27

Aster

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A knock at my door at ten o’clock at night is nothing out of the ordinary. Students requesting emergency condoms, students reporting someone throwing up in the bathroom—and all over the bathroom—and students asking for more condoms because they “lost” the last ones are pretty standard fare.

What’s not so standard is seeing Aidan Shaw framed in my doorway when I yank it open after the sixth urgent knock.

For a second I just stare at him. He hasn’t been back since our fight, and this time I’m not dressed to kill in a borrowed dress and heels. This time I’m wearing hot pink sweatpants and a clashing orange Holsom T-shirt, my hair still wet from the shower.

“Did you know Jerry is banging Missy?” he blurts out, then barges into my room without waiting for an invitation. “Missy from Frisbee baseball?” he adds. “The blonde who plays second base?”

I take my time closing the door, keeping my back to him.

I may know a little something about this.

I may have...introduced them.

“Maybe?” I offer.

I turn just in time to see him gape at me. “Maybe?” he repeats. “You maybe know about this?”

“Just a little.”

“What did you do? And why did you do it? And how? And why?”

“What’s the big deal? Jerry and I broke up. He’s allowed to move on. He can never truly be happy again, but he can try.”

“I can’t tell if you’re joking.”

“Fifty-fifty.”

Aidan scrubs his hands over his face, genuinely pained. I expect him to continue ranting about Missy, but then he surprises me. “I thought it was you,” he mutters through his fingers.

“What was me?”

“Tonight,” he says. “I got home and I could hear them through the wall, going at it.”

I wince. I may have introduced them, but I don’t want to think about it.

“I thought maybe you’d taken him back or something.”

“Never,” I say firmly.

Aidan looks a bit sheepish, and I try not to notice how hot he is. His jeans and combat boots are fine, but when Aidan gets dressed for work, the contrast of the crisp white shirt and dress pants with his tattoos and hair...

It’s not fair.

I tip my head, like I can pour out the dirty thoughts. “Why are you here?”

“I had to get away,” he says. “And I didn’t know where else to go.”

I raise a doubtful brow. I know he has friends because I met them at the wedding. And I saw T.J. and Wes and Brix at the PPP meeting, so I know they’re still alive.

“Fine,” he mumbles. “I just wanted to come here.”

He pulls out the chair from my desk and straddles it, resting his arms on the back and his chin on his hands like a petulant kid in detention.

“You seem pretty upset,” I comment, sitting on the edge of my bed. I close my laptop—I’d been playing games instead of studying, anyway—and use the heel of my foot to push some dirty laundry out of sight.

“I’m not upset,” he says. “I’m...confused.”

“About your feelings for Jerry?”

He lifts his head enough to glower at me.

“About Missy?” My heart does a tiny, alarmed flip in my chest. Of course I’d seen Missy’s aggressive brand of flirtation during the Frisbee baseball games, but I’d never once seen Aidan reciprocate. I figured she was exactly the type of project-seeking girl he wanted to avoid. But now that I know her, I also know she’s beautiful and smart and funny and down-to-earth.

I didn’t think this through.

In my defense, it’s not like I planned it. We were walking across campus a couple of weeks ago when she spotted a hot guy and dragged me over to “bump into” him. Bump into...Jerry. It could have been awkward—and it was—but I was still angry at Aidan, so what better way to punish him than to invite more Missy into his life? I knew if Missy and Jerry went out that Jerry would immediately confess his sins, so once we were alone I’d confessed for him, telling Missy how he’d cheated on me, the first and only time in his life he’d ever done such a thing, and he felt so bad that he’d absolutely never do it again to anyone else. His cheating was actually kind of...a good thing.

I used to make a living selling lies.

And apparently, Missy bought them.

“I’m very clear on my feelings for Missy,” Aidan says. Then he clarifies: “She terrifies me.”

I hide a smile.

“And she’s super loud during sex.”

I cringe. “Don’t tell me this stuff.”

“Why not? Misery loves company.”

“You’re miserable knowing that Missy is having orgasms?”

“No, I’m miserable because I’m not.”

The words hang between us for an incredibly long time.

“Are you?” he asks softly. “Having...?”

I should tell him that it’s none of his business and never will be, but I can’t seem to blink and he’s watching me so, so closely.

I move my head slightly from side to side, a reluctantly admitted no.

“Why not?” I ask after a moment.

“Why not what?”

“Why aren’t you...with someone?”

He rubs a hand over his jaw, palm rasping against the stubble. “Well...” he says cautiously. “I was waiting for you.”

My heart squeezes. “You were waiting for something that doesn’t exist.”

“You exist,” he says, holding my stare. “Not in the way I thought you did. But in this way. A real way.”

I was fourteen when we fled from my dad, and I’d never had a boyfriend before then. When I was stealing and lying and figuring my life was fucked so why not, I’d hooked up with a few guys. Sometimes it was a bed for a night or sometimes it was a meal, and sometimes it was just someone to tell me I was pretty and be nice to me for a while, even if it wasn’t true. It didn’t matter. It’s not like I told them the truth about my life. Never showed them the real me. Then I went to prison, and never had to.

My first year at Holsom was self-imposed isolation. A couple of guys asked me out, but I felt like such a freak I turned them down. I stayed on campus during the summer and worked at one of the language schools, and it was the combination of extreme loneliness and seeing those students come to a new country, learn a new language, and make new friends, that inspired me to do the same. I’d learn the language of college students and figure out this new world, go through the motions like I belonged, and pray that I eventually convinced myself it was home.

Then I met Jerry and he made the illusion feel real. Like, if he bought it, so could everybody else. And maybe I could, too.

Until Aidan.

Unlike before, I don’t feel a flash of rage when I remember what he did. I’m never going to be grateful for it, but maybe Aidan’s involvement was just a catalyst, a way to speed up the end of a relationship that had always had an expiry date.

Aidan’s the only guy in my life to see all of me. The person I was and the person I want to be and the person I am now. And for whatever reason, he’s still looking.

It’s terrifying.

As though he can read all this on my face, he stands, stretching his arms over his head, revealing a tan strip of skin above the waistband of his pants. I’d seen way more skin than this that day at the pool, but I’d been thinking about drowning him then, not dreaming up ways to see more.

Now my long-dead forgiveness reflex is rushing back in and dragging my hormones with it, and they’re all saying, Let’s do this thang.

“I should go,” he says quietly.

His eyes are darker, like he’s fighting some inner battle, saying the words not because he means them, but because he has to.

“Yes,” I agree, because I have to, not because I mean it.