerd a few rows down—the one who looked like he weighed about ninety pounds soaking wet in his Star Trek t-shirt with coke bottle glasses, a bad case of acne, and a mop of mousy hair? You know, someone who I'd have absolutely zero attraction to. Not the cover model jock from next door. The same jock who made me weak in the knees every time he looked at me.
And, I hated admitting that. I hated that I couldn’t stop myself from feeling that way about someone I barely knew. All it did was make my life more complicated. In so many ways, I felt as though the Andrew debacle was still hanging over my head. For that reason alone, I didn’t need complicated. I needed logical. Simple. Clear-cut.
Being lab partners with the one person on campus who I wanted nothing to do with, well, it was none of those things. As the professor kept rattling off names pairing lab partners together, I tore off a scrap of paper from my notebook and scribbled my email address on it.
That's all Emerson was going to get from me. Just an email address. Not my Facebook, not my Snapchat, not my Instagram, and definitely not my phone number.
Not that any of those would have really made much difference considering he lived on the other side of my bedroom wall. A bedroom wall that I wasn’t sure he wasn’t desecrating with a slew of bimbos on a regular basis. My thoughts suddenly flashed to the noises I'd heard on Friday night and Saturday morning. Had it been him or had it been Chris?
An unwarranted and bizarre concoction of sensations ran through me—hostility, repulsion, annoyance, and as much as I hate to say it, jealousy. Maybe even a little arousal.
I shook my head to rid it of the thought. No. Hell no! There's no way, there's just no way…
“That's all, class,” the professor announced, snapping me out of my trance. “If you didn’t see who your partners are, a few students were absent today, so that could be the case. Just come see me and we will get you in contact with your partner during the next class. Anyway, you have your reading assignments to do before Wednesday, so please see to it that you do them, or you'll quickly find yourself in over your head. I don't slow this class down for slackers and have no sympathy for lazy students who don't do their assigned readings. Now, if you have any questions, you have my email. Don't hesitate to contact me if there's anything in your reading you're having trouble with. Alternatively, if there's something serious you need to discuss, you can find me in office 15C on the third floor of this building. Class dismissed.”
I briefly considered heading straight to office 15C to see if something could be done about this practice partner situation. But I thought about what the professor had said—lab partners could only be switched for very serious issues. I was fairly certain that an
