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I paused for a moment. Jill was a great girl. Pretty. Smart. Fresh out of college. She wasn’t some fragile flower that would wilt if Hunter didn’t think of her as girlfriend potential. She’d been the only one who had been willing to switch shifts with me next week, so that I could study more for my upcoming mid-term exams. However, I didn’t want to hear how great, or how bad, her date with Hunter was. I’d seen him look her up and down. I’d be concerned if he hadn’t. Would her team-work attitude go out of the window because of him? What could I do? Not give her his number?
“I don’t,” I said. “But I’ll try to get it from my friend.”
Jill flashed me a broad smile. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
***
BETH STEPPED INTO OUR dorm room as I towel-dried my hair. She dropped her satchel on the floor and came to my side of the room. I leaned toward her and we touched cheeks. She looked as glad as I had been when I’d arrived here after work. As Beth turned around, she kicked off her shoes.
“Hey,” I said.
She’d cleaned a house for most of the evening. She was usually doing her homework in our dorm room or with one of her study groups at a café, or in the library. But, passing up an on-call job, and earning more money, was too good of an opportunity for her to let go. She’d burnt herself out last year with her cleaning job and schoolwork. College was much harder than she’d thought. It was harder for me all around; I wasn’t in a graduating class of thirty-eight students anymore. At UM, I was truly one of many. I knew that Beth was a little freaked out about the decrease in her cash flow, now that she was working part-time, but she had to in order to maintain her G.P.A. She wasn’t taking the standard twelve credits to be a full student like I was.
Chase had asked her to quit working. He wanted to support her, but she’d adamantly refused. It’d been the first and only time that I’d seen them argue. I understood her fear that she’d lose her drive to earn a living for herself and, thus, lose her passion to be self-sufficient. She also didn’t want to be like her mom, as men had primarily supported her mom and her until she started working in high school. Hunter was not only a full-time student like us, he was a linebacker, as well as a freelance graphic designer. His apartment was paid in full for the entire year. I really liked that Beth hadn’t forgotten about Jake or I as she and Chase were becoming more serious. Sure, she’d spent a lot of her free time with him, but she also made time for us. I wasn’t losing my best friend and my sister to her relationship with him.
Dressed in her bathrobe, Beth grabbed her shower caddy and went to shower. When she came back, forty-five minutes later, I laid my head down on my pillow and watched Beth as she hung her towel and placed her caddy away.
“How was the house?” I asked her.
Beth blew out a breath and knotted her hair into a loose bun at the crown of her head. “The bathrooms were the rooms that required heavy duty scrubbing.” She cocked her head, peering at me with her sapphire eyes. “See anyone you know today?” A saucy grin curled her mouth.
So she had communicated with Hunter today. I swore he was like her third best friend sometimes. My boss, Blanca, had been another person in an endless amount of people today who’d asked or talked about him. I’d bitten my tongue, before I’d unleashed a round of expletives. Blanca had assumed that Hunter was an ex of mine—according to her, I’d stared at him like a scorned woman. But I thought I’d been nice to him. Every co-worker of mine with a functional libido wanted to make nice with him. And I couldn’t simply pretend that Hunter didn’t exist.
I inhaled sharply. “Did you tell Hunter to come to La Caridad?”
“No. His boss wanted him to go there. It’s new and it hasn’t been empty since its opening.”
I nodded and slightly changed the subject. “Jill wants his number. Would you mind giving it to me, so that I can send it to her?” I wanted to text it to Jill immediately, or else she’d think I was stalling.
Beth took her phone from the top of her desk. “I’m going to run it by him.” She fell silent for a moment. “And you both speak Spanish. That’s something else you have in common with Hunter, besides me.”
“I don’t wanna have anything else in common with him.” I sighed. “I think he means well, but he’s an addict and he cut Chase’s face. You’re not afraid of him?”
“No,” she replied without hesitation. Her hands fell from her hips and we looked at the clock. She opened the door and we heard some girls saying hello to Jake.
I’d taken his mattress from our closet and placed it on the floor when he entered our room. After Beth threw his sheets, a naked pillow, and a pillowcase on the mattress for him, she stepped on her tiptoes and gave Jake a quick kiss on his jaw. Then, he kneeled on the opposite side of the mattress and fit the sheet on the bed with me.
“What’s up?” Jake hugged me after we made the bed.
“I was just telling Beth about an unwanted customer who came into La Caridad today.” A deep frown crept over his forehead. I put my hands on his chest. “It was Hunter.” Beth glared at me.
“He just ordered his lunch,” I replied. “I didn’t think he’d come to my place of work.”
Jake’s grimace started to slip from his face. He pulled out my chair from my desk, sat down, and took off his Nike’s, as if he was touching a baby. Only, in this case, he inspected his sneakers to ensure that they remained spotless. Beth came from our closet with a shoe-box and set it on the floor. When Beth was back on her bed, she turned sideways and flashed me a smile. I straightened up on my bed and looked at her apologetically.
Jake placed his sneakers in the shoe box, took off his shirt and pants. Then he folded them on top of my desk chair.
“Who needs the room to himself for tonight?” I queried.
“Jut,” he answered. “He and Trish got started while I was there.” He laughed and laid his back against the mattress.
“Chase told me that happened to him a lot before he and his former roommates scheduled when they were going to bring their dates to their room. And they followed it, most of the time,” Beth commented, showing no acrimony at the fact that Chase had been with a slew of girls prior to her.
Jake turned his head from Beth and then looked up at the ceiling. “I would’ve slept on the sofa in the hallway if I weren’t here.”
“Crash here whenever any of them are going at it,” Beth said. “I know they won’t pay for a motel room, like you do.”
“Nah,” he agreed. “They won’t.”
