Consumed: A MMA Sports Romance (29 page)

But I had agreed to go with Jess, and I
told myself as I slithered into the skirt and top that I was going to make the
best of it. I’d have a couple of drinks—not enough to get blasted, but enough
to enjoy myself—and keep an eye out for Jess. At least it would be a break from
constant studying or binge-watching TV shows on my computer.

The party that Jess was taking me to was
at a frat house; the Phi Alpha Kappa fraternity had a bad reputation on campus,
going by the nickname “bad boy frat.” I knew from what I’d heard that they had
nearly gotten their credentials taken away several times in the last ten years,
mostly for their over-the-top pranks and the intensity of their parties—and the
property damage that came along with them. If I was going to go to my first
party as a college student, it was both a good introduction and a scary
prospect.

Jess left me to finish getting ready
herself and I pulled my long, dark brown hair back and braided it to keep it
out of my face. I put on some makeup and stepped into a pair of pumps, making a
face at my feet. They’d be killing me by the end of the night, but Jess
couldn’t possibly have anything bad to say about them—they were certainly sexy.
I grabbed my purse and looked around for my keys.

“Evie, aren’t you ready yet?” Jess called
from the common area of our dorm room.

I sighed and spotted a pair of ballet
flats I’d thrown across my floor when I came in arguing with Jess about whether
or not I would go with her to the party. I slipped the shoes into my big purse,
grabbed my keys, and took a deep breath. I told myself that the night couldn’t
possibly be as bad as I was thinking it would be. It would just be a few
drinks, and a few laughs, and then I would be back in my room. How bad could it
possibly be?

We walked across campus to where the party
was going on; Jess told me she’d slipped a pair of flats into her own purse as
well—and as a ‘just in case,’ she had a spare dress stuffed into her bag. “I am
well-versed in avoiding a real walk of shame,” she said to me with a grin.
“Change into another dress and a pair of flats and no one really knows you
spent the night somewhere.”

I had to admit that she wasn’t entirely
wrong; however, people would still see you leaving the frat house the next day.
I pointed that out to her.

“Well, you kinda lie low until you get to
a more common part of campus and then you walk tall. People think you’re coming
from the library or one of the labs.”

She shrugged. “You’re putting way too much
thought into something that shouldn’t be that common a situation,” I told Jess
with a grin.

“Yeah, well, some of us go to parties more
often than once a semester.”

I rolled my eyes. “Some of us are serious
about getting a good job after graduation.”

Jess twisted her face into a wry grin.
“Evie, you need to lighten up a bit! Jeez, you could still make A’s without
using your weekends to study, too. These are supposed to be the best years of
your life, and what are you doing with them?”

I shrugged. “Learning. Putting them to
good use so that when I’m 50 I’m not still scraping by on the same job I got
when I was 30.”

Jess shrugged. “All work and no play makes
Evelyn a dull girl. I know you have it in you!”

We got to the enormous building that
served as the frat house, and before we’d even gotten to the door, I could
already hear the pounding bass of the music. The front lawn was empty of all
but a few people, but I knew from what I’d heard that the back yard, with its
swimming pool, would be thronged—as would the frat house itself. Jess didn’t
bother knocking—it was too loud to hear it anyway. She just opened the door and
I caught a whiff of beer, pot, sweat, and a little vomit; the tell-tale signs
of a raging party.

There was a guy in a toga hanging out by
the door, and he grinned at us as soon as we walked in. “Hey, welcome to Phi
Alpha Kappa! You Greek?”

“Nah, we’re just here to use you for free
alcohol,” Jess said with a grin. The guy shrugged.

“Hey, no problem there. As a token of our
hospitality, allow me to offer you beautiful ladies some initial refreshments.”

The guy produced two red Solo cups of beer
and held them out to us. I had never been a big fan of beer—and the kind of
beer that showed up at parties like this was even worse than my dad’s treasured
Sam Adams. I started to say I’d rather not.

“Evie, take the cup!” Jess grabbed the
other one, shooting me a grin. “Come on, you’re here to have fun. Lighten up,
will you?”

Jess grabbed the other cup, put it in my
hand, and pulled me away from the doorway. I sipped at the beer and made a face
as I swallowed. It was watery and bitter—no good flavor at all. Jess took a
long drink of her own cup and I wondered how she could gulp down such swill.
Maybe if I was lucky the liquor would still be out; I could handle some punch
or some vodka and soda.

We turned a corner and all at once I
spotted him. He was leaning against a wall, a couple of girls around him,
looking just as hot as I could have ever remembered. Zack was tall and lean,
not skinny, and he had plenty of muscle to show for years of playing football
and training. He was wearing a toga, like all of the members of the frat, but
draped around his waist and shoulders the sheet didn’t look ridiculous—it looked,
inexplicably, incredibly hot. For a moment I was frozen in my tracks; it had
been over a year since I had even seen Zack, and even though I had known he’d
gone to the same college, I didn’t really think I’d ever see him. With
thousands of students, what were the odds?

I couldn’t help but stare—I knew it was
stupid and I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help the rush of feelings that just
seeing him gave me. Zack and I had dated in high school; he had been a junior
when I was a freshman and my mom had started getting sick about the time that
he and I began seeing each other. We were together for two years, until the
beginning of my junior year—when Zack had graduated and was planning on going
off to college. It had taken me a year and a half to get over him; I mean, it
was a good experience all told, and I knew I was stronger for having gotten
over it at my own speed, but the sight of him, out of the blue, brought me back
to all the feelings I’d had for him. He was my first.

“Hey, Evie, you okay?” Jess’s voice
snapped me out of my trance and I smiled, taking a deep breath and looking away
from Zack.

“Yeah, I’m fine. Go on and find whoever
you were looking to hook up with. I’ll just hang out.”

Jess looked at me for a second longer like
she might not quite believe me, but Jess has never been the kind to worry for
too long; she downed the rest of her beer and started off through the crowds,
looking around her and greeting everyone she ran into that she might actually
know.

I tried to move away, but I couldn’t stop
thinking about how weird it was to see Zack again. I sort of stuck around in
the middle of the room, not exactly looking at him, but pretending to be part
of the group around me, like I was listening to whatever story the guy in the
middle of the group was telling; but the whole time I was thinking about how
things had been with Zack: how much I had loved him, and how important he’d
been to me when my mom had first gotten sick. He had been a really great
guy—funny, charming, smart. I couldn’t pretend like we’d had some deep
relationship that was more mature than our years, but he’d been around for me
when I was more stressed out than I had thought I could ever be in my life. He
had hung out with me in the middle of the night, sneaking into my room while my
parents slept to comfort me.

In retrospect, he hadn’t been the greatest
guy in the world, but I knew well enough by then that no guy really was. He’d
been immature and had broken things off with me mostly because he had wanted to
be free to date whoever he wanted in college—right when things with my mom were
starting to get worse. I couldn’t hold it against him specifically for that
reason; it wasn’t his fault that my mom’s cancer treatment was starting to
become a steep, uphill climb instead of the easy walk through the woods they
had told us it would be. I’d gone out on dates and had a few short
relationships after Zack had gone off to college, and I had gotten over him.
But part of me had always wondered how different it would be if he had at least
given us a chance when he started college.

Of course, I thought to myself wryly, I
now knew well enough that even if Zack hadn’t been the partying type, college
was a lot more demanding than high school. He would have had a lot less time
for me, and the college wasn’t exactly close to our home town. He would have
only been able to see me, at most, a couple of times a month and during breaks.
Would that have been enough for me, anyway? Would I have just broken up with
him eventually as my life became more and more dominated with the need to study
to make good grades and spend every moment I could with my mom? It still stung.
It had been hard to get over him.

I decided that I wouldn’t even say hello.
I wasn’t angry or anything; I just told myself I didn’t need that kind of
awkwardness on the one night I’d given myself to have fun. I’d check out what
was going on around the frat house, maybe find some people worth talking to,
and I’d catch up with Jess later when it was time to go. It didn’t exactly
bother me that Zack was there—he clearly belonged to the frat and it wasn’t as
though he needed my permission to be at a party I was attending. He had
probably gone to Phi Alpha Kappa’s events since he had first started; he had
joined up, and he’d be at almost any of the parties the frat threw. I just
didn’t particularly want to be seen staring at him, and I knew that if I stuck
around I’d do just that.

I glanced in Zack’s direction one last
time, telling myself that I was just making sure of where he was so I could
avoid him. But luck was not on my side; he happened to look at me the very
instant I looked at him. My face burned and I knew I was blushing bright red
under my makeup—obviously embarrassed. I took a deep breath, plastered a quick
smile on my face. Zack’s eyes widened and I fought back the urge to run away as
he said something to the girls who were gathered around him and then moved away
from the wall.

He cut through the crowd, dodging the
lurching, drunken people and then, as the crowd began to clear, I swear he
strutted—there was a definite swagger in his steps—as he came towards me, the
last few feet from where he had been standing. “Evie!” he said, smiling down at
me. His teeth flashed white in the weirdly dim light of the frat house, and I
returned his smile nervously.

“Hey, Zack,” I said, not trusting myself
to say anything more. I realized I was staring like an idiot and shook my head.
“I didn’t expect to see you here.”

Zack laughed, pulling me aside to a
slightly quieter part of the main room.

“I definitely didn’t expect to see you
either—I didn’t even know you were going here.” His dark eyes glinted and he
grinned again. “You looked like you’ve seen one of the professors downing a
shot just now!”

I laughed, feeling the tension in my
stomach starting to ease.

“That would really be something,” I
agreed.

Zack reached out and pushed a strand of my
hair out of my face and I wondered just how messy it was—if I looked like a
total wreck in spite of Jess’s approval when we left the dorms.

“Oh, well, you know, Carmine comes by
sometimes and gets into the whiskey, so maybe you’ll see that sight sometime.”

Professor Carmine, one of the math
professors, was almost a joke among the students; he had made at least one
final in the last year a take-home test at the last moment because he had shown
up for the exam with only twenty minutes left, hung over from a night of
partying. More than one of the students in my classes had stories about running
into Carmine at one bar or another in the area; he lived right across the
street from the college, and there were plenty of places to drink within
relatively easy walking distance of the campus.

“So—uh, what have you been up to?” I still
felt weirdly nervous around Zack, in spite of the fact that I didn’t have any
real reason to be. Our relationship had ended over a year before, and I’d moved
on. Clearly, Zack had too. What was there for me to feel weird about?

“Oh, well, I’m the second string
quarterback; I might get a few chances to play this season, even. Of course,
you know, I’m a member of this bunch of happy idiots. I’m doing all right in my
classes. What about you?”

I shrugged. “Mostly just trying to keep my
grades up, you know?”

I suddenly felt like a complete social
loser; I would never admit to Zack that I hadn’t even gone to any of the
orientation parties, instead spending my time researching classes and doing the
legwork to get more scholarships for next semester or next year. I knew that
Jess thought I was kind of lame—and while I told myself I didn’t care what Zack
thought, deep down I knew that I didn’t want to come across as a bookworm loser
to him.

“I’m glad you were able to come out
tonight, then. Have you been able to make many parties since the semester
started?”

I shook my head, smiling even as my cheeks
burned up with another blush.