Again

Going back to college might
not have been one of my best ideas—but it was the only one that might finally
change my life. I wanted to change my life. I
needed
to. It was just
hard to convince myself of that once I was actually on campus with tons of
real
freshman all around me.

I guess it’s a lot easier to
fantasize about living your life over again than to actually go through with
it.

“Are you lost?”

I turned and found a built,
blond-haired hottie washing his hands. He dried them quickly, crossed his arms
over his broad chest, and leaned against the sink.

That was the moment I
realized I was in the men’s bathroom. The moment my breathing switched from
gulping Riesling at an all you can drink happy hour to puking it up into the disgusting
toilet at the back of the bar when drinks switched back to full price.

My knees went wobbly. My
mouth was dry; my head seemingly floating on top of my neck. I couldn’t tell if
I was suddenly unbalanced because of how handsome he was, or the realization that
I clearly was lost.

Minus a penis lost.

“Shit,” I reached for the
door handle with sweaty palms. At least I was making the kind of stupid mistake
a real freshman would.

My wide, wild eyes probably
made me look as confused by my surroundings as any other student arriving, but
honestly, I was terrified and not because I’d almost caught this guy with his
pants down, but because this whole idea was insane.

“It’s okay,” he said, walking
toward me, waving his large hands to calm me. “This is definitely not the worst
thing I’ve seen someone do the first day back.” He smiled, showing teeth that
reminded me of toothpaste commercials. It brought out the sweetest dimple the
size of an M&M on his chin.

Fuck me. I smiled back.

He paused, eyeing me up and
down, perhaps noticing the tight body I was showing off in a desperate attempt
to appear nineteen.

“What makes you an expert?”
I asked, hoping to change his focus. Maybe he wasn’t regarding me for the
reason I thought; tight body or not, I
wasn’t
nineteen. I was
twenty-nine. Why the hell would anyone believe any different?

He pointed to his red polo
shirt.

Turns out he was doing his
job.

The area above his right
pectoral muscle read Resident Advisor, Hudson University. There was something I
couldn’t identify in his sea-glass blue eyes—almost like he was holding back, putting
up a good front.

I knew his look well. It was
one I’d mastered. When it got too hard to wear my own everything-is-fine mask I
doused it in alcohol and sex and bad choices, but that wasn’t a solution
anymore.

And clearly, everything
wasn’t
fine.

“I need to get out of here.”
I grasped for the door latch again, trying to put out the fire blazing in my
neck and face.

He reached from behind me
and also went for the latch. His hand brushed against mine, blistering enough
to brand my skin.

My pulse popped like the
last minute of popcorn in a microwave. I needed to get away from him. I would
have usually chastised myself for even glancing in his direction. Not that I
had much choice considering I’d been the one who put us in such close and
uncomfortable quarters.

Twenty-nine-year-olds didn’t
spontaneously combust from a college kid’s accidental touch. But damn, this guy
was fine. My RA back in college-take-one was nothing like this. If he had been
I might have made it past the first semester.

I might have passed my
actual college-take-one classes.

Of course, I also might have
spent it studying what was under his khakis.

“Let me help you,” he said, pushing
on the latch as I continued to pull. His voice was a deep vibrato, as deep as
his blue eyes seemed.

“I can open a door,” I said,
pulling as hard as I could. Nothing happened.

Apparently I couldn’t.

He lifted his arms
I-surrender-style and stood back, stifling a laugh. “It’s a push.”

“I knew that,” I looked down
as I finally pushed the door open and we exited the bathroom. Not because I was
embarrassed, though who was I kidding?

I kept my eyes down. I
didn’t want to show him my face. Have him laugh and say,
what the hell are
you doing here, old lady
? Or even worse
, are you here helping your
daughter or son move in?

It was one thing to be told
you had a baby face your entire life. It was another to put it to the test next
to actual babies!

That was why I’d run into
the bathroom. Too bad my early-onset cataracts had obscured the mammoth M and
stick figure dude.

We stood in front of the
door, the dorm lobby brimming with students and their parents. I should have
just walked away, but I liked the way he was checking me out, his gaze sliding
from my just purchased Uggs to my just purchased white winter hat with cat ears
smashed over my recently highlighted blond hair. I had been doing my best to
look student-like.

But I was pretty sure I
looked like Hannah Montana.

It had been easy to photoshop
my high school transcript so it seemed like I graduated a year ago. Simple to change
my one semester of F’s to A’s, to take the SATs again, to get a fake ID, to
dress like any other nineteen-year-old. It took an hour to sublet my
rent-controlled New York City apartment.

Being here and acting like a
college freshman would clearly be a lot harder.

I took a deep breath,
focusing on the chaos of the lobby. The bulletin board on the far wall was
adorned with rainbow-colored construction paper that read “Welcome Back.”

Was I seriously doing this?
Damn if I didn’t wish I was at an all-you-can-drink happy hour to
give me a little of my tried and true liquid courage.

I could walk out now and
forget this crazy scheme, but what did I have to go back to?

I’d been fired and dumped by
David on the same blackout of a night and was a year away from thirty with no
prospects for anything better. Considering I lived paycheck to paycheck when I
had a job, it meant if I didn’t succeed here I literally had nothing.

This was my only choice. It
was start over where I fucked up and flunked out last time, or give up.

I had giving up to look
forward to once I hit forty. It was time to make college-take-two my bitch.

“Sorry about that, next
time I’ll ask for directions,” I said, forcing a smile.

“There’s a whole class here
on how to work doors. You might want to enroll,” he said, lobbing back a
devastating grin.

Warmth flooded up from my
stomach. I tamped it down. “I guess you already passed
Smart Ass 101
with
flying colors.”

His face changed and he stepped
back, like he was resetting himself, remembering himself. He scanned to the
duffle on my shoulder, the rolling trunk suitcase in my hand. “Didn’t your
parents come to help you today?”

“I don’t have parents,” I
said, blurting out my first lie without even thinking. Really, my mother was
very much alive and very much my mother. Being the only child to a woman who
was artificially inseminated meant she had wanted me desperately. The fact that
I never asked to be born didn’t seem to matter to her at all.

“Wow, sorry,” he said, his
face downcast, his dimple hidden by his sunken chin. “That’s terrible.”

Shit,
what a stupid lie. I should have had a backstory ready. I was
more worried about convincing everyone in my current life about where I’d be
for the next four years—the Peace Corps—than remembering I’d have a whole new
group of people to convince about more than my age.

As penance, I’d made a
donation. I wasn’t sure how many dams my small gift would build, but I figured
it would do more for Senegalese farming than I could.

“It’s okay, they’ve been
dead a long time,” I said, thinking quickly, but saying the words made me feel
like crap. My mom drove me crazy, but I loved her. She’d sacrificed a whole
hell of a lot to have me. She was a working single mom by choice.

My father was a sperm donor
I’d never met, but apparently he had an immaculate background: handsome, a
doctor, no mental illness in his immediate family tree.

When I’d been caught doing
something my mother couldn’t understand: sneaking alcohol at twelve, having sex
on our basement couch at fourteen, flunking out of college at eighteen, she
would always tell me my genetics did not align with the person I was becoming. Every
time she gave me her speech about what a mess I was compared to the stock I
came from, I couldn’t help but wonder if my real “father” wasn’t the hotshot in
the listing at the sperm bank, but was just some homeless guy jizzing in a cup
to get money for a fix.

“I’m not sure what to say,”
he replied finally. He stared at the floor, clearly uncomfortable that the
wrong girl in the cute cat ears hat had wandered into his bathroom.

It was good I couldn’t ever
touch this guy because I was seriously blowing it. I was a dolt who couldn’t
open doors and talked about her dead parents. I mean, legally, I could touch
him, but rule number one for college-take-two was:
no guys

No wait—that was rule number
two.

Rule number one was:
no
alcohol
which, if broken, meant I would break rule number two anyway.

Noticing the way the sleeves
of his polo shirt tightened against his biceps as he shoved his hands in his
pockets demonstrated he was as good a specimen as any to break rule number two with.
I shook away his superbly toned arms and what the hands attached to them could
accomplish. I was doing everything differently now. School came first, middle,
and last. There was no way that was happening by indulging in fantasies like
this on day one.

“What I mean is…” I paused, “…it’s
been long enough that it’s not on my mind all the time.” I needed to stop
talking about my fake dead parents. I needed to get onto the elevator across
the lobby and get up to my dorm room.

I understood that without
alcohol I’d need a new addiction. It couldn’t be sex. Maybe I could fool my
brain into making it studying. Could you get high from library fumes?

“I get it,” he said, his
face softening. “Sometimes I wonder why the past doesn’t come with an
expiration date.”

Hot and thoughtful, wasn’t
that just my luck?

“It does,” I said,
swallowing hard, “but you’re the one who has to enforce it.”

That was what I was doing,
wasn’t it? My old life was over, expired. My new life had four hopefully
productive years ahead.

He didn’t reply, just
watched me in a way that made my heart whack against my chest like a dog’s
wagging tail. His eyes were on me and at the same time far away, clearly
thinking of something else.

This was a heavy
conversation to have with someone whose name you didn’t even know, but it
wasn’t likely I’d ever see him again. One good thing about a college campus was
anonymity.

“Not that I’m an expert or
anything,” I said, hoping to terminate his trance.

“It’s easier said than
done,” he said, finally shaking his head like he was waking himself from a
nightmare. He cleared his throat. “Sometimes I wish my parents were dead.” His
lips tipped up at the corners but then, realizing it was a terrible joke, he
closed his mouth tight.

“Everyone does,” I said,
“sometimes.”

I thought about my mother.
She’d called me a month ago on the morning I turned twenty-nine at the precise
moment I’d shot out of her vagina, per usual. As she sang “Happy Birthday,” the
memory of the night before came into excruciating focus: getting exceptionally
drunk (even for me) at the Franklin Law Group holiday party, a shouting match
in the elevator with David, my married fuck-buddy and boss of the past year. It
wasn’t the first birthday where reliving my mother’s sacrifice, I wished I
could have been shoved back in.

That was what
college-take-two was supposed to be about. Starting over literally as someone
who would never do the things I’d done that led me to be who I was at twenty-nine—finally
understanding my life could be more than just a series of bad decisions.

He ran his fingers through
his curly blond hair, “I’m not usually so stupid.”

I wished I could have said
that but, if my past was any indication, I always was. Never mind—it was time
to climb on and ride the high that I was passing as a freshman. He might be
sticking his foot right in his mouth again and again, but he was buying that I
belonged here.

Other books

Now and Always by Lori Copeland

Shattered & Scarred: The Sacred Hearts MC by A. J. Downey

The Crown Jewels by Walter Jon Williams

The Tinkerer's Daughter by Jamie Sedgwick

The Silver Ship and the Sea by Brenda Cooper

Time of Fog and Fire: A Molly Murphy Mystery (Molly Murphy Mysteries) by Rhys Bowen

Dancing Together by Wendi Zwaduk

The Betrayed by Igor Ljubuncic

Lone Wolfe Protector by Kaylie Newell

Mr Corbett's Ghost by Leon Garfield