College Girl

College Girl

Kindle edition

Copyright © 2013 by
Sheila Grace

sheilagracewrites.blogspot.com

This is a work of fiction. Any
resemblance of characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely
coincidental. The Author holds exclusive rights to this work.

Reader discretion is advised.

This book is NOT appropriate for
readers under 18 and those who are easily offended. It contains strong
profanity throughout, explicit sexual situations, violence, underage drinking,
and other themes not intended for sensitive readers.

Dedicated to the two people who know who I
am
.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter
2

Chapter
3

Chapter
4

Chapter
5

Chapter
6

Chapter
7

Chapter
8

Chapter
9

Chapter
10

Chapter
11

Chapter
12

Chapter
13

Chapter
14

Chapter
15

Chapter
16

Chapter
17

Chapter
18

Chapter
19

Chapter
20

Chapter
21

Chapter
22

Chapter
23

Chapter
24

Chapter
25

Chapter
26

Chapter
27

Chapter
28

Chapter
29

Chapter
30

Chapter
31

Chapter
32

Chapter
33

Chapter
34

Chapter
35

Chapter
36

Chapter
37

Alex

“Fuck, he’s hot,”
Brit
whispered next to me.

To my over-sexed roommate, every
guy was hot. I looked up from my notes and gave her my best
shut-up-I’m-trying-to-pass-Calculus look. She just pointed with a sly grin to
the front of the lecture hall. Relenting, I turned and saw what—or more
accurately whom—she was pointing at. The tall man standing next to
Professor Robertson. He had broad shoulders, wavy golden blond hair … totally
not my type. I generally leaned toward tall,
dark
, and handsome. Not that I had a type to begin with, but this
guy wasn’t it. He was all
ego
. I could tell with one
look. Suddenly his bright blue eyes shifted toward the lecture hall and stopped
on me just as I was studiously surveying the muscles in his upper arms.

Shit
! Seriously? I had to be open-mouthed and idiotic-looking the
second his eyes swept over the front row? And what the hell was I doing in the
front row of Calculus, anyway? I should have dropped after the second day when
it had become crystal clear I was in over my head. But now here I was two weeks
into winter quarter—and failing. Miserably. So, unless Professor
Robertson suddenly decided to start grading on a very generous curve, I was so
very screwed. Meaning my GPA was never going to recover from my ridiculous
decision to take higher math. I had passed the first quarter only because the
curve had brought my
F
up to a nice
passable
C
.

Why had I decided to take Calculus
after barely making it through Trig in high school? Well, right after quitting
my part-time job—before Mom and I had packed up the 4Runner and driven approximately
four hundred miles to my new home-away-from-home, as the university’s brochure
put it—I had spent the last two weeks of summer camped out in my pajamas
watching old reruns of
L.A. Medical
.
Dumbest move ever. During those two weeks of giddy pre-college idealism, I had
decided—stupidly—that I could do pre-med while double majoring in
English and French.
Again—stupid.
Yeah, it
would’ve been fine if I had been some major math genius, or even if I had
really, really wanted to be a damn doctor. But this so wasn’t the case. The
problem was that TV had a way of making ninety-hour workweeks in a rundown city
hospital look sexy.

I would have been totally fine
with my English/French major even with the horrible post-grad employment
possibilities.
But no.
I had gone off and told Mom
about my half-baked idea about becoming a doctor—one of those pretty
doctors with perfect hair on
L.A. Medical
who were always yelling
Stat!
Yeah,
worst fucking idea. Ever.
Because even if Mom would never
admit it in a million years, she was totally obsessed with having a doctor for
a daughter.
And maybe that was why I had told her.
So
that I could be the special daughter for once.

And that was how I ended up
sitting in Professor Robertson’s Calculus class staring stupidly at Mr. Hot.
Sinking down in my seat, I glanced at Brit. My roommate was still staring
shamelessly at the newcomer. Not that I was surprised. Brit was currently
sleeping her way up and down our dorm floor—and the one below it. I
couldn’t even count the number of times I had come back after studying in the
library to find a sock on the door, broadcasting the fact that she had brought
another guy to our room.

A sock? Really?

Unfortunately for me, sleeping
with ever-willing guys actually seemed to be Brit McIntyre’s entire collegiate
goal. On my roommate application I had requested two things.
First,
a non-smoker.
Second, someone sane.
Brit
McIntyre was the university’s idea of practical joke. She was only sitting next
to me now because I spent more time studying than she did. Not to mention that
I was getting somewhere around forty percent on the exams—rather than in
the teens like she was.

“Folks, I would like to introduce
you to Ryan Matthews, who’s going to be taking over as my teaching assistant
for the rest of the term while he finishes his doctorate in Applied
Mathematics,” Professor Robertson announced.

Damn. I had liked the other TA,
who had been about two inches taller than me, balding, and too nervous for me
to feel remotely threatened. Mr. Hot, on the other hand, didn’t look like a
math nerd, which made it even worse that he was going to spend the rest of the
term writing the letter
F
—or if
I got lucky, the letter
D
—on my
exams. I glanced over at Brit. She didn’t care. She was here for the parties,
not the academics. Sure, she claimed her life’s goal was to be a pediatrician,
but she was actually doing worse than I was—in all of her classes. Plus, she
seemed genuinely amused to be on “Ac-Pro.” “
Ac-Pro” being the
trendy vernacular for Academic Probation.

I wished I could be as blithe
about it as she was. Then again, I wasn’t about to trade places with her. From
the little she had told me about herself that might actually be true, she had
some awful family shit going on. Her father was dead; her mother was crazy. That
was undoubtedly worse than Mom reminding me every five minutes: “I took a
part-time job so you could go to school!” Or: “Tell your stepfather thank you!”
The unavoidable implication behind Mom’s statement was: Your stepfather
shouldn’t have to pay your way through school because your own father is a
loser. I’d been tempted many times to ask whose fault that was. After all, I
wasn’t the one who picked my father. But I wasn’t about to say that. Despite my
grade in Calculus, I wasn’t a complete moron.

I watched out of the corner of my
eye as Mr. Hot, or Ryan Matthews, sat down in the corner several feet from the
podium. In my brief college experience, I’d already discovered that TAs mostly
sat around during undergrad classes looking like they were averting world
destruction on their iPads. Whatever. I went back to scribbling notes—a
gnarled mass of equations and practice problems.

By the time I looked up again,
Ryan Matthews was staring at my legs. At least that’s what it looked like he
was doing. I blinked, started turning bright pink, swallowed—and then
started choking. Professor Robertson stopped. Looking over at me with that wry
expression he got like we were all unruly kindergartners, he pointed toward the
door.

“Water, maybe?”

Still choking, I nodded, jumped
up, and raced—red-faced—toward the door. Bursting into the hallway,
I made it to the water fountain just as my coughing fit was
subsiding,
relieved not to have to ingest water from a receptacle I had seen guys spit
into. If I had had the sense to grab my bag, I totally would have skipped the
rest of class. Unfortunately, I had absolutely no faith that Brit would pick up
my stuff for me, so I trudged back to class, not sure whether to be relieved or
not that Mr. Hot had vacated his spot.

As soon as I sat down, I looked
over and noticed that Mr. Hot had just relocated—to an empty seat three
seats from mine. Brit, of course, was staring at him. Given my luck, she’d beat
me back to the room, and I’d find a sock on the door handle. I looked over at
Mr. Hot. Actually, Brit wasn’t really one for high standards. Her weekend
activities mostly involved beer, pot, and whatever guy was willing.
But if Mr. Hot happened to fall in the willing category?
I’m
sure she’d give it a go.

I smirked. I was being totally
unfair, but this Ryan Matthews guy just looked like a walking ego case. I’d
seen that look on guys’ faces before. They were the ones I avoided. They were
too good looking, and they knew it. Guys like him were the deep
end
of the pool, and I had never even stuck my toe into the
kiddie pool.

In fact, when I had confessed to
Brit that I hadn’t slept with anyone—this was before I knew what a
headcase she was—she’d practically howled with laughter. At least I had
had the common sense not to mention the fact that I had never gone out with,
made out with, or done pretty much anything else with anyone. As it was, every
time I came walking back into the room when she had friends over, she’d say
something crass like, “Yeah, Alexis has a big fucken V right on her chest.”
Honestly, I was fucking shocked that she was able to
reference—intentionally or not—
The
Scarlet Letter
. The most I had seen her read was Cosmo.

Yeah, I smiled and played the
nice, innocent little roommate. Golly gee, aw shucks, and that shit. Really,
though, I wanted to fucking kill her. Like I was all up tight because I didn’t
crank up the pretentious top
forty faux-alterna-crap to a
deafening volume
, smoke constantly, and fuck everything in sight.
This
made me subject to her scorn?

“All right, that’s it. Remember that
each exam is worth a third of your grade. Mr. Matthews will collect your
assignments.”

Lovely. The professor was, of
course, referring to the problems for this week’s homework, which I had completely
and totally botched. I swallowed my regret for not dropping Calculus while I
had the chance. Shoving my notebook into my bag, I turned to Brit.

“I’m going to the library …”
’cause I can’t get a fucking thing done with
you blasting your music and braying into your iPhone all night
.

“’Course you are,” Brit said in
that syrupy sweet tone she adopted when she was being a condescending bitch.

Then again, it
was
Thursday night, which was a big bar
night for anyone with an ID in this town. I was surprised Brit had bothered
showing
up for class. If I got really
lucky, she’d be out all night. Getting in line, I marched slowly toward
Mr. Matthews
to turn my assignment.

This guy did
not
look like someone who spent all day worrying over math problems.
In faded jeans and a gray T-shirt that strained at his biceps and shoulders, he
looked more like someone who spent his days surfing or lifting heavy objects. Imagining
him shirtless, I blushed and looked down as Brit leaned against the wall and
scribbled something on a piece of paper. I knew it wasn’t the assignment, but she
handed it to our new TA, anyway.

When he looked up at her with a
puzzled expression, that’s when I realized it must have been her cell number
she had scribbled. She made what I liked to call her “suggestive face,” and I
rolled my eyes. Vomit. She slinked by him, and I handed over my assignment
without making eye contact. Then, just as I was about to escape, his hand shot
out and touched my wrist, sending a spike of adrenaline through me. I looked up
into his bright blue eyes, and he smiled, but it wasn’t in a nice way. It was
in a way that made my legs shake.

“You must be the girl with no
name.”

Dammit
!

Fucking Brit had handed him her
cell number, and I had forgotten to put my name on my homework? That was just
great. Reaching for my assignment, I leaned against the wall, only inches away
from him, and tried not to pay attention to his delicious aftershave as I wrote
my name on the sheet of paper and handed it back to him.

“Alex Reed?” he murmured.

I looked up at him reflexively,
blushing when I realized that he was just reading my name from the paper.
Knowing anything I said would come out sounding beyond stupid, I bolted out of
the room. It was pitch black and freezing outside, and the miserably short days
of winter, which hadn’t bothered me back home, were officially making me
psychotic four hundred miles north. Of course, every time I talked to Mom, she told
me to get campus security to walk me back from class at night. I never bothered
mentioning that I’d end up dying of old age if I waited for them. Besides—embarrassing!
The walk to the library was five minutes at the most.

Still, this didn’t mean I wasn’t
freaked out walking in the dark across a college campus that was completely
empty by nine-thirty. I watched my breath come out in white puffs as I rushed
toward the library. Was Northern California
supposed
to be this freaking cold? Hearing Mom’s voice in my head, I kept an eye out for
the “rapist alarms.” Only I called them that, but that’s essentially what they
were—posts that the university had erected every hundred yards or so that
rang the police. I wasn’t sure if that was supposed to make the co-ed
population feel safer, but it just made me feel like there was a rapist hiding
behind every bush.

Shorenberger was deserted by the
time I got there, and the main building was going to close soon. By then I figured
I could move to the twenty-four hour reading room. Anything to avoid going back
to the dorm and dealing with Brit and whatever she was planning on bringing
back to our room. In the back of my head, I was hoping it wasn’t the insanely
hot Calculus TA. But, then again, what the fuck did I care?

After stopping by the bathrooms, I
settled into a quiet little alcove on the third floor right before a crackly
voice came over the intercom saying the library was closing in twenty-five
minutes. Rather than spending that time torturing myself with Calculus, I
opened up the anthology for my creative writing class.

I had the bad habit of reading the
stories that weren’t assigned.
The weird, creepy ones.
Creative Writing was the one class I didn’t mind spending extra time on, which
was too bad, because Calculus took up most of my time. A close second on the
time-suck list was Chemistry. Fall term I had taken Chemistry for Idiots. At
least that’s what people called it. Basically, after botching the placement
exam, I had ended up in the university’s
pre
-chemistry
class. By the time I had enrolled in “real” Chemistry this quarter, my
TV-induced delusions of medical school had worn off, but—like
Calculus—I hadn’t dropped it soon enough. I figured that right now the
only reason I wasn’t going to end up on Ac-Pro like Brit was because of
Creative Writing and French. They evened out the gap.