“Well, I made it home safe. Goodnight.” I turned the key in the lock and stepped inside of my apartment then turned around to face him so that I could politely shut the door.
“Alex,” he called out, placing an arm in between my door and the frame before I could close it.
“Yes?” I asked keeping my voice neutral and wholly unaffected.
He leaned his body forward, coming close enough for me to feel the heat radiating from it for what seemed liked the umpteenth time that night. “For the record, I don’t have a mile long list of anything. In fact, there is no list at all.” He shrugged his shoulders as if his words held less weight than they actually did. “I just wanted you to know that. Goodnight.”
Then he turned and walked away, leaving me staring flabbergasted at his back. I quietly shut my door and leaned against it. I realized my knees were shaking at the same time I realized that I would have to be very, very careful around my new partner, lest I
turn into one of those girls that fell all over him. Because regardless of what he said, I had no doubt about it that there were girls and that when they fell, they fell hard.
“Ugh!”
I opened my eyes then squinted against the harsh rays of the early morning sun that were offensively streaming into my bedroom window through the partially closed blinds. I rolled over to one side of my bed. Still squinting, I stretched out my arm and blindly felt around for the off button on the alarm clock. I did not want to be up at eight a.m on a Saturday. It was an ungodly hour given the day of the week. But I’d made my bed and now I literally couldn’t continue to lie in it. I didn’t run yesterday so I needed to get a run in and I had a test in Organic Chem coming up the following week that I’d planned on using a good portion of my weekend to study for. Out of pure laziness I hadn’t done much but lounge around the house yesterday with Whitney, which meant I needed to make up for it with the rest of my free time over the weekend.
Begrudgingly, I peeled myself out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom. The cool water splashing against my face rinsed the last vestiges of sleep away. I changed into a sports bra, cotton tank top and a pair of nylon shorts. I slid my feet into my favorite pair of Nike running shoes and was out the door.
I ran for five miles along one of the hike and bike trails that kept springing up throughout the city. They were one of Atlanta’s many attempts to promote urban living and compete with the allure the suburbs held for a lot of people. I didn’t need such tactics to sway me. I was a city girl through and through. I would never leave it for the quieter existence suburbia offered.
I returned home to the smell of warm blueberry muffins and fresh fruit.
I immediately went to the kitchen and grabbed at plate out of the cabinet. I loaded it up with four muffins, ripe strawberries, freshly cut watermelon, and a few raspberries. I picked over the cantaloupe. I loved fruit but I never liked that particular one.
“I love it when you get in a cooking mood,” I said with a mouthful of muffin.
Whitney grinned at me from the couch. “I went to bed in a good mood so I woke up in one too.”
I plopped on the counter and sat the plate in my lap. I picked up a piece of watermelon with my fingers and nearly moaned when I bit into it. The fruit was sweet and juicy and almost orgasmic. “Nasty.”
“Look who’s talking,” she smirked at me. “Molest watermelons much?”
I swallowed the fruit and stuck my tongue out at her. “Did you go out with Jaron again?”
“Eww no,” she said wrinkling her nose. “He is so last week. I’m on to bigger and better things. Like the fine track guy I told you about.” She paused to fan herself. “Alex, I’m telling you, you missed out. I’m pretty sure I’ve never come so hard in my life.” She gave me a knowing look then smiled a little too widely. “Well, maybe you didn’t. Your new partner is twice as hot and it’s impossible to have a body like his and
not
know what to do with it in bed.”
I groaned out loud. “I’m not going there with you today.”
“That’s fine. Because you
will
be going there with
him
tonight. I want details, chick. All of them.”
I thought about launching a piece of fruit at her face. I bet that’d wipe the smirk right off of it. I folded my arms over my chest instead. “There will be no details to give because
nothing
is going to happen. I hate to burst your bubble,
chick
, but be prepared to make early morning coffee runs every day for a month.”
“We’ll see. Just so you know, I’ve already stopped washing. I have enough clean clothes to last me until you take over my laundry. I normally wash my clothes on the gentle cycle and dry them with low heat. Underwear go in the top dresser drawer, t-shirts in the second one, and shorts and tank tops in the third. I’d advise you not to venture into the bottom one unless you want to be permanently scarred for life. It’s where I keep all my personal toys. Everything that looks businessy, dressy, or clubish, you can hang in the closet.”
I finished off my last muffin and the rest of the fruit lingering around my plate. “I love how you’re so confident that you’re going to win. It’s going to be funny when you don’t.”
“No, what’s going to be funny is when you lose. Although I won’t feel too bad about you doing my laundry. It’s going to be a sweet win for me but an even sweeter loss for your ass.”
I rolled my eyes at what that implied. “I’m assuming that garment bag I saw hanging in my closet this morning contains that ridiculously expensive dress my grandmother said she’d have sent over.”
“Yup. And the plain black box below it contains a pair of red bottoms that match it.”
I hopped off the counter and rinsed my plate before placing it in the dishwasher. “I’m morphing into a hermit crab and locking myself inside my room for the rest of the day. I have an O-Chem test on Thursday that I need to study for. I barely made a C with the curve on the last one, so I need at least a B on this one and all future ones.”
“Alrighty,” Whitney said picking up the remote from the coffee table in front of her. She flipped from one movie channel to another. “I honestly don’t even known why you’re bothering with a Pre-Med course load. You’re already loaded, and even without your trust fund The Society pays you more than generously. And since you’re obviously not planning on not being an active member of The Society anytime soon, I just don’t see how you are going to find time to hunt daemons and go to med school.”
“My dad did it,” I said more defensively than I meant to. In her own way, she was just being concerned for me.
“Still, it’s a lot for you to take on. Even now as an undergrad. If I were you, I’d switch to an easier major like Communications, or English, or hell even Political Science would be easier than Pre-Med. Your life is stressful enough as it is.”
I didn’t offer a verbal response to her assessment. I turned off the kitchen light then crossed the space from it to my bedroom. “I’ll be in my room if you need me,” was what I said instead.
I pulled my textbook and spiral notebook with my notes from class out of my book bag and lay across my bed with them both. Instead of cracking them open right away, I stared at their closed covers for a moment, thinking about what Whitney said. She was right. Some people chose to be Pre-Med for the same reason others chose to become lawyers or engineers or business professionals. They were careers that came with a guaranteed high figure salary. Even if I didn’t have a trust fund worth millions that I could cash in the day I graduated from college and never have to work a day in my life, the stipend provided to active members by The Society was more than enough to live more than comfortably on.
But for me, as I suspected was the case with my father, my chosen major was about more than money. Yes it would be hard and I was placing unrealistic demands on myself and would be spread thin between med school and patrolling, but it was still something I had to do. People had died because of me. Despite my power to heal, I’d been completely helpless to save Deacon and Danielle. I’d been in as much agony as they no doubt had been— beaten, ripped into like a piece of meat, then discarded like scraps leftover from a meal. But by some stupid twist of fate I’d been left alive and they hadn’t. Again. Just like with my parents. I’d been powerless to save them too. If I was alive and they weren’t, if people had been irrevocably harmed because of my actions, then the least I could do to atone for my mistakes was to spend the remainder of the life I had to live but they didn’t, healing other people and helping them to live.
I reasoned that if I made it through the hells of undergrad and med school that once I started practicing I would be okay. I could go into general medicine and open a practice of my own where I sat my own hours. I could easily fit working as a doctor during the day and patrolling at night into my daily schedule then. What it boiled down to was me just needing to buckle down and manage my time better until then. I’d gotten a C on my last test because honestly, I kept finding other things to do when I should have been studying. I had a teensy problem with procrastinating when it came to the monotonous task.
My self-pep talk turned mope session turned self-pep talk helped me clear my head enough to semi-focus and get down to the half-hearted business of what I’d come into my room to do. I pulled a highlighter and stack of index cards out of the nightstand drawer beside my bed. Then I opened both my textbook and the notebook that lay beside it.
Two hours into making then reviewing flashcards over the functional groups in organic compounds and the reactions they can undergo, I found myself dozing off on my bed.
“Alex, there’s Chinese in the living room if you’re hungry.”
I woke up to Whitney’s voice along with the delicious smell of fried rice and pepper steak floating into the room.
Yum.
I sat up on my bed, stretching my arms above my head as I did so. “What time is it?” I yawned.
“Almost three.”
Good I didn’t sleep for too long. I had enough time until my grandmother’s charity ball to eat, study a bit more, then shower and get dressed.
******
A knock sounded at my apartment door and I still wasn’t ready.
“
Shit,”
I cursed under my breath.
My makeup was done but I couldn’t figure out what to do with my hair. It hung freshly washed, blow dried, flat-ironed, and limp around my shoulders. I hated my hair. It refused to hold a curl or even a kink. Trying to curl it with an iron would be pointless, the curls would fall in two seconds flat.
“It’s not Chase!” Whitney yelled from the living room. “But it’s six forty-five so he should be here any minute. Hurry up and get your butt out here. What’s taking you so long to get dressed? Usually I’m the one lagging behind primping in the mirror and you’re waiting on me.”
“I’m coming!” I yelled back through the partially closed door. “It’s my hair. I don’t know what to do with it.”
“Since when do you care about your hair? Just throw it into a pony tail or pull it up into a bun like you usually do for these things. Your grandmother is used to it by now.”
She was right. Why did I care indeed? I never do. My appearance at my grandmother’s social events was normally the least of my concerns. I didn’t even want to be at them. Why would I bother getting all dolled up?
I grabbed a brown hair tie off of my sink and gathered my hair into a somewhat messy ponytail, using the hair tie to hold it in place.
My door bedroom door creaked open and Whitney walked to stand beside me. “Here, let me,” she said as she tugged the hair tie off.
She picked up the still warm flatiron lying on the sink’s countertop. She’d put a couple of spiral curls into the top layer of my hair when another knock sounded at the door again. For some reason, the second knock made my heart speed up even faster than the first.
“Kellen, grab the door for us!” Whitney called into the living room.
She put a few more spirals into my hair then stepped back to admire her work. “Perfect.”
I looked at myself in the mirror and had to agree. She’d managed to make my lifeless hair spring to life with a handful of well placed curls. The top layer was in spirals while the bottom layer remained bone-straight beneath them. It gave my hair a pretty voluminous effect. “It’s…nice,” I said still looking at my reflection.”But it won’t last.”
“Oh it will last. I got skills.” Whitney grinned at me in the mirror. “What would you do without me? You’re welcome by the way. No need to thank me though. You’ll more than repay me for my services when you wash my dirty clothes for a month.”
Her grin grew wicked. “I’ll go entertain our dates while you put on your dress. Hurry up. The faster Chase sees it on you the faster he can take it off.”
A couple of minutes later I stuck my head out of my bedroom door. “Whitney,” I said before even looking around to see that she was not there. “Oh…hi,” I greeted Chase. My words came out about ten types of awkward.
Sapphire eyes met mine. “Hey.” Dimples flashed at me as he spoke. “The car arrived a minute ago so they went downstairs ahead of us.”
Of course it did,
I muttered to myself in my head. My damn roommate was setting me up again. Only, I really did need her. The zipper on my dress was stuck and I couldn’t reach around my back to get it all the way up. I felt my face heating up before the words I were about to say were even out of my mouth. “Would you mind helping me with my zipper?”
Chase’s answering smile was roguish. “I suppose I could be troubled to do so.”