All Played Out (Rusk University #3)(15)

“You done yet?” he calls from behind me, and I spin around, covering my intimate places with my hands, but he’s got his back to me at the far end of the pool.

“Um, not yet!”

He sets off swimming again and I grab my skirt first. It’s dark and plaid, and can withstand a little water. So I use it to get off as much water as I can, then I go ahead and slip it on. Then I pull up my underwear beneath it and proceed to throw on the rest of my clothes as fast as I can. The fabric catches and sticks on my skin, and uncomfortable doesn’t even begin to describe how I feel.

I slip on my shoes and call out to Torres, “I’m done.”

I guess he doesn’t hear me, so I walk around to the end of the pool he’s approaching and stand in front of him so that maybe he’ll see. He has his head down in the water, but when he touches the wall, he doesn’t turn around and head in the other direction. He rises out of the water, shaking his head to clear his eyes, and looks up at me.

I swallow. Bad idea. Bad, bad idea.

His eyes travel from my ankles at his eye level, up my legs, lingering at the edge of my skirt, and I wonder just how much he can see from his position below me. But then he continues up, pausing at my white shirt, which clings in places to my damp skin, before he finally meets my eyes.

There’s such hunger in his gaze that my knees actually feel a little weak.

Furious that I have so little control of my body, I turn away and say, “I’ll meet you by the swing.”

Then I dart out of the pool area, grab my spiral, and flee.

Well, there’s two more things marked off my list. “Kiss a stranger” and “Hook up with a jock.” I feel fairly confident that what we’d just done qualifies as a hookup, and since this is my list, it’s my judgment call. And now . . . there’s absolutely no reason why I should continue to hang out with Torres. I needed a jock, and I got one, and now everything else can be done without him. I know he said that thing about helping me with the list, but really . . . I doubt he meant it.

That’s just his persona, all smooth moves and exactly the right words. And really, he’s the last person I want to see me do some of the things on this list. Tonight was embarrassing enough.

I wanted a catalyst. He’s more like an atom bomb.

I see him righting the pool fence, struggling to get it latched the way it was, and I panic. What am I going to say to him? Will he expect to know why I stopped us? Or will he want to make god-awful small talk? I’m bad enough at small talk with people I haven’t been naked with.

Deciding to make my way back to the party alone, I grab my bag from where he’d left it by the swing and move as briskly as I can toward the gate, tucking my spiral away as I go. I hear him call my name a second after I’ve closed the gate, and I quicken my pace. Within thirty seconds, I’m back at the downed fence at his house, and I slink back in their yard just in time to come face-to-face with my roommate.

When Dylan sees me, she has this harried look in her eye, and she drops her costume torch to throw herself into my arms.

“Thank God,” she breathes in my ear. “You disappeared, and I couldn’t find you, and you weren’t answering your phone, and we were afraid . . .” She trails off, and pulls away to face me. “We were afraid.”

I see Silas jog up behind her then, and he releases a heavy exhale. “You found her. Good. Where was she?”

I don’t know if it’s the bizarreness of the night up until this point, but their worry makes my throat clog, and it aches when I swallow.

“Good question.” Dylan’s hands are still on my shoulders, and she asks firmly, “Where have you been? And why are you wet?”

I panic, knowing that any second now, Torres is going to enter that gap in the fence that I just came through, and I’ll have a lot more questions to answer. So I pull away and walk past Dylan and Silas toward the house, forcing them to turn and follow me.

“Oh, I just went for a walk. The sprinklers came on in one of the neighbors’ yards as I was passing, and I didn’t react fast enough to avoid getting wet.” I look behind me just in time to see Torres step through the hole in the fence. He freezes when he sees his friends, and I ask Dylan, loud enough for him to hear, “Would you care if I went home? This just really isn’t my scene.”

She frowns. “Sure, of course.”

Silas says, “We were about to kick most everyone out anyway. We’ve got a game tomorrow night, so McClain put a strict curfew on this thing.”

Dylan looks up at him, and I realize she doesn’t want to leave. Can’t really blame her for that.

“You could stay,” I say. “If you don’t mind me taking your car. I can come pick you up tomorrow morning.”

She leans into Silas’s side, and he places his hand on her hip. I try not to stare, try not to think about what that must feel like. Comforting? Possessive?

“If it’s okay with you,” Dylan says, “that would be great. You don’t even have to pick me up. I’ve already got plans to go to the game tomorrow with Dallas, and I’ve got some clothes here I could wear. Unless you want to go to the game with us?”

“Uh, no. No, I’ve got some homework to do.”

Lie. I’m all caught up, and the professors didn’t really assign anything since it’s Halloween weekend. But given all the Saturday nights I’ve spent studying, it doesn’t occur to Dylan to question me.

“Okay. Well, let me go grab my keys from inside, and you can go.”

I let her and Silas pass me, and even though I shouldn’t, I glance back at Torres. He’s leaning on the fence, and he should look ridiculous in that costume, but he doesn’t. He looks good. And not at all happy.


WHEN I WAKE to an empty apartment the next morning, it doesn’t seem to matter that the sun coming through the window lights up every corner. I thought I’d felt lonely last week when this whole list business started, but no . . .

No, this is loneliness.

This experiment was supposed to make me realize how good I had it. It was supposed to get rid of my doubts. Well, as experiments are wont to do, it has no care for what I’d wanted the outcome to be.

I make myself a huge breakfast that I couldn’t possibly eat alone, like if I just go about my business as if I’m cooking for two, it could make it so. I eat in the kitchen, leaning against the counter because that’s what I usually do when I’m busy, when I’m moving so fast and have so much to do that there’s no time to feel alone.

But I’m not busy.

I don’t have any homework. And for the first time ever, I wish I had a job. Just a normal, boring job like working retail or in an office or anywhere. It would give me something to do, somewhere to be, people to know who have nothing to do with my classes or my family or a group of friends I couldn’t possibly fit into. I would maybe even be willing to work in a restaurant . . . something I swore I would never, ever do.

My grandparents started their own restaurant. My parents run it now with occasional help from Nonna, and my brother started working for them full-time as a manager right after high school. It’s this huge family affair with aunts and uncles and cousins, and they’re so good at putting their hearts into that place, into the food, into every bit of it.

But my heart? My heart never wanted any part of it.

The restaurant is easy for them. Comfortable. I can remember my brother, Leo, hanging out in the kitchen, talking to the employees, stealing food. We’d head to that place every day after school, and he couldn’t wait to get there. I dragged my feet. When we both started working as waiters in high school, Leo thrived. I . . . didn’t. I didn’t fit in with the employees. Everyone was nice enough, sure. It wasn’t like school, where I had to worry about how my differences from the other students could cause me problems. But I still didn’t . . . fit. And I didn’t know how to talk to customers. Leo always earned twice as much as me in tips. It was exhausting to be so different. And it was exhausting to pretend that I wasn’t exhausted by it. The only place I didn’t feel that was the classroom.

That’s where I belonged. Where I thrived. The only place where there was no one to live up to, no one to fall behind, because it was my domain. No one in my entire extended family had ever been to college. My grandparents emigrated to the States from Italy a few years after they married. They groomed my mother to take over the restaurant. Dad was a waiter at the restaurant, and she fell for him even though he was older and Nonna didn’t approve. My aunt worked in the restaurant, too. By the time I was in high school, things were going so well that they were thinking about opening a second location.

They wanted Leo and me to help run it. I know they did. But I couldn’t go my entire life trying to belong in the restaurant when there was another place where it felt so natural for me to be. I wanted to go to college. I wanted to learn more, be more. Beyond that, I wanted to go to graduate school, probably get my doctorate. Other kids balked at the idea of more school. I craved it.

All I’ve ever wanted for my future was to live in a world that’s bigger than the one I grew up in. But now I’m realizing that all I did was trade one small, stifled world for another. It’s not right that last night was more interesting than every other night in my life so far combined. I’m torn between wanting more nights like it and going back to my normal routine of class, sleep, and more class just because it’s safer. Easier. Far less terrifying.