Hooped #2 (The Hooped Interracial Romance Series #2) (3 page)

“So we’ll order in. Denny’s does
togo
online, and a bunch of other places do delivery.
We’ll get delivery food, stay in all day and do laundry and study. How’s that
sound?” I grinned, tilting my head back until it came to rest on the arm of the
couch.

“Perfect. That sounds like the ideal situation.”

“You get breakfast, I’ll get lunch, and we’ll split
dinner.”

“Done deal.” I peeled myself off of the couch and went
back into my room to retrieve my laptop.

We took turns perusing the menu; part of me was a
little disgusted at more fast food after the night before, but I had to admit
that it was more appealing to order in than to go to the dining hall. I
compromised and got a Slam with pancakes, eggs,
fruit,
and
sausage
while Kelly ordered a French
Toast Slam. We decided to split an order of cheese fries to go with
it
and ordered coffee and juice to drink. I
paid online, and Kelly agreed to go and pick it up on her own; I didn’t even
want to leave the room to go to her car out in the parking lot.

I sorted through the textbooks for my different
classes while she was away, deciding what I needed to tackle first. In spite of
my determination, I found myself thinking about Devon—and hated myself for it.
I was going to focus on
precal
, and on American
History before 1865, and I was not going
to
think
about Devon
Sealy
or about
basketball. I turned
on the TV
to fill
the room with noise. The last thing I needed just then was to have silence and
space to think.

Kelly and I settled in, sprawled around the common
area of our dorm, our Styrofoam containers scattered across the coffee table
and the floor. I went into
precalculus
first,
deciding that I might as well do the most difficult things while my brain was
fighting me to think about Devon. If I could distract myself sufficiently,
maybe I’d just get in the habit of not thinking about him at all.

“What are you going to do about him?” Kelly asked me
when we took a break a few hours later, trying to decide on what to order for
lunch. The walls in the dorms were thin enough that I could hear people
beginning to move around the floor, coming and going, talking to each other. I
hoped against hope that none of our friends would be interested in coming by
and visiting with
us
or seeing why
neither Kelly nor I were out and about. I just wanted to be as alone as
possible.

“I’m going to avoid him,” I said, shrugging. “Let’s do
Fratelli’s
for lunch. Their pasta is amazing.”

“I’m down.” Kelly grabbed her
phone,
and we browsed the menu on the site.
 
We put in our order, and I looked at my
American History books, thinking that I should just plow through the studying.
Kelly changed the channel on the TV, obviously more than happy to take a break
from her own literature reading.

“So you’re going to avoid him,” Kelly said. I pushed
my books aside and shrugged.

“It’s the only thing that makes sense. Avoid him,
avoid the basketball games. Forget about him over time.” Kelly’s
lips
twisted in a wry grin.

“Do you really think you can do
that,
though? I mean—the girls are going to
want to go to another party at some point, and it’s not like you’re in another
city from him or something.” I considered it.

“There are like, thousands of students
here,
though,” I pointed out. “Besides which,
he’s an upperclassman. I didn’t meet him
until
the night before last, I think my odds are good for never running into him
again.”

“But how are you going
to
avoid
him? You don’t know him well enough to know where he’ll be.” I frowned.

“Well, I won’t go to
any
more
basketball games, I won’t go to any frat parties. It’s not like
it’ll be difficult; I don’t go to parties that often anyway.” Kelly nodded
slowly.

“But you don’t know if you’ll like—run into him in the
DH or in the library.”

“I never ran into him before. I can’t even remember
seeing him other than at games until that stupid party.”

“Just be prepared for it to happen.” I laughed.

“I doubt it will, but pretending like you’ve never met
someone before goes both ways. On the off-chance I do run into him somewhere,
I’ll just pretend like I have no idea who he is.” Kelly rolled her eyes.

“You’re transparent, though! You’ll run into him and get
that hurt puppy look in your eyes.” I groaned.

“
No,
I won’t.
I’ll just look right through him, or turn away, and pretend like I didn’t even
see him.” Kelly laughed, shaking her head.

“You’re better off just avoiding him, as useless as it
is.” I shrugged.

“There’s almost no chance I’ll run into him. It’s not
even a big deal.” Our food
arrived,
and
Kelly went down to the lobby to pick it up.

The next day I felt much better than I would have
expected to. When my alarm went off, ripping me out of a deep sleep, I thought
to myself that I had been silly all weekend; no one knew about what had
happened between Devon and me other than Kelly. I would just go back to my
normal life, a little wiser, and forget that Devon Sealy had ever existed. Life
would go back to normal.

I got out of bed and gathered up my books for class,
yawning and stretching. There was no lingering soreness from the sex I’d had; it
was as if my body had started forgetting Devon, too. I packed my book bag and
went down to the dining hall to grab something quick and easy to eat in class:
a breakfast sandwich, a to-go cup of coffee, and a banana. It would be enough
to get me through until lunch, for sure.

I was starting to feel really happy once more,
relieved and contented as I walked to class, answering the waves and calls of
the people I knew on campus. I’d been overreacting, obviously; I would just get
on with my life, and I would find a new guy to be into. If I avoided going to
games for the rest of the season, I could probably still enjoy watching on TV,
as long as our team wasn’t playing, and eventually I could watch our games
again once Devon graduated and left school.

I slipped into class a few minutes early, snagging my
usual seat in the middle, off to the side of the room. It had been the seat I
had taken the first day of classes, and it was still “mine” unless I managed
somehow to get to class too late to claim it. The other students started to
filter in, and the normal, routine hum of people discussing the assignment,
their weekends, started to rise up in the room. I shook my head to myself,
remembering my comment to Kelly that I never wanted to leave my room again; I’d
been acting like such a tragedy queen.

The professor came
in
and started asking about our weekends as she set up for class, loading up the
computer. Since it was American History, and we were covering everything
through the end of the Civil War, Dr.
Fewkes
liked to
include primary source slides in all of her lectures; she even assigned primary
sources for supplemental reading. I got out my textbook and flipped
to the chapter
we were studying.

Everything was going absolutely the way that it had
every day that I’d been in classes since the beginning of the semester. The
students around me were beginning to settle in, and I had wolfed down my
sandwich and had a few gulps of coffee to kick-start my brain. I figured that I
would eat the banana later in class, or maybe when I trekked
across the quad
to get to my next class.

But just as I decided that everything was great—the
sun shining, my normal routine established once more—I heard the door open, and
promptly felt my stomach give a heave. Walking through the door, a guidance
transfer sheet in hand, was Devon Sealy. I had told Kelly that it would be so
easy to avoid him; and here he was, walking right into my first class of the
day, less than twenty-four hours later. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to cry.
I wanted to run.

Chapter
Four

I looked away from the front of the class immediately,
staring down at my textbook and taking a deep breath.
Get yourself together, Jenn,
I thought firmly.
You told Kelly exactly how you were going to handle this. Don’t prove
her right by going to pieces.
I took another deep breath and glanced around
the room, purposely keeping myself from looking at Devon as he spoke to Dr.
Fewkes
. She told him to take whatever open seat he wanted,
and I said a silent prayer in my mind that he would just sit in the back, that
he was just going to do what everyone said he always did: pretend like he
didn’t even know me.

For my own part, I decided that my best course of
action was
just to focus
completely and
entirely on the lecture and my notes, and not even acknowledge that Devon Sealy
was a person who existed. Just because we were now apparently in the same
class—and what was he doing in a survey class, anyway—didn’t mean that I couldn’t
just avoid him. There were plenty of other cute girls in the class for him to
flirt with if he wanted to, and I was there to learn; I wasn’t there to be
around Devon.

I kept my eyes on the front of the room, on my
textbook, or on the notebook where I was writing
notes
and started to feel much better about the situation.
According to what everyone had told me about Devon, he would probably be just
as likely to ignore my existence as I was to ignore his—even more so, in fact.
As Dr.
Fewkes
told an anecdote about early
Colonial-Native American interactions, I found myself smiling. I was going to
be fine. The flurry of panic was a normal reaction, but I had everything under
control once more, and there was no reason to interrupt my normal routine.

As class wore on, and discussions started on the
supplementary material we had been assigned, I no longer had the option of just
looking straight ahead of me or at my desk, which was a little daunting, but I
told myself that it would be fine. I paid attention to whoever was talking, and
I had to be more than a little grateful that Devon didn’t seem to be interested
in contributing—which, considering he had just transferred in, made sense. I
caught sight of him at one point as my gaze flicked around the room and felt a
jolt go through me; my heart beat a little bit faster. He wasn’t hanging in the
back where he wouldn’t be seen; he was only a few seats away from me, almost at
a level.

“Jenn, what do you think of the letter?” Dr.
Fewkes
asked me. I cringed internally as every eye in the
classroom turned
to
me.
I should have said something right away and
then she wouldn’t have called on me. Fuck.

“I think it’s interesting that the early colonists
didn’t all view the Native Americans as savages,” I said quickly, feeling the
blood rising into my face. I kept my gaze on the professor. “I’d be interested
to kind of understand where the shift happened, because obviously they were
dependent on the natives for a really long time to know how to life on the land
here.” I had a moment of weakness and glanced around the room.

Devon was looking right at me, a little smile on his
face, and I felt my blush deepening, my face burning all the way from the roots
of my hair to the top of my chest. I swallowed against the dry feeling in my
throat and pushed down the blush by force of will, returning Devon’s pleased
little look with something like a scowl before I deliberately looked away and
turned my attention back onto the professor.

I managed to avoid looking at Devon for the rest of
the class, and decided that to make doubly sure I wouldn’t have to deal with
him, I’d hurry my way out when the period was over. I was just going to grab my
stuff and leave, and wait until I’d made it to my next class of the day to eat
my banana. Considering the way that he’d looked at me—the pleased gleam of
recognition in his eyes, the almost flirty smile—I was not about to eat a
banana with him sitting only a few feet away from me. In the back of my mind, I
had to wonder at the fact that Devon had even acknowledged me at all, silent as
it was. If everything everyone had said about him was true, wouldn’t he have
just not looked at me at all, or looked at me without any kind of recognition?
Maybe he’s already forgotten that he had
you. Maybe he’s that much of a player.
I had to smile to myself at the
thought; if that was the case—if he had literally forgotten that he’d had sex
with me—it did present some interesting opportunities for revenge.

But fast on the heels of that thought was the much
more angering one that Devon had either had sex with so many girls, or I was so
unexceptional to him, that he couldn’t even remember taking my virginity. I
frowned, worrying at my bottom lip and thinking once more that visiting the
school nurse might be a good idea. My mind flip-flopped again; maybe Devon had
grinned at me like that because he did remember me—and thought that I was still
all gone in the head
about
him, like half
the girls on campus.
Well, if that’s the
case, then he’s got another think coming, doesn’t he?
I told myself that I
was going to continue ignoring him. If he had been able to forget about me, I
would forget about him, and that was the way things would be. It was only fair.