All Played Out (Rusk University #3) by Cora Carmack (4)

Nell’s To-Do List

Why are you looking at me like that?” I ask.

He shakes his head, but doesn’t stop staring at me.

“Uh. Sorry. You just reminded me of someone for a second there.”

I wait for him to move away, but he doesn’t. His gaze is still fixed on my mouth, and it’s strange how just that look provokes a physical reaction in my body, one sensation compounding into the next until my skin feels too tight and my blood too warm.

I wish I could pause this moment, unroll time so that I can examine his expression and his body language, and so I can catalog my own body’s abnormal response. But time never stops for my overactive brain, certainly not when his fingers slip up from my collarbone, over my frantic pulse, and grip my chin. The seconds disintegrate into impossibly shorter intervals, and his thumb treks upward to catch at my bottom lip.

I break away then, gasping and holding my chest like I’ve just been pelted by another Frisbee, by a dozen of them.

This . . . the way my heart is beating unreasonably fast . . . it doesn’t make any sense. And I don’t like when things don’t make sense.

It’s not like I’ve never seen an attractive guy before. I’ve even gone on dates with a few. But I’ve never had this kind of physical reaction to anyone. It’s unsettling not to understand why.

I put several feet between us and glare at him. “I told you to stay away from me.”

He hums and frowns and says, “No. No, I distinctly recall you saying you were supposed to stay away from me.”

“Same thing.”

“Oh, gorgeous. If what you’re supposed to do and what you actually do are always the same thing, I think I need to stage an intervention.”

A tide of thoughts rolls in, and I try to keep them at bay, but there’s no stopping it.

Normal college thing #1:

Hook up with a jock.

When I’d written those words, they’d been innocuous. An item on a list. It had been solely about exploration, about making sure I was being educated in every way, not just in the classroom. But even then, the words had been somewhere between a joke and a proposition so outlandish that I felt relatively confident I’d never be in a position to complete it. But now there’s a sensuality to those thoughts that didn’t exist before.

Before I’d stood face-to-face with just such a jock.

Before he’d touched me.

Before I’d wanted to touch him back.

It doesn’t feel like a joke anymore.

On the heels of that sensuality, anxiety swoops in, filling all the leftover nooks and crannies. Because, though I’m familiar with the term “hook up” in all its slang meanings, I’m not familiar with it in the physical sense.

I’ve never had sex.

I’ve always meant to. It’s something that I’ve tended to view rather clinically, a normal biological occurrence that shouldn’t intimidate me. But there was never anyone with whom I’d felt enough compatibility, and I’d always felt that if you’re going to do something, you should do it right. When I started making that list last week, it only made sense that I should check off that particular event while I did the rest of my experimenting.

“Clinical” is not the word that comes to mind when I look at Mateo Torres.

“I was joking about the intervention,” he says.

“I know,” I snap, defensive.

“Well, you looked a little terrified, so I thought I should put you at ease.”

“I’m not terrified.”

It’s silly to be scared of him. He tilts his head to the side, and before I can react, he’s eliminated all the precious space I put between us.

“You don’t have to disagree with everything I say.”

I step back a foot, but he follows.

“I’m not.” He only grins, and why is my pulse increasing like that? “I’m not disagreeing with you only to disagree. You’re just wrong.”

He laughs.

“And I bet you love being right.”

I frown, unsure what that has to do with him refusing to give me any personal space. I move again, and when he tries to follow, I press a hand into his chest, holding him back.

“Well, I am right a majority of the time, which is why I feel confident in my initial assessment of you.”

He leans into me, and I can feel the warmth of his skin through the thin shirt that separates us. My hand is just over his heart, and its steady, strong thrum somehow feels like a chisel, chipping away at my defenses through that simple, innocent touch. I pull my hand away quickly, and he takes it as an opportunity to move even closer. He grins, and I can say positively that I have never met a man this confident. And my family is Italian, so that’s saying something.

“And what was your initial assessment?” he asks.

“That you are only concerned with yourself. With how you look. How people see you. And I am the complete opposite. I am concerned with facts. With ideas. With knowledge. I want to be the puppet master, while you are content to be the puppet that doesn’t realize he’s letting other people pull his strings.”

A muscle in his cheek spasms. His eyes widen in surprise, maybe even alarm. Then his jaw clenches, settling his whole expression into stone. But even that lasts only a moment before the tension leaves him, and he pins me with a lazy half smile.

“I do like a girl who’s feisty.”

He’s baiting me. Or more likely deflecting. And I’m not sure if I want to allow it so that this conversation can be over, and I can get some much-needed space. Or . . . if I want to call his bluff, peel back another layer, and take a longer look at what he’s hiding.

Or if I want to examine exactly what he means by “like.”

I don’t get a chance to make a decision before both of us are distracted by a commotion behind us.

My team has just scored, but Mateo’s team doesn’t seem to be paying the slightest attention. The guy with blond, unruly hair, Ryan, is standing nose to nose with Keyon on my team. I can’t hear what’s being said, but the tension is plain as day in their body language. And though I can’t hear the guys, I can easily hear what Stella is yelling at Ryan’s back.

“Jesus, Ryan. Would you chill out? It was nothing!”

When that doesn’t work, she takes hold of his arm and tries to pull him away. He doesn’t budge. Until she screams, “You’re not my fucking boyfriend, okay? So BACK OFF!” Ryan stumbles back then, like her pull on his arm suddenly doubled in strength. He faces her, all tensed up, and she continues, “And I am not a porcelain doll. I don’t break easily, and I sure as hell will not be treated as if I already have.”

She turns around and storms off, and after a few seconds, Dallas, the redhead, jogs after her. Ryan stares off blankly, clenching and unclenching his hands as if she just barely slipped from his grasp and he hasn’t quite figured out how it happened. His expression is a mix of anxiety and alarm and pain, and for a moment it reminds me of the look on Torres’s face that he’d hidden so quickly after I accused him of being a puppet.

Sometimes I can be too brash in my observations. I don’t always think ahead to the emotions that could follow, and my heart does something akin to a shiver when I think of how I would feel if someone called me out on my own insecurities.

What if someone I barely knew looked into my eyes and said the very thing that I’d thought in my most unguarded moments, the thing that scares me most? What if someone could tell that the reason I concentrate so much on details and data is that they’re the only things that keep me from feeling inferior? I disregard emotions because they don’t come easily to me, because when other people talk about love or happiness, I feel only a cloying sense of confusion and fear that I’m not capable of those things. Not that I don’t experience happiness or love my family, but those are nurtured emotions that have grown slowly and steadily over time, and they exist at comfortable levels. But deeper than that? The kind of happiness that fills a person up? Or love that can overwhelm a person and rearrange the very essence of who they are? I don’t believe I have that kind of thing in me. It’s just not in my nature.

Which is why focusing on my career has always made the most sense. That’s something I understand. Something I’m good at.

But now even that feels off-kilter.

I turn then, intending to apologize, to admit that I’d judged him too harshly, but Torres is no longer behind me. I whip around and see that he’s slipped around the other side of the picnic table and is heading back to the field, where what’s left of his friends are gathered together talking.

Dylan is there too, Silas’s arm draped over her shoulder and holding her tight to his side. They all wear looks of concern as they talk, and I swallow, feeling as if the distance between us is much greater than the length of a table and a dozen yards of playing field.

I’m on the outside here. And what hurts more than the fact that no one seems to notice me as I turn and head for Dylan’s car is the fact that I’m comfortable on the outside. It’s what I know. It’s who I am.

Is that something that can be changed through will alone?

DYLAN DROPS ME off at home, but doesn’t come inside. She offers to, sure. She’s been looking at me funny ever since she found me waiting at her car alone, but I just told her I’d walked off to think. Which is the truth. Besides, she had plans to go over to Silas’s house, and I didn’t want to ruin that. I flip on the lamp beside the couch, leaving the overhead light off, and take a seat in my dim living room.

My roommate has been seeing Silas only since the start of the semester, and I can already acutely feel her absence. When she stays at his house, and I’m left alone in our two-bedroom apartment, I should be happy. The place is by no means big, and I should relish the extra space, the alone time.

Instead, the loneliness creeps into the shadowed corners, and I find myself turning on every light in the place just so that I don’t feel so alone.

This could be my future.

It’s not as if I can keep a roommate forever. When I’m thirty-five, I’ll be hard-pressed to find a friend to live with me just so I don’t have to come home to an empty house. But I suppose I’ll spend most of my time in a lab then anyway. I’m not afraid to be married to my job, or at least I didn’t used to be.

But this feeling is just a phase. It has to be. I will love the challenge of working in biomedical engineering. I’ll be on the cutting edge of medicine and technology. My time and focus could change innumerable lives. That will make up for any loneliness I might feel in the few short hours a day I’ll spend in my empty apartment. Better than getting myself into a relationship that will only be half real. No, I don’t want or need to have another person mucking up my life. There is too much I want to do, too much I want to accomplish. And though my relationship experience is limited to a few simple high school dates, I know enough to see that relationships take work. You can’t just consider your own needs anymore, and that weighs people down.

No. I’m happy as I am. Especially when it’s the only way I can be.

Despite those determined thoughts, I find myself pulling out the spiral where I’d jotted down my list a few days ago. I’d added a handful of things that had seemed obvious at the time.

NORMAL COLLEGE THINGS

1.  Hook up with a jock.

2.  Make New friends.

3.  Go to a party (and actually stay more than half an hour).

4.  Do something Wild.

5.  Lose my virginity.

They’re things I associate with college, even though they’re out of my own personal wheelhouse. And they’re all far enough out of my comfort zone to function as the kind of catalyst I’m seeking in my little experiment.

I reconsider the list for a moment, feeling simultaneously stupid, naive, terrified, and thrilled. It might be silly, but I love this kind of thing. I can’t magically make myself a different person. I can’t force myself to be better with emotions or at talking to people. I can’t snap my fingers and become normal, but I can observe normal people and follow their behaviors. I can check items off a list. Figures that the only way social life would become interesting to me is by making it an experiment.

And even though I’m not expecting any major life changes like Dylan experienced, who knows, maybe with a little practice, things will start to come more easily to me. It wouldn’t hurt for me to be a little more comfortable outside of a classroom. It’s kind of like the age-old debate between nature and nurture. Just because I’m not predisposed to be like everyone else doesn’t mean I can’t become that way as a result of my environment.

And then in the future, when my family or my friends or anyone tries to urge me to be different, to focus less on my career, to be normal—I’ll know with certainty what that kind of life feels like, and I’ll know it’s not for me. And I can be done questioning myself once and for all.

With that thought in mind, I jot down a few more tasks for my list. Then I pull over my laptop from where it sits on the coffee table and open it up. With my pulse beating at a frenzied staccato, I type into Google:

College Bucket List.

Then I dive into my research, pen at the ready to add to my list.