All Played Out (Rusk University #3) by Cora Carmack (11)

Nell’s To-Do List

For a few moments I just stand there naked and dripping beside my clothes. I should be frantically dressing or finding some way to blot the water off my body. Instead I’m watching Mateo’s sleek naked body cut through the water in the moonlight. Torres, I correct. He needs to stay Torres.

I have never been struck dumb by the naked male form. All the statues in museums of sculpted muscles and curves never really seemed that art-worthy to me. My interest in the body has always been clinical, not aesthetic.

Now I realize that was because I’d never seen it in person. Never seen the powerful way muscles move in action. It goes so far beyond medical. I shake my head before I can start waxing poetic about Torres’s magical muscles. God, it’s like that guy makes me forget I have a brain.

If he hadn’t started talking, there’s no telling what I would have let him do. What if he’d just . . . I don’t know . . . stuck it in, no warning or whatever. Like . . . SURPRISE! Here’s a penis. I picture the scene now. Losing my virginity by sneak attack in the pool, and the vision in my head goes from painful to awkward then back to painful. I can’t even think about the fact that he didn’t have a condom with him in the pool, and I doubt there are pockets in his loincloth.

“You done yet?” he calls from behind me, and I spin around, covering my intimate places with my hands, but he’s got his back to me at the far end of the pool.

“Um, not yet!”

He sets off swimming again and I grab my skirt first. It’s dark and plaid, and can withstand a little water. So I use it to get off as much water as I can, then I go ahead and slip it on. Then I pull up my underwear beneath it and proceed to throw on the rest of my clothes as fast as I can. The fabric catches and sticks on my skin, and uncomfortable doesn’t even begin to describe how I feel.

I slip on my shoes and call out to Torres, “I’m done.”

I guess he doesn’t hear me, so I walk around to the end of the pool he’s approaching and stand in front of him so that maybe he’ll see. He has his head down in the water, but when he touches the wall, he doesn’t turn around and head in the other direction. He rises out of the water, shaking his head to clear his eyes, and looks up at me.

I swallow. Bad idea. Bad, bad idea.

His eyes travel from my ankles at his eye level, up my legs, lingering at the edge of my skirt, and I wonder just how much he can see from his position below me. But then he continues up, pausing at my white shirt, which clings in places to my damp skin, before he finally meets my eyes.

There’s such hunger in his gaze that my knees actually feel a little weak.

Furious that I have so little control of my body, I turn away and say, “I’ll meet you by the swing.”

Then I dart out of the pool area, grab my spiral, and flee.

Well, there’s two more things marked off my list. “Kiss a stranger” and “Hook up with a jock.” I feel fairly confident that what we’d just done qualifies as a hookup, and since this is my list, it’s my judgment call. And now . . . there’s absolutely no reason why I should continue to hang out with Torres. I needed a jock, and I got one, and now everything else can be done without him. I know he said that thing about helping me with the list, but really . . . I doubt he meant it.

That’s just his persona, all smooth moves and exactly the right words. And really, he’s the last person I want to see me do some of the things on this list. Tonight was embarrassing enough.

I wanted a catalyst. He’s more like an atom bomb.

I see him righting the pool fence, struggling to get it latched the way it was, and I panic. What am I going to say to him? Will he expect to know why I stopped us? Or will he want to make god-awful small talk? I’m bad enough at small talk with people I haven’t been naked with.

Deciding to make my way back to the party alone, I grab my bag from where he’d left it by the swing and move as briskly as I can toward the gate, tucking my spiral away as I go. I hear him call my name a second after I’ve closed the gate, and I quicken my pace. Within thirty seconds, I’m back at the downed fence at his house, and I slink back in their yard just in time to come face-to-face with my roommate.

When Dylan sees me, she has this harried look in her eye, and she drops her costume torch to throw herself into my arms.

“Thank God,” she breathes in my ear. “You disappeared, and I couldn’t find you, and you weren’t answering your phone, and we were afraid . . .” She trails off, and pulls away to face me. “We were afraid.”

I see Silas jog up behind her then, and he releases a heavy exhale. “You found her. Good. Where was she?”

I don’t know if it’s the bizarreness of the night up until this point, but their worry makes my throat clog, and it aches when I swallow.

“Good question.” Dylan’s hands are still on my shoulders, and she asks firmly, “Where have you been? And why are you wet?”

I panic, knowing that any second now, Torres is going to enter that gap in the fence that I just came through, and I’ll have a lot more questions to answer. So I pull away and walk past Dylan and Silas toward the house, forcing them to turn and follow me.

“Oh, I just went for a walk. The sprinklers came on in one of the neighbors’ yards as I was passing, and I didn’t react fast enough to avoid getting wet.” I look behind me just in time to see Torres step through the hole in the fence. He freezes when he sees his friends, and I ask Dylan, loud enough for him to hear, “Would you care if I went home? This just really isn’t my scene.”

She frowns. “Sure, of course.”

Silas says, “We were about to kick most everyone out anyway. We’ve got a game tomorrow night, so McClain put a strict curfew on this thing.”

Dylan looks up at him, and I realize she doesn’t want to leave. Can’t really blame her for that.

“You could stay,” I say. “If you don’t mind me taking your car. I can come pick you up tomorrow morning.”

She leans into Silas’s side, and he places his hand on her hip. I try not to stare, try not to think about what that must feel like. Comforting? Possessive?

“If it’s okay with you,” Dylan says, “that would be great. You don’t even have to pick me up. I’ve already got plans to go to the game tomorrow with Dallas, and I’ve got some clothes here I could wear. Unless you want to go to the game with us?”

“Uh, no. No, I’ve got some homework to do.”

Lie. I’m all caught up, and the professors didn’t really assign anything since it’s Halloween weekend. But given all the Saturday nights I’ve spent studying, it doesn’t occur to Dylan to question me.

“Okay. Well, let me go grab my keys from inside, and you can go.”

I let her and Silas pass me, and even though I shouldn’t, I glance back at Torres. He’s leaning on the fence, and he should look ridiculous in that costume, but he doesn’t. He looks good. And not at all happy.

WHEN I WAKE to an empty apartment the next morning, it doesn’t seem to matter that the sun coming through the window lights up every corner. I thought I’d felt lonely last week when this whole list business started, but no . . .

No, this is loneliness.

This experiment was supposed to make me realize how good I had it. It was supposed to get rid of my doubts. Well, as experiments are wont to do, it has no care for what I’d wanted the outcome to be.

I make myself a huge breakfast that I couldn’t possibly eat alone, like if I just go about my business as if I’m cooking for two, it could make it so. I eat in the kitchen, leaning against the counter because that’s what I usually do when I’m busy, when I’m moving so fast and have so much to do that there’s no time to feel alone.

But I’m not busy.

I don’t have any homework. And for the first time ever, I wish I had a job. Just a normal, boring job like working retail or in an office or anywhere. It would give me something to do, somewhere to be, people to know who have nothing to do with my classes or my family or a group of friends I couldn’t possibly fit into. I would maybe even be willing to work in a restaurant . . . something I swore I would never, ever do.

My grandparents started their own restaurant. My parents run it now with occasional help from Nonna, and my brother started working for them full-time as a manager right after high school. It’s this huge family affair with aunts and uncles and cousins, and they’re so good at putting their hearts into that place, into the food, into every bit of it.

But my heart? My heart never wanted any part of it.

The restaurant is easy for them. Comfortable. I can remember my brother, Leo, hanging out in the kitchen, talking to the employees, stealing food. We’d head to that place every day after school, and he couldn’t wait to get there. I dragged my feet. When we both started working as waiters in high school, Leo thrived. I . . . didn’t. I didn’t fit in with the employees. Everyone was nice enough, sure. It wasn’t like school, where I had to worry about how my differences from the other students could cause me problems. But I still didn’t . . . fit. And I didn’t know how to talk to customers. Leo always earned twice as much as me in tips. It was exhausting to be so different. And it was exhausting to pretend that I wasn’t exhausted by it. The only place I didn’t feel that was the classroom.

That’s where I belonged. Where I thrived. The only place where there was no one to live up to, no one to fall behind, because it was my domain. No one in my entire extended family had ever been to college. My grandparents emigrated to the States from Italy a few years after they married. They groomed my mother to take over the restaurant. Dad was a waiter at the restaurant, and she fell for him even though he was older and Nonna didn’t approve. My aunt worked in the restaurant, too. By the time I was in high school, things were going so well that they were thinking about opening a second location.

They wanted Leo and me to help run it. I know they did. But I couldn’t go my entire life trying to belong in the restaurant when there was another place where it felt so natural for me to be. I wanted to go to college. I wanted to learn more, be more. Beyond that, I wanted to go to graduate school, probably get my doctorate. Other kids balked at the idea of more school. I craved it.

All I’ve ever wanted for my future was to live in a world that’s bigger than the one I grew up in. But now I’m realizing that all I did was trade one small, stifled world for another. It’s not right that last night was more interesting than every other night in my life so far combined. I’m torn between wanting more nights like it and going back to my normal routine of class, sleep, and more class just because it’s safer. Easier. Far less terrifying.

But how long can I live with just safe and easy before my life becomes completely devoid of meaning? I’ll have work, sure, but what if I end up not liking it as much as I think I will? For so long, I’ve thought that the most important thing in my life was my career, getting to where I want to be. Finding a place where I fit. But what if it’s not as satisfying as I always thought? What if I got it wrong, and I didn’t like class because I fit there, but because I thrived there? Because it challenged me and pushed me in a way that my childhood in the restaurant never had?

And then the big question is . . . am I thriving here? I’m excelling, certainly. My grades are good. I’m making plans. But I don’t know if that’s the same as thriving. I just don’t know.

I used to think about the future in terms of goals and achievements, and now all I can think of is all the things I might end up regretting. And it’s all this stupid list’s fault. And Dylan’s. And Mateo’s. I was perfectly fine ignoring my doubts until Dylan pointed out how blindly I was pursuing my future, without even exploring any other options.

Does that make me any different from Leo? He stepped right into his position at the restaurant, no hesitation, no thought to any other future because it’s what he’s good at. I’d thought him so naive.

If he was, I guess I am, too.

I rinse off my plate and load it in the dishwasher, and then dial my parents. My mother answers on the fourth ring, and just by the chaos I can hear in the background, I can tell she’s at the restaurant. Probably in the kitchen prepping for the day.

“Antonella?” she says loudly. “Are you there?”

“Yeah, Mammina. I’m here.”

She says something in Italian to someone on her end, something about preparing the bread, and after a few seconds I hear a door shut and the din disappears.

“How are you, passarotta mia? It’s nice to have you call me for a change.”

My little sparrow. She took to calling me that sometime during high school. She said all I ever talked about was leaving the nest. And even though I’ve heard the endearment a thousand times, this time it has tears filling my eyes, and no matter how hard I press my fingers against them, I can’t get the tears to stop.

“Mamma,” I choke out, my voice surprising me as it cracks. And even though it’s just one word, she knows. In that way that all mothers seem to be able to tell what their kids are feeling with just a tiny sound.

“Oh, Nell. What happened?”

I don’t have words for all the things I’m feeling. It’s all too big. Too frightening to admit out loud.

“I’m doing everything wrong,” I tell her, because that’s what it feels like. I have this one chance to get things right, and I thought I was doing it it. I thought I knew what I wanted to do and who I was, and now all I can see is a future that terrifies me. A future where I turn out to have made all the wrong decisions.

“Impossible,” she says. “You’re too smart for that.”

That only makes me cry harder. Because that’s all I’ve got. I’m smart. But what does it really matter in the long run? What if I graduate in the spring, and then I go to grad school, and then I get my doctorate, and then I start working only to discover that I’ve spent years of my life pushing blindly toward a future that doesn’t make me happy? My brain has never been the problem. But my heart is an equation I don’t know how to solve.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” she says. “Whatever it is, we’ll deal with it.”

She’s a good mom. My parents are good parents. And I’ve always felt guilty that my only goal is to not be like them. It’s because of them that I don’t have to work. Because even though they were sad that I wanted to leave, they wanted me to have every opportunity, to take every chance that was offered to me. They wanted more than anything for me to be happy, and I’m screwing it all up.

I suck in a breath, trying not to let on just how freaked out I am. “I just . . . I’m lonely, Mamma. And tired. And I’m worried about the future, and I don’t know. It kind of all overwhelmed me this morning.”

Understatement of the century. But I hate making her worry.

“Why are you worried about the future? Are classes not going well?”

“No, classes are great. I’m doing really, really well. Still on track to graduate early, and I’ve been researching and talking to my professors about grad programs.” Grad programs that I should already have researched enough to know my top choices so I can start thinking about the application process. But for some reason, I just can’t get myself to make a decision. “But, Mamma, what if I’m wrong? I picked biomedical engineering based on an aptitude test and an article I read in a science magazine when I was seventeen. And I know we got my tuition covered here at Rusk, but grad school won’t be that easy. It will be expensive. And . . . and I’m just worried that I’m going to spend all this time and money on something I arbitrarily chose as a teenager. Something that I could have gotten wrong.”

“If you got it wrong, so what? You think you have to get everything right on your first try?”

“With something like this? Yes. I do.”

“Oh, psssh. You are twenty years old. And you are brilliant and beautiful and driven, but you are not perfect, despite how often it seems so.” I do a weird, gurgly, sobbing laugh, and I can’t help but think about Torres last night. He called me perfect. Several times. But that was an entirely different kind of compliment, and one that has no business sneaking in around thoughts of my mom. She continues, “You are allowed to make mistakes, Nell. And even though it might seem right now like one mistake is enough to derail your entire future, it’s not.”

“You don’t understand, Mom.”

“Don’t I? I might not have gone to college or picked some high-tech career, but we all make choices. You don’t think I agonized over whether or not to marry your father? You don’t think both of us had doubts about taking over the restaurant? You don’t think it’s terrifying to raise children? To know that every choice you make not only determines your future, but theirs, too? The future is never just one choice. It’s a thousand. And they never stop. You will choose your future every day of your life. And should you wake up one day to find that you regret the choice you made the day before, then you make a new one. Don’t worry about whether you might be wrong someday. Worry about whether you’re right now. Tomorrow can wait.”

“Tomorrow can wait,” I repeat. The tears are still flowing, but I no longer feel like I’m choking on some invisible ache in my throat. I no longer have to gasp for breath.

“It can,” she promises. “No point worrying about what happens at the end of the road when there’s a hundred steps to take before you get there. You worry about today’s step. Because I promise you, passerotta, there will come a day when you stop obsessing over what lies ahead and begin to look backward instead. And when that day comes, it won’t matter so much whether every step was in the right direction because life is not a straight line. It will only matter that you took them. That you never let yourself stand still.”

“I don’t know why people always call me the smart one,” I say. “You definitely have me beat.”

She laughs, and the sound lifts me in a way that even her words didn’t quite manage to do. “I am firmly in the looking-backward stage,” she says. “And things are much easier to understand on this side.”

“Thanks, Mamma.”

“You’re welcome. And I’m glad you called. Do it more often.”

I agree, and we say our good-byes, and when we hang up, I know exactly what I want to do today. It’s officially November now, and I graduate in mid-December. If that’s all I have left, I’m going to use every day I have. Maybe I am wrong. But short of tacking on another major, it’s too late to change my plans completely. I want to check another item off my list, but I can’t do it alone.