Beneath The Skin (A College Obsession Romance) (19 page)

“Oh, hey,” Dmitri jumps in. “Sam, how are things with Tomas?”

“Well, he still plays the bassoon,” she answers miserably, as if she might as well have just told us he’s still dying of some horrifying flesh-eating disease. “I’m bringing him to the
Throng & Song
this weekend to see Dessie.”

“You two have been together almost a year now, huh?”

“Not really. Are we a thing? I don’t know.” She seems to be making origami out of her napkin; I can’t tell. “When does something become a something?”

“Let’s ask Brant,” suggests Chloe coolly. “He’s an expert in this very subject.”

Honestly, I can take about twenty-six more snarky asides and jabs before I reach my limit; she’s still got a ways to go. “I’d say, it’s a
thing
when you really …
feel
it,” I answer Sam. “You’ll know.”

“So,” cuts in Chloe, “when exactly did you
not
feel this mystery
thing
for me? Just curious, Brant. By your very own theory, we ought to have become a
thing
the very first night we went out, considering you had my clothes off before we even got back to the dorms.”

I sigh. Yeah, I guess we’re going there. “Chloe. I seriously thought, since we both knew Dessie, what we had between us was more of a … friendly thing. Friends with benefits. Hadn’t you had one of those before? It’s not some perverse thing. You even said you were still hung up on your ex and just needed to feel comforted, remember?”

“Comforted,” she says tersely, staring down at her half-eaten salad. “Not
used
.”

“How were you used? You got something out of that night too, didn’t you?”

“It was more than one night, Brant. We had sex three times. Once in the dorms, and twice in Dmitri’s room.”

“
My
room?” Dmitri blurts, his eyes flashing.

I sigh. “My room had that
smell
last year, remember? Anyway, Chloe, I’m sorry,” I tell her tiredly. “I figured you were enjoying it while it lasted, too. I didn’t realize I was … obligating myself to some kind of …”

“Obligating?” She huffs. “Nice. What a big, smarty word for you.”

“It didn’t seem all that serious to me.”

“Maybe that’s because, no matter the girl you’re with, you don’t really
see
them, do you, Brant?” She stares at me, her nose rings and earrings catching a stray glint of the sunlight coming in through the window. “You act like you respect all the women you’re with, but we’re just … different
sauces
you can dip your corndog in,” she spits out.

“Ew,” grunts Sam.

“Imagery,” agrees Dmitri with a wince.

“Just quit lying to yourself,” Chloe tells me, her eyes burning me with their darkness. “You’re not a ‘lover’, Brant. You’re not a boyfriend. You are just a plain, straight-up slut. Sex is your game, not love. Just a basic, shallow, dumb, animal hunger for
getting
off
… and that’s it.”

I swallow hard, staring down at the foot-long sub I haven’t even taken a single bite of yet. I want to disagree with her and argue about how serious I am, about this new girl in my life Nell, about how wrong she is … but can’t for the life of me come up with a single argument.

Then the gods of lady luck ask: How can we make this moment for Brant just a little bit worse?

Their answer comes in the form of an excited shout. “Brant!”

I look up to find a girl with chin-length auburn hair waltzing up to our table, her eyes bright and her lips pouty. This might be bad timing, but the first thing I recognize about her—before even her face—is her big tits accentuated exquisitely by that skintight tan shirt she has on. They bounce in the most hypnotizing way as she approaches, and it’s those dancing knockers that I peel my eyes away from to meet her face.

“You didn’t answer my text, sweetie! Oh, hi,” she absently says to the rest of the table, then returns her eyes to me. “Are you up for it? Maybe six or seven tonight, sweetie? Or eight, if you got things? Or nine? I’m flexible.”

If my time with her behind that privacy screen in the art class was any indication, I know exactly how
flexible
she is.

“I got a, uh … a Theatre thing,” I tell her, feeling my skin crawl. “I can’t. Sorry. I …”

“Oh? I can come! You know my dance classes are in that building too, right? School of Theatre: Acting,
Dancing
, Excellence,” she sings, reciting the name just so I can enjoy the sound of her grating, overly-chipper voice.

Chloe smirks. “It’s
Theatre
, Dancing, Excellence,” she mumbles to herself with a roll of her eyes.

The dancer either doesn’t hear her or outright ignores her. “So I’ll come too, then! You obviously need a date. What time? Seven?”

“It’s tomorrow,” I say. “Listen … C-Candace …” I had to fish around in my brain for her name.
I still haven’t read the text she sent me last night.
“I was sorta just planning to go with my roommate here since he’s friends with an actor in the show.”

“
Playwright
,” Dmitri hisses unhelpfully across the table.

“Playwright of the show,” I amend.

“That’s okay!” she says cheerily. “I can just tag along. Really, I haven’t actually taken the time to
see
a show at the theater in, like, months.”

Chloe sighs dramatically, exasperated on all our behalf. “Since the message is clearly flying over your head,” she states loudly, “Brant here is trying to gently let you down. He’s lost interest and has moved on. There’s some girl at the art school he’s all obsessed with for now until he’s tired of her, too. We are all sitting here patiently waiting for your attempts at manipulating Brant into another date to die out. And really, it’s for the best.”

I shoot Dmitri a look.
You told Chloe?
my eyes seem to say. The guilty look on Dmitri’s face is my answer.

For only a moment, Candace the dancer appears to have been punched deep in her gut. Then, just as fast, she recovers and offers me a tight smile. “Come to think of it, I think I have a rehearsal tonight for my recital in two weeks.” She saves herself yet another scrap of dignity by giving me a cheery sigh—as if all this news didn’t just smash up her heart like a bag of wasted fast food tossed out the car window—then waltzes away just as fast as she’d come.

“You really know how to set it straight,” I mutter at Chloe without looking at her.

She doesn’t respond, poking at her salad. I glance at Dmitri across the table, who only offers an apologetic shrug, his eyes appearing like two innocent black beads behind his glasses. Sam has her mouth full of cheeseburger and staring up at something on the ceiling, which appears to have caught all of her interest.

“I got class soon,” I lie, gently swiping my uneaten sub into my backpack and slinging it over a shoulder. “See you later.” Though I’m not sure who exactly I’m addressing.

I hear Dmitri say my name, but I pretend not to hear it, leaving them to enjoy their lunch in peace without the apparent disturbance of the all-evil, heart-annihilating pussy destroyer Brant in their presence.

The sunlight cooks me again as I stroll slowly across campus. It might be something to do with Chloe’s words, but I find my mind trying to defy her, as if her scathing speech was a challenge. She thinks I have no depth? Nell thinks the idea of me being deep is a joke? Even Dmitri, as nice and polite as he is about it, never goes into much detail with me about the stories he writes. I sometimes wonder if it’s because he thinks I won’t get it … or care.

I’m sick of people treating me like a dumb jock. I didn’t even play sports in high school. Hell, the jocks I was friends with back then were driven and smart, from what I remember. One even got accepted to goddamn Yale.

Dmitri’s latest story is about an organ donor coming back to life to go on a quest to get his heart back? That shit’s deep. I wish I’d thought of it. Then again, an idea is just that until you make it into a story and, well, I don’t know if I have the patience to put that many damn words together.

Then you have Nell painting headless dogs and beautiful women with nothing censored but their mouths. Isn’t that shit deep, too? That kind of work makes a statement.

So what the hell kind of depth do I have to show for?

What statement am I trying to make?

Just thinking about Nell makes me hurt all over again.

Students pass by me in pairs, like everyone in the world’s a couple but me. I walk alone, passing lovers and buddies and groups gathered under trees. Among one such group by the psychology building, a girl turns away from her friend to watch as I pass by, and I’m struck by her knowing gaze, wondering if she’s checking me out, or if we’ve already done the deed in the back of a supply closet in that very building.

I should remember, shouldn’t I?

Or is she just another bowling pin I struck down at the end of the lane, swept away, forgotten?

I finally settle in a spot under a tree near the School of Art tunnel on a grassy knoll. It’s there that I pull out my sub, unwrap it, and finally sink my teeth into its peppery, meaty goodness. I watch people as they pass by, trying to see something beyond what I’m just literally seeing. I’m determined for something bold and brilliant to occur to me. The deep and meaningful thing worthy of an
artist’s
attention … Something worthy of a photographer’s skillful eye.

Chewing with conviction, I stare and I stare at the world, waiting to see that brilliant … amazing … something.

NELL

I might be wearing clothes, but over them I’m wearing something else, something thicker and darker, something that can’t be seen.

Guilt?

Frustration?

Embarrassment?

And it weighs so much, my posture is literally broken all day. I stare at the blank canvas, which taunts me. Here I am with a campus studio all to myself, and nothing’s coming.

I feel like I totally ruined my night with Brant. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but maybe some innocent, dreaming part of me actually enjoyed his presence. He did everything right, didn’t he?

Something happened after I got off. Suddenly, I grew afraid. With all the horniness drained from me, my emotions changed, and all the reality flooded in like a cold, unwanted shower. That was worsened by the ill-timed text Brant received, which served as some dark, ironic reminder of whose face I just let between my legs.

Just thinking about that makes my thighs squeeze together. I can still feel him there when I close my eyes.

Fuck.
No one has ever touched me like that. No one has ever made me climb so damn high before.

My breathing changes just from thinking about it.

As if he’s already down there again.
Oh, god.

I pop open my eyes, pushing those irresistibly sexy memories of Brant and the other night away. I take a deep breath, as if that’ll help, but it only seems to remind me of how I sighed deeply when his tongue probed me … and his mouth did
whatever the hell sort of sexy voodoo it was doing down there
.

My heart’s beating so fast, I literally set down my charcoal pencil and put a hand to my chest.

It’s more than what he does to my body. I learned that, too, after I came. There’s more there than just a hot face, a perfect sculpted body, and a cocky smile that can level trees. And when I realized that I’d let my feelings ignite, when I realized that even after my orgasm I still wanted to hold him close, when I realized that I
wanted
him to stay … that’s when I knew I was royally fucked.

Brant isn’t someone to grow feelings like that for, especially this fast. I’d be the world’s greatest moron. That’s like building a tower of cards at the peak of a hill just because the wind’s calm that day. Sure, admire your tower and all its delicate balance for its short little life, but you’d better be ready to watch it fall.