Chapter 1
Dandy
How quickly I would’ve given up campus cafeteria food for chicken fried steak and a warm batch of Mama’s biscuits. And how quickly I would’ve given up everything on earth to have him back.
I loved him. He was mine and I loved him. Then I lost him. Nick plucked my heart from my chest and skimmed it across a lake somewhere. There it stayed, someplace cold.
Coming from a small town in North Carolina, I’d only had one serious boyfriend before him. Caleb had been my friend ever since we caught crawfish together as kids. He was the one I was supposed to be with. Our families knew each other and had gotten together for Sunday dinners since we were born. He remained in the small-town mentality, content to work at his dad’s mini-market and listen to country music while sipping sweet tea. I outgrew him and everyone else in that town.
Poetry had grabbed hold of me starting with Shel Silverstein, and had solidified its place in my future when I first set my eyes on a copy of Poe’s The Raven and Dickinson’s I Could Not Stop for Death. By the age of twelve I’d ditched all things country for anything indie. I wanted truth, I wanted deep, I wanted pain. Now that I had it, I would have gladly given it back. After Nick, I wanted to die.
Pain isn’t so much fun.
I’d been depressed at Logan long before I met him and was only one semester away from ditching college and heading home. The grass wasn’t greener at Logan University. Flowers wilted here too, and I wished more than ever I could be back home with family. If we hadn’t been grouped together in class, I may have never spoken to him, and I would have headed home to calm down, accept Caleb, and settle in to a boring existence like everyone else where I’m from.
But I was grouped with Nick, and after that nothing was the same.
Everyone else called him Lucky, but I refused to. To me, he was Nick. I’d been crushing on him in class for a long time, but he was one of those great looking guys all the girls wanted. He was one of those frat boys. Our class was large, we sat far apart, and I was too intimidated to talk to him. But the moment Professor Benton put us in a group together, I knew it was my only chance to make him mine.
Nobody else mattered. The other three in our group? I don’t even remember their names. It was only Nick and me.
It started with innocent flirting as we met with our group in the library or out in the park beneath a tree. Of course, I made sure that I always sat next to him. He was never more than a few feet away if I had anything to say about it. Was I a stalker? Of course not. Like any other young woman, I wanted to find true love. I desired a man’s touch. Having only slept with Caleb, I didn’t know what it would feel like to be with another man, but I wanted to know. I wanted to feel wanted.
Is that wrong of me? Is there anything wrong with that? Apparently, I was crazy. At least that’s what Nick seemed to think.
What started out as playful slaps on the arm whenever he would crack a joke grew to flirtatious glances and some pesky teasing back and forth. That led to our first date and then our second and so on.
We began to spend all of our time together. We’d hang out in coffee shops and listen to mellow music together while making out in a corner booth. He took me to a Sevendust concert, which was a little more hardcore than either of us was used to, but that concert ratcheted our sexual tension up to a point that it exploded later that night in his room. That hadn’t been our first time together, but it was the most memorable.
God, how I missed him. If he only knew what he did to me, how he changed me, and how he’d broken me. He had no idea the pain he’d caused. Have you ever felt heartache so bad that it controls your entire body? It aches in your head, in your throat, in your arms and legs and fingers and toes. It’s a hurt that never goes away and each time you see that person you’re missing, it’s like another dagger has been driven into your heart. That’s the way I felt about him.
My roommates tried to cheer me up. They were two fiery women with strong personalities. They would never let a man make them feel the way I felt. One of my roommates had a sexual desire that bordered on nymphomania. She fucked new men all the time, claiming it was the only way to figure out if he was the right one. So far none of them had been. My roommates had become like my best friends, yet neither of them was the friend I needed. Neither of them could fill the void left by Nick.
A mile or two down the road, he was partying the night away with his frat brothers. I’d been almost like a permanent fixture at the Delta Iota Kappa house. All the guys knew me and they all seemed to respect me. After all, I was Nick’s woman, Lucky’s woman. I WAS his woman.
Now SHE was his.
The first time I saw them together, I thought I might vomit. Nick had helped Natalia bring our other roommate, Anya, up to our room. It seemed Anya was shit-faced as usual. From my hiding spot under my blanket, I peeked out and watched them enter the room. At first, I thought it was another random guy Anya was bringing home, but then I saw him and my heart sank.
Do you know what it’s like to lie back and watch your man and your roommate flirt? I guess I can’t say they were flirting, not at the time, but since they ended up fucking each other nightly, it’s safe to assume some flirting happened at some point.
So I played the part of a disgruntled, sleep-deprived roommate. As they tossed Anya onto her bed, I let out an angry, “For fuck’s sake, be quiet.”
“Sorry,” Natalia said.
She had always been my friend, but my hatred for her and for Nick began to build up inside me until my blood was practically boiling.
“So this is you?” Nick asked.
He’d never been to my room before. In all that time we’d dated, we always went back to his place as I’d warned him that I had two roommates. We’d wanted time alone together. At least his roommate, Paydirt, was hardly ever in their room. Now, here Nick was, standing in my room, surveying the posters on the wall.
The pain was so real and so deep. Knowing he was standing right there, so close to me, but obviously interested in one of my roommates hurt me badly. He was spying my posters, seeing tokens of my life and the things I liked, and it made me hate him for hurting me. He didn’t belong in my room.
WHY THE FUCK IS HE IN MY ROOM?!
“Nightwish,” he said. “Deep.”
“You like them?” Natalia asked.
“I’ve heard a couple of songs and they were cool.”
SHE DIDN’T EVEN LIKE NIGHTWISH. THAT WAS MY POSTER. SHE JUST NEVER MOVED IT WHEN WE CHANGED BEDS SO SHE COULD SLEEP CLOSER TO HER COUSIN! THE SCANDALOUS BITCH!
My mind raced and my heart pounded in my chest. Then they left the room and I was alone with one drunken roommate and my depression. Like a whirlwind of hate, anger, and love—yes, even love lived there in that storm—I seethed there under my blanket, thinking of ways to get revenge. Trying to come up with some way to hurt both of them. They’d both wronged me.
Natalia knew who he was. How could she do this to me? At least I knew he had no idea who my roommates were, but she…she had heard it all. She’d seen pictures of him. She’d listened to all my stories. She knew exactly what she was doing.
I remembered swapping sex stories with her. She knew the things Nick did with his tongue. She knew the positions we’d tried and the places we’d fucked. She knew about the time the condom broke and I didn’t stop him from coming inside me. She knew all of my deepest darkest secrets and yet she was interested in him anyway.
The urge to spy on them was too strong, and I couldn’t resist peeking outside the window over my bed and watching them as they walked out of the building and into the courtyard. She walked ahead of him and he followed closely behind. From the look of it, she wasn’t that interested in him.
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he was being a tool and chasing after her. Maybe she was turning him down. Could it all be a coincidence?
Then my world shattered when he reached out and took her hands in his and she didn’t pull away. I fell back away from the window and sobbed into my blanket. Only people who’d seen each other for a while would behave that way. It wasn’t the way a woman acted on a first date or during a first encounter. No, they must have been dating for some time. I was heartbroken.