Easy (8 page)

LM

I stared at the email,
trying and failing to compare Landon to Lucas. They seemed as opposite as night
and day, but I only knew half of each of them. I didn’t know much about Lucas
beyond his striking looks and his ability to beat the shit out of someone. During
art history, I’d found myself wondering what would have happened in that
interaction with Buck, if Lucas had been with me. I wondered if Buck would have
dared to look at me like that. To say what he’d said:
Lookin’ good
. The
thought of Buck’s cold eyes examining me made my stomach turn.

Feeling shallow
for caring, I speculated again what Landon might look like, and how much impact
that might have on what I thought of him. His compliments made me stare at my
laptop and smile. He’d said my ex was a moron, and now he seemed to be
interested in our breakup. In me. That, or I was reading too much into it.

Landon,

We were together almost three years. I never saw it coming. I followed him here to
school, instead of trying for a performing arts school. My orchestra teacher
nearly had a stroke when I told him. He pleaded with me to audition at Oberlin
or Julliard, but I didn’t. I can’t blame anyone but myself. I trusted my future
to my HS boyfriend, like an idiot. Now I’m stuck somewhere I’m not supposed to
be. I don’t know if I just believed that much in him, or that little in myself.
Either way, pretty freaking stupid, huh? So there’s my weepy little story.

Thank you for the article.

JW

Jacqueline,

Not stupid. Overly trusting, maybe, but that reflects on his lack of
trustworthiness, not on your intelligence. As for being somewhere you’re not
supposed to be – maybe you’re here for a reason, or there is no reason. As a
scientist, I lean toward the latter. Either way, you’re off the hook. You made
a decision; now you make the best of it. That’s all you can do, right? On that
note, I’m off to study for a statistical mechanics quiz. Who knows, maybe I’ll
be able to prove scientifically that your ex isn’t worthy of you, and you’re
exactly where you should be.

LM

***

When Erin came through the door, I
was half-asleep and surrounded by conjugated Spanish verbs printed on colored index
cards. I scooped most of them up just before she bounced onto the edge of my
bed.

“So? Did you call
him or text him? Did you use the stuff we went over? What did he say?”

I sighed. “Neither.”

She lay back on
the bed, flinging her arms wide dramatically as I snatched up cards before she
creased them. “You chickened out.”

I stared at the cards in my hand.
Yo habré, tú habrás, él habrá, nosotros habremos…
“Yeah, maybe.”

“Hmm. You know, this is better. Don’t call. Make him chase you.” She laughed at my creased brow. “Guys like Chaz are
so much easier. Hell, I could
tell
him to chase me and he would.”

We laughed at the
visual that produced, because it was probably true. I thought about Kennedy.
About what kind of guy he was. He’d chased me in the beginning, but he didn’t
have to try very hard to catch me. I was swept off my feet by him, swept along
in his dreams and plans, because he’d made me part of them. Until a few weeks
ago.

“Aw, shit, J. I
know what you’re doing. Don’t think about him. I’m gonna make some cocoa. Get
back to—” she sat up, picking up a card I’d not grabbed hastily enough, “—
ugh
,
Spanish verbs.”

Erin filled mugs
with tap water in the bathroom and stuck them in the microwave to heat. I
stared at the blurry cards in my hand. Damn Kennedy. Damn him, damn him. It
would serve him right to see me with someone like Lucas. Someone so different,
but equally hot. More so, if I started calculating details.

Operation Bad Boy
Phase was
on
. But I wasn’t calling Lucas, or texting him. If Erin was
right—if he was a chaser—he’d not done enough chasing, yet.

When she handed me
the mug, I took a deep breath and smiled. She’d piled mine with marshmallows
from the little stash of them we both occasionally dug into without bothering
to make cocoa. “So if I don’t text him, what’s next?”

She smiled and
squeaked a triumphant little squeal. “He must be digging the good girl thing
you’ve got going on…” Her eyes widened. “Jacqueline—maybe he’d noticed you in
class before the breakup. You changed seats, right? Making it obvious you two
broke up. This is
perfect
.” I was back to confused and she was laughing.
“He’s
already
chasing you. Now all you have to do is keep running. Just
not too fast.”

I licked chocolate
from my upper lip. “Erin, you’re dangerous.”

She smiled wickedly. “I
know
.”

***

Wednesday, I got to the classroom
before the 8:00 class let out. As soon as most of the students had filed out
the door, I slipped in and took my seat, determined not to pay attention to Lucas
when he came in. To that end, I flipped through my index cards, though I was
more than ready to ace the quiz in Spanish.

When Benji slid
into his seat on my left, I didn’t pause in my review. I refused to be
distracted from
not
paying attention to Lucas’s seat, and whether or not
he was in it.

“Hey, Jacqueline.”
That wasn’t Benji’s voice.

The seats were
bolted to the floor, with right-handed desktops. Lucas leaned slightly over the
side of Benji’s, pushing into the very margin of my space. My breath caught,
and I focused on letting it out, appearing unaffected. “Oh, hi.”

He bit his lower
lip once, briefly. “I guess you didn’t notice the phone number on your coffee
cup.”

I glanced at my
phone, sitting on the edge of my textbook. “I noticed.” I watched his reaction,
knowing I was practically
telling
him to chase me.

He smiled, his light
eyes crinkling slightly at the corners, and I tried not to swoon visibly. “I
see. Turnabout is fair play. How ’bout you give me yours?”

I arched a brow at
him. “Why? Do you need help in economics?”

He bit his lip in
earnest that time, stifling a laugh. “Hardly. What makes you think that?”

I frowned. Could I
be attracted to a guy who cared so little about doing well in class? “I guess
it’s not my business.”

He leaned his chin
into the palm of his hand. The tips of his fingers were tinged with gray, probably
from drawing with that pencil sitting over his ear. “I appreciate your concern,
but I want your number for reasons completely unrelated to economics.”

I picked up my
phone and found his number, and sent him a text that said:
Hi.

“Dude, you’re in my seat.” Benji’s tone was matter-of-fact, but unperturbed.

Lucas’s phone vibrated in his hand, and he smiled as my text popped up, giving him my number.
“Thanks.” He unfolded himself from the chair and addressed Benji. “Sorry, man.”

“No prob.” Benji
was one of the most easygoing people I’d ever met. His attitude said
slacker
,
but I’d gotten a look at the midterm crammed into his notebook—he’d made a high
B, and for all his talk about skipping class and sleeping in, he’d yet to miss
one. After Lucas sauntered back to his seat, Benji leaned over the edge of his
desktop, closer than Lucas had. “So what was
that
about?” His eyebrows
rocked up and down and I tried not to grin.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” I replied, fluttering my lashes in my best Southern belle impersonation.

“Careful, little
lady,” he drawled. “That fella seems a bit dangerous.” He shook a too-long curl
out of his eyes, smiling. “Not that there’s anything wrong with a bit of
danger.”

My lips pinched into half a smile. “True.”

I congratulated
myself for taking a singular peek over my shoulder, halfway through the
fifty-minute class. Lucas wasn’t looking at me, so I couldn’t help staring.
Pencil in hand, he was sketching intently, first shading and then carefully smearing
with his thumb. His dark hair fell around his face as he concentrated on his
work, the lecture and the classroom disregarded as though he was alone in his
room. I imagined him sitting on his bed, knees up, pad balanced on his thighs.
I wondered what he was sketching. Or who.

He glanced up and caught my gaze. Held it.

His mouth pulled
into that ghost of a smile and he stretched his neck and rolled his shoulders,
returning my stare. Glancing at the pad, he tapped the end of his pencil
against it and sprawled back in his seat, lashes fanning down as he examined
his work.

Dr. Heller finished
the chart he was free-handing onto the whiteboard, and the lecture resumed. Lucas
tucked the pencil over his ear and picked up a pen. Before shifting his
attention to our professor, he smiled at me again, and a jolt of excitement shot
through me.

At the end of
class, a different girl than last week intercepted him on his way out the door,
and I bolted without a backward look. My adrenaline kicked in, my body sensing
my need to escape and giving wings to it. Glancing over my shoulder, I ducked
through the side exit and slowed down, feeling silly. Erin and Maggie insisted
that I should elude his grasp for a few days more, and make him pursue me—but
he wasn’t going to
literally
give chase.

I texted Erin that
I’d be getting crap coffee in the cafeteria before my afternoon class instead
of going by the Starbucks. She texted back:
GENIUS. I’ll meet you there. Sisters in solidarity and all that shit.

***

By the end of art history, I was
beginning to doubt Erin’s notion that Lucas wanted to play this game. Maybe he
wasn’t a dog. Or I wasn’t a cat. Or I was just really bad at this. I sighed,
stuffing my phone into my bag. I’d clicked it to check for a message at least
thirty times during class.

I’d always disparaged
the games people played in pursuit of love—or the next hook up. The whole thing
was a competition to see who could get how far, and I could never figure out if
there was more luck or skill involved, or some unknowable combination of the
two. People rarely said what they thought, or revealed how they felt. No one
was honest.

Easy for me to
say, from my high horse of the perfect relationship with Kennedy. Erin had
called me on that months ago, when I told her she was being ridiculous over a
guy—plotting to decipher what he wanted from a girl before systematically breaking
down his defenses. I had to admit she was right. I had no idea what it was like
to be a young, single adult, so I wasn’t entitled to judge.

Until now.

This angst was
absurd, but I couldn’t shake it. He’d stared at me in class. I felt confident
when I left economics, and miserable now. Why? Because he hadn’t shoved the
redhead out of his way at the end of econ to come after me? Because he hadn’t texted
me at some point during the barely three and a half hours since I’d seen him? That
didn’t even make sense.

By the time I was
heating soup in the microwave for dinner, I’d resigned myself to having failed
at keeping Lucas’s interest. I pushed the pretty girl who’d rushed up to him at
the end of the class from my mind, once I started imagining him leaving the
class holding her hand, or more. “Dumbass,” I muttered at myself.

From the end of my
bed, my laptop dinged an email alert, and an answering flutter came from my
stomach. It was probably nothing—a notice about flu shots from the health
center, or another note from one of my old high school friends, who were all “so
devastated” that Kennedy and I were over (which they all figured out when he
changed his Facebook relationship status—
twenty minutes
after he’d
broken up with me).

I’d disabled my
account immediately, and had yet to reinstate it. The thought of seeing his
glib status updates and having photos of him pop up in my feed was demoralizing.
Even if I hid him, we knew too many of the same people. There’d be no hiding
his activities completely. I began getting sympathetic and condescending emails
and texts the next day, so I was justifiably apprehensive whenever I checked my
inbox.

Cringing, I pulled it up… and smiled.

Jacqueline,

Are you going to make it to the session tomorrow (Thursday)? In case you won’t,
I’ve attached the worksheet I’m planning to go over. It’s new, separate stuff,
and you needn’t be completely caught up to get it. (Speaking of, you should be
all caught up within a week or so.)

LM

PS – I’ve been thinking about that proof I spoke of last time – that you’re where
you’re supposed to be. And it occurred to me, can you prove you’d be better off
somewhere else? If you’d have left the state, your relationship would have ended
still. Maybe you’d have even blamed yourself, not knowing that it was doomed
because of him, either way. Instead, you’re here. You got dumped, skipped class,
and met the best econ tutor at the university! Who knows, maybe I’ll make you
fall in love with economics. (What’s your major, btw?)

Landon,

I’m a music education major. I hate
that saying: "Those who can,
do
, those who can’t,
teach
." As a
tutor, I know that’s BS. Still. I wanted to
do
. I imagined joining a
symphony orchestra, or a progressive jazz band… And instead, I’m going to
teach.

I won’t be at your session – I have lessons with my middle school boys tomorrow. (I
think I’d be more impressive to them if I could fart the scales instead of
plucking them on the bass.)

Sorry to inform you, but I plan to make it through this class and be done with econ.
No reflection on your genius tutoring skills, I swear. Thank you for the
worksheet. You’re too kind.

JW

Jacqueline,

If you want to do, then do. What’s stopping you?