Unraveled(105)

The heavy coin with the emblem of the Medal of Honor stared up at me, almost as if it looked disappointed. Do the Corps proud, both in uniform and out.

I rubbed both hands over my face. “You’re a dirty fighter, Noah Jackson.” I snatched the coin from his hand and curled my fist around it until the rope-finished edges bit into my skin.

His response was to wrap his hand around my shoulder and squeeze it tight. “Semper Fi, brother.”


AM

YOU’RE GOING TO REGRET NOT being in biology with me, I texted Ellie Martin, my best friend since kindergarten and now college roommate. We were taking the dreaded science elective that every other student took their freshman year, but Ellie and I’d managed to duck the requirement until our second year. Our advisor, Dr. Highsmith, told us to get it over with or he would drop us. I thought it was an empty threat, but we both loved him as our academic advisor—hideous sweaters, tendency to spit, and all. Dr. Highsmith was considered one of the foremost economic thinkers in the country, and his chair was endowed by some bigwig alum who credited his post-college success to theories that Dr. Highsmith taught. I planned to be the CEO of my own insurance company someday and endow my own chair. The AM West Chair of Economics. That had a nice ring to it.

You’ll be the one with regrets when you have nightmares about flying monkeys.

Ellie had been afraid of tornadoes since she watched The Wizard of Oz when we were seven. She’d heard from someone that they watched storm chaser footage during biology class and she changed her science elective that same day. No amount of arguing with her about how biology had nothing to do with the weather could convince her otherwise, which was why I was walking into class by myself. I sent her a picture of the flying monkeys that I’d saved to my phone this morning for just such an occasion, grinning at her immediate curse in response. Getting the finger through text just has no power.

“You’re gonna run into that stage.”

My texting conversation with Ellie came to a halt at the softly drawled warning. About five inches from my shin was the front of the lecture stage in my Biology 101 class. The warning had saved me from sure embarrassment, but my cheeks heated anyway as I turned to see the person behind the voice. I’d an idea who it was, but I was two parts dismayed and two parts enthralled by the sight of him. Bo Randolph.

I knew of Beauregard Randolph. Everyone at Central did. Central College was one of the best liberal arts colleges in the nation, nestled in an urban area in the Midwest, but it was smaller than some city high schools. Gossip whispered at the start of morning classes at one end of campus was heard at the other by noon in the cafeteria. Or some version of the gossip, anyway.

I’d never envisioned attending any other college than Central, but one drunken party later and I wished for the anonymity of those public universities and their enormous student populations. So while I’d heard many rumors about Bo, I didn’t know how many of them were true. The rumors about me—that I was a slutty girl who’d banged the entire lacrosse team—had only a grain of truth. I’d given up my virginity after one fraternity party to some lacrosse player, who then bragged about it to his teammates.

Somehow that one encounter became the entire team. Once a field bunny, always a field bunny. The lacrosse squad made it their goal to see that everyone believed I was fair game, prey to be chased down and taken at any opportunity. Sober, not sober. Willing, not willing. I wished there had been an informational sheet in my freshman welcome packet warning that hooking up with a lacrosse player resulted in social ruination.

The rumors about Bo ran the gamut from him being a professional fighter to having killed some guy on the east side of campus for looking at him wrong. Oh, and don’t forget the women. Bo’s name was linked to every sort of girl here at Central. It didn’t matter if a girl was sporty, artsy, quiet, or popular, Bo seemed have hooked up with them all. Naturally, this only served to heighten Bo’s reputation with both sexes. If you were a guy, your conquests made you a god. If you were a girl, you were the conquered, no better than a toy.

I’d sat directly behind him in Advanced Economy Theory last semester and spent months battling twin emotions of lust and resentment. Resentment because of the unfairness of how differently our actions painted us in the eyes of our classmates, and lust because Bo made it exciting to go to class. It wasn’t because price discrimination was a fascinating topic or that economics was my actual major. No, the highlight of those days was staring at the interplay of muscles and skin and tendons when Bo wrote, stretched, or reached behind him to pull his backpack over his shoulder. He looked like the live model for a Rodin sculpture. Even the tinkling of what I assumed to be his dog tags striking each other when he moved generated a Pavlovian response of craving in me. About the only flaw I could see in Bo was his messy dirty blond hair, but even that just invited me to sink my fingers in it and smooth it down.