Chapter 6 - The Write Off

13 Years Ago

Freshman Year, Second Semester

The next time I hear from West, it’s a Sunday night and I’m drowning in a sea of math homework that might as well be in a foreign language. I’m not good at math, and I hate that about myself. A writer who sucks with numbers? How novel. If I could write books and understand how to double the measurements in a recipe, I’d be unstoppable. The world needs more women in STEM, and as much as I wish I could contribute, I’m not going to be one of them. I’m going to be an Enneagram type 3 (wing 4) who likes library-scented candles, moody music, and books with dragons and magic and hot guys.

As if he’s been summoned by my thoughts, my phone buzzes with a message from an unknown number.

I’m getting kicked out of my room.

I push my textbook off my lap and tuck my legs under me with a smile. Amber sprayed perfume between her boobs and dry-shaved her legs before she left our room ten minutes ago, which means this could only be one person.

Don’t freeze to death.

It’s not exactly freeze-to-death cold outside, but the mid-thirties is cold for Tucson. My windows are dark and frosty, and the dorm heater is struggling to keep up.

Heading to the library now. Might not make it alive.

Sucks to be you. I’m buried under three layers of fuzzy blankets, in a roommate-less room.

Now you’re just being cruel.

Not that I mind, but how’d you get my number?

Amber. It was my condition for leaving tonight. This is Jupiter, right?

It’s been a week since the basketball game with West, and I won’t lie and say I haven’t thought about him since. And every time I think of him, I think of his story about a lonely boy, which made me cry, and how I can’t help but wonder if that story showed me a part of West he otherwise keeps hidden. I think about how he voted for me to win, despite wanting the prize for himself. I feel the weight of his hand on my shoulder and his multicolored eyes trained on mine when he said, I was just trying to impress you. I had no idea he cared so much about my opinion, especially when he can write like that. Funny and bittersweet. I was laughing all the way to the end, right up until the moment a tear landed on my keyboard.

Are you saying my roommate sold me out for sex?

She thinks we’re friends.

Is she right?

When my phone buzzes again, my reflexive grin is idiotic.

Meet me on the second floor of the main library and we can find out.

I glance again at the frosty windows. Nothing has ever sounded less pleasant than trudging across campus in the cold.

Too cold. You’d have to pry me out of these blankets.

Is that an invitation?

I blink at my screen, phone clutched in my hands, my mouth forming a small O. I quickly scan back through our conversation, trying to decipher anything suggestive in it. I brought up sex, but in a funny way. I mentioned my bed (more than once!). I dared him to pry me out of it.

But he’s not—he wouldn’t—I didn’t summon him here for a Sunday-night hookup.

Right?

Room 314.

I send the text with shaky fingers, and then I press my face into my pillow.

Eight minutes later, he knocks.

* * *

“Hey.” West stands with his shoes toeing the threshold of my room, his cheeks pink from the cold and his chest heaving like he ran here. His hands are on my doorframe, his fingernails a scratched-up Sharpie-purple that I would hate on literally anyone but him.

“Hi.” A beat passes in which neither of us moves, but then I stand back so he can shut the door behind him, shrinking the room by a factor of five thousand. He shifts his weight, and I blurt the first thing that comes to mind. “Want something to drink?”

He rakes his fingers through his hair. “Sure. Do you have milk?”

I laugh until a flash of embarrassment flits across his face. “Wait. For real?”

He lets his hair fall over his eyes and walks around me to survey the wall over my bed. It’s empty except for a handful of pictures from home and a poster of earnest writing quotes. Finally, West looks over his shoulder. “Or whiskey?”

“You want milk or whiskey?” I open the mini refrigerator that fits under my loft bed and stare at a half-empty Red Bull that I was rationing for later and the chocolate protein shakes that Amber drinks for every meal. I look back at him. “Shockingly, we don’t keep either in our room, unless you want Amber’s almond milk. It’s expensive, though, so she might kill you.”

His shoulders creep up to his cheeks. “I was kidding. Whatever is fine. Or nothing, honestly.”

“The girls in 308 always have a stash of something, but they hate me ever since I accidentally left my retainer next to the sink four weeks in a row,” I say wryly.

His lips tilt. “It was a joke. I don’t even drink.”

“Yeah, neither do I when my parents are asking.” I flash him a smile, and he lets his bag drop to the floor.

“Do you really brush your teeth in the shower?” he asks as he bends over my desk to inspect a picture of me and a few friends from graduation. Most of them stayed in the San Diego area, but I didn’t have the grades to get into any of the UC schools. I doubt we’ll still be talking come Thanksgiving.

“Do you not? My brothers have done it for as long as I can remember. I thought it was standard.”

“Not standard. And not that hygienic, if I had to guess.”

“Oh.” I bite my lip, standing alone in a shoebox of a room with a guy who thinks I’m gross while my face heats like a solar panel. “I didn’t realize that was information I should have guarded with my life. That’s even more embarrassing than the quotes on my wall.”

He glances up at the poster that reads: The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

“No, it’s not. And anyway, my family calls the TV remote a ‘genie,’ and I didn’t know that was weird until I was, like, fifteen. We also howl at the full moon every month.”

I blink at him. “Why?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. We thought it was funny, and then we got superstitious about it. One month we didn’t do it because it was raining or something, I don’t remember, and the next day my youngest brother broke his leg. I had to pull him to school in a wagon for six weeks. One day the wheel fell off, so I put him in a wheelbarrow. A neighbor called my mom, and she yelled at me for not telling her about the wagon.” He shuts his mouth abruptly and scowls like he regrets telling me all that. “We never missed a full moon again.”

“Never?” My real question is implied in my raised eyebrow.

West grimaces. “Never.”

I pull the blinds away from my window. “Is it—”

“Not until Tuesday,” he says.

“Damn.” I suddenly can’t imagine anything I want more in life than to see West howl at the full moon. “Well, thanks for sharing the weirdo misery. Glad to know I’m not alone.”

“I just told you multiple embarrassing things about my family. You owe me another one.”

I climb onto my bed and sit with my back against pillows while I motion for West to sit next to me. “Okay, here’s one. When I wanted a snack, I used to eat a piece of Wonder Bread slathered in margarine and white sugar.”

“Try harder. That shit was the fancy dessert in my house,” West says with a smile.

“I once opened my mom’s top dresser drawer—”

He holds up his hands. “I don’t think I want to know this—”

“—and it was filled with loose baby teeth. She admitted that whenever she played tooth fairy, she’d drop my and my brothers’ teeth in her drawer to save for later, but she never did anything with them. She doesn’t even know whose are whose.”

“That’s worse than I expected, and I expected parental sex toys.”

I lean across my twin bed and cover his mouth with my hand. “Don’t say that ever again.”

His eyes spark, and then he licks my palm. I shriek and rub my hand against his chest while he laughs. “I can’t believe you just licked me.”

“I can’t believe you’re surprised. Didn’t you say you have brothers?”

“Two older ones. Who are nice to me, by the way. How many siblings do you have, and do you torture them regularly?”

He hesitates, like he’s not sure of the answer, but finally settles on “Four.”

“Whoa.”

“Yeah.” West ducks his head, letting his hair fall over his eyes again like he does when he’s uncomfortable. I didn’t realize I knew that about him until now. Just like that, an entire portion of my brain is suddenly devoted to learning the story behind that reluctant four. I’ll die if I don’t find out. I’m going to dream and daydream and write stories in my head until he tells me. I’ve auto-deleted a mountain of info to make room for this clawing curiosity. The names and faces and histories of any guy I ever had a crush on, for instance. Gone in the bob of his Adam’s apple, erased in the slow dip of dark eyelashes against his cheeks.

West looks like he’s in agony. He hasn’t told me the story yet, but he will. I find the only ounce of patience I possess and change the subject. “You’re a horrible distraction. I’m supposed to be doing math homework.”

His shoulders slump in relief, and when his eyes catch mine, I see the unspoken Thank you in his rainbow irises. “Sorry, I’ll stop distracting you.”

“I don’t mind,” I say too quickly. “I can’t do my homework, anyway. I don’t understand it.”

“What are you learning?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” He picks up my textbook and starts thumbing through the pages. “Where are your notes from class?”

“I don’t have any.”

A scrap of paper filled with hastily scrawled dialogue flutters to his lap. “I think I’ve found your problem.”

“Inspiration strikes when it strikes, West. It’s not my fault that my Greco-Roman-inspired fantasy with an emotions-based magic system and a bodyguard romance is more interesting than trigonometry.” Just like it’s not my fault that words stay put on the page, unlike numbers, which dance around whenever I look at them.

“You write during class?”

“I write during everything. I’m writing a kiss scene in my head right now.”

He chokes on his own breath. “The fuck?”

“What?” I look at his wide eyes and realize he thinks I want to kiss him. His teeth drag over his bottom lip, and it dawns on me that maybe I do. A flush of heat steals across my chest, and for a heartbeat, I’m trapped in his gaze. I clear my throat and tear my eyes away, looking anywhere but at him. I’m going to have to figure out what to do with that thought sometime when he’s not sitting on my bed. “I’m always writing scenes in my head. You should see the Notes app on my phone,” I murmur.

He narrows his eyes like he’s not sure what to make of the invitation. After a beat, he continues to thumb through the pages of the textbook on his lap. “Why don’t you just drop the class?”

“Because I need a math credit to graduate, for reasons unknown, as if calculators and tax accountants and the nine-times-table finger trick don’t exist.” I roll my eyes. “The midterm is on Friday. If I fail that, I fail the class. If I fail the class, I have to retake it in the fall.” I shudder.

“You won’t fail.”

“I might.”

“There are worse things.”

I tilt my head to the side. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand whatever language you’re speaking.”

“Having to retake one class isn’t the end of the world.”

“Sorry, again, my brain just can’t compute those words.”

He laughs, and it’s a sound I want tattooed on my eardrums. “I should have known, based on your reaction to coming in second place in the writing contest.”

A loud thud hits my door, and West and I both startle in surprise.

“Is Amber back already?” he asks. Whatever unexamined hopes I had for the evening dissolve like frost.

“Hello?” I yell.

“It’s snowing!” comes a loud, giggly response from a voice that’s not Amber’s.

I’ll bet. “Looks like someone raided the neighbors’ liquor stash.”

“Unless she’s telling the truth.”

“Well, you tell me, T-loc, does it snow in the desert?” I tease, branding him with the nickname given to Tucson locals.

“I’m not a T-loc,” he scoffs. “I’m from Casa Grande, which is even worse. And no, it doesn’t snow in this dust bowl hell.” We stare at each other while the sounds of slamming doors and thudding footsteps echo through the dorm hallway. “Except…sometimes it does,” he begrudgingly admits.

We slide off the bed, our feet hitting the floor in unison. I grab a sweatshirt from my floor as he opens the door. He grabs my hand and pulls me into the hall as I’m yanking boots onto my bare feet.

Campus is pandemonium. Hundreds of students are dancing, running, and screaming in the street in front of the Maricopa dorm. An open window on the third floor next door is blaring music through a speaker.

“No way,” I say, my breath clouding in front of me. I hold up my palms and watch wet snowflakes fall softly onto my skin. Of all the things I expected when I decided to go to college in the desert, this wasn’t on my list.

We step into the street, then quickly jump back as a group of students in their underwear run past us, soaking wet and shaking from cold. “What’s going on?”

“Skinny-dipping in the Old Main fountain,” comes the reply.

“Does it count if you’re in your underwear?” West asks. I glance up at him; he has snow flurries on his long black lashes. The sight makes me giddy. I’m drunk on cold air. “Has anyone ever told you that you have multicolored eyes?”

“No, just you.”

“Really?” I’m shocked. Sometimes I see his eyes in my sleep.

“You’re too gullible,” he says.

I shove him hard, but he clasps my frozen fingers in the palm of his hand, his gaze hot enough to make me sweat. “Has anyone ever told you that you have a mole right here?” He lightly brushes his thumb over the spot just above my lip.

Most of my features are unremarkable. I’m average height. I have shoulder-length hair that’s dark blond or light brown, depending on the light. My brothers tease me for my hazel “Bratz” eyes—they’re pretty big—but I could be a walking cyclops, and my mole would still get all the attention. I wrinkle my nose. “Yes. Constantly. All the time. I hate this stupid thing.”

West shakes his head. “That’s dumb.”

“Your hair!” I pull my hand out of his and brush my fingers through his damp hair. Apparently, we’re people who touch each other now.

He frowns. “What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s curly!” I don’t know why, but the fact that his straight emo bangs curl when wet is the best revelation of my life. “Do you straighten it every day?”

He won’t look me in the eye. “Yes.”

“Can I convince you not to?”

He groans and covers his face like he’s been caught in a compromising position. “No.”

A girl from my dorm floor passes me a drink made up of party leftovers. I take a whiff and feel the burn in my nostrils. After a shudder-inducing sip, I offer it to West.

He shakes his head. “No, thanks.”

“You sure? It’s disgusting!”

“I don’t drink.”

“You were serious about that?”

He nods.

“There’s a story there.”

His wet curls are stuck to his forehead as he nods again. Curiosity burns me alive. “Will you tell me about it?”

“Someday,” he says easily, and I’m not sure if he’s making me a promise or dismissing my question.

We stand in the softly falling snow for a quarter of an hour, doing little besides watching our breath puff in front of us. I don’t know if it’s the weather or the boy at my side, but I’m frozen to my spot, unable to move. “I’m numb everywhere,” I say absently.

West moves to take off his hoodie, but I put my hand on his forearm to stop him. “I’m fine. You keep it. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

He runs his tongue along the inside of his cheek, considering me for a long moment. Finally, cautiously, he wraps his arms around my shoulders and pulls me into his chest. His long arms cross in front of me and wrap around my torso. “This better?” he asks in a quiet, questioning voice while improbable, magical snowflakes fall around us. I can only nod as the music pulses in my ears and my blood. People pressed on all sides sway and sing and laugh and stick their tongues out to catch the falling snow. My heart feels jittery and floaty, and West’s arms are the best jacket that’s ever existed. I tip my head back against his chest and close my eyes, and in a shock of realization, it occurs to me that I’m chasing this feeling every time I sit down to write a single sentence on a blank page. This expansive, ballooning, giddy, oh my god, I could live in this moment forever, but I’ll die if I don’t know what happens next feeling.

I jolt out of West’s arms. “I have to go write.”

“Now?”

“Yeah. I know exactly how to finish the scene I’ve been stuck on, and if I don’t get it out of my head, I’ll lose it.” I push myself onto my tiptoes and kiss him on the cheek.

He looks dumbstruck, his mouth trying several times to form a sentence before he figures it out. “What about your math?”

I hold up ten fingers and then drop a thumb. “Nine times five is forty-five! What else does a girl need to know?” I slip through the crowd and race back to my room. When I open my laptop, the words have never come easier. I’m powered by the sound of his laugh and the feel of his arms and the sheer biology of my lips against his cheek. I write until my eyes blur, sometime between three and four in the morning, then fall into bed with a grin.

I’m dead tired, happier than I’ve been in weeks, and blissfully unaware of the consequences of having West Emerson as a muse.