Bridgette
Are you done with lab?
Scott’s text filtered through my phone just as I was getting out of Dr. Daunte’s class. Being in the lab for six hours could make anyone’s eyes hurt. Looking at computer models and devising patterns that could potentially predict how the stars evolved made me tremendously excited and extremely tired.
Yep, I texted back.
Hungry? He asked, followed with an emoji of pizza and noodles.
He was asking me to choose so I texted him with the noodle emoji.
Thursday evenings were now saved for Scott and I, so in the morning I rode with Rianna to school and he texted me when he was done with practice and he picked up me up from school.
It has been three weeks of texting, and going out on little dates with him since the night he stayed over at my place. I had texted Rianna that Scott was around and since she ended up spending the weekend in Palm Springs, Scott and I had the whole place to ourselves.
We ended up watching a movie and fell asleep on the couch. In the morning we went out for brunch, and before he left he gave me a searing kiss and elicited a promise from me that I would be calling and texting him from now on.
We didn’t talk about relationships. We just went with the flow.
I invited him to board game night with Rianna and Evan and he took everything in stride. We ganged up on him, but he always pulled me close to him when it was Rianna and Evan’s turns in Cards Against Humanity.
He didn’t say much but when he did, he made snarky comments that made all of us laugh.
Evan, of course, hyperventilated when he met Scott, but Scott gave him a bro fist bump and everything went smoothly. As smoothly as Evan not-so-discreetly taking pics of Scott and posting them on his Snapchat. Scott just shrugged and said that as long as he wasn’t naked, it was all good.
We’d seen each other at least once each week, and I had an amazing time. We always ended up eating, or watching a movie, or just doing something mundane like walking around Westwood, but once we were alone in my bedroom, he turned up the heat and we ended up with a lot less clothes than we came in with.
I wasn’t rushing anything and it didn’t seem like he was either.
I’d become really good at kissing him and feeling him grow under his jeans and he’d become an expert at rubbing my breasts underneath my bra and shirt.
It felt juvenile.
But it also felt wonderful.
You game to go out tonight? Another text came through as I trudged along the steps towards the library.
Do I have to dress up?
By this time, he knew my schedule already. I had an afternoon class tomorrow so I’d be okay going out late.
Casual, he texted right back.
Knowing Scott, he was probably getting into his car to pick me up. His training facility was in Agoura Hills and it would take him at least an hour to get here.
I was okay with driving to where he wanted to eat dinner, but he insisted on always picking me up. He said it made him feel more masculine.
I didn’t know how much more masculine he could get, but to me he was already all man.
He picked me up as if I weighed nothing, and I didn’t know that I was attracted to bossy men, but geez, the less he talked in public, the more words he said when we were alone together.
Okay. Sir.
It was meant to tease, but I knew that it made his cock hard when I called him that. He was busy tweaking my nipples one time and the word ‘Sir’ spilled out of me, and I felt his cock harden like granite underneath my panties.
I didn’t get another response, but a few minutes later, he texted me, Rikko’s gonna be with us.
I sent a thumbs-up and decided that I was going to wait by the steps close to Structure 8.
I didn’t know how to define my relationship with Scott, and maybe that was the best thing about it.
We were enjoying each other. Getting to know each other’s quirks and ticks. He was going to be really busy in two weeks when football season started, and I was going to continue living my life until the day I received an invitation from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas for interviews.
Of all the people I knew, only three people weren’t taken aback when I told them of my dreams.
My brother said to go for it when I told him last year that I wanted to be an astronaut. He joked that my height would be a restriction and he wasn’t far off. Three inches shorter and I might not have passed their anthropometric requirement for height.
My friend, Rianna, told me, you go girl, when I explained to her that being with the stars had always been my dream since I was ten.
And Scott, he’d asked why there were so many SPACE magazines in my apartment and I simply told him that it was a subject that fascinated me, and that one day all the reading that I was doing was going to be beneficial when I was up there at the International Space Station. He’d blinked once and muttered, “Damn.”
I had one year left for my undergrad and after three years postgrad, I could start applying to be included in NASA’s highly selective process.
Rikko’s excited to see you. Scott’s text interrupted my thoughts.
Don’t text and drive, I warned, texting and driving were worse than drunk driving, and I’d seen the many sad casualties on the roads of L.A.
Another thumbs up and it was quiet for an hour as I turned on my laptop to make sense of my latest findings. There was a current model for plasma spectral modeling and as I cross-referenced the literature I’d found regarding the many techniques of studying astrophysical plasma, I got lost in the world of ions, and atoms, and free electrons.
Science came easy to me.
My brother Bishop was the same. Though he loved Quantum Mechanics, and I was more fascinated with the nature and evolution of the universe.
My friend, Rianna, loved to see how a blank space could be changed by the addition of design elements. For me, when I saw a blank space, I wanted to paint it with color and at the same time, I wondered how gravitational forces kept everything inside this planet we called Earth so that we would not be floating in space.
Time passed and my neck started to ache when the phone inside my purse alerted me that Scott had arrived.
I saved my work and started down the steps, looking for a silver Audi SUV whose driver had become a part of my daily routine.
He was out of the driver’s side before I landed on the last step, “Hey.”
His strong arms went around me and I greeted him the way I’d come to know he liked, a squeeze on his hard back and a smile on my face.
Kisses were saved for when we were inside the car because when it came to us, they could get out of hand.
One time we were kissing inside of his car while parked in front of my apartment and I’d climbed out of my seat and straddled him. I’d ended up with a few love bites by my neck that I had to cover with my hair down and he’d ended up with scratches on his back because of my nails.
He eyed me with curiosity and said, “You look different today.”
“Really? You just haven’t seen me for five days.” He’d had a lot of team meetings, and I guessed they were now doing double time for practice, so we’d resorted to texts and Facetime calls.
He pressed a finger to his lips without removing one of his hands from my waist. “I don’t know. It’s something.”
I thought of what I did different this morning because as much memory my brain could hold, when he was around, he made me forget. Simply because he was there.
“Oh yeah.” I moved my head up and down, “I put some blush on.”
He side hugged me closer to him as we walked towards his car. We couldn’t meander for long because the parking monitors were everywhere, and they gave a ridiculous amount of tickets to cars that were unmanned, especially in busy spots.
“Blush?” He asked as he opened the door of his car and I hopped in.
I watched him walk in front of his car and as he sat on the driver’s seat and put his seatbelt on, I remarked, “I like to sprinkle blush on my face on lab days.”
He eyed me with a confused look, “But you’re in a lab…why would you need to look extra pretty?”
I loved the way he said ‘extra’ before pretty. I wasn’t a vain person. The last thing I would ever wish to become was my mother, who had been calling me nonstop, asking when I was coming home. Home was anywhere away from her.
Anyways –
As much as I didn’t value physical appearance much, it warmed my insides whenever Scott complimented me. I mean, his ex-girlfriend, my brother’s current girlfriend, looked like a Victoria’s Secret model, so even if it was a tiny bite, the green-eyed monster ate at me.
Kara was a good person, but even I couldn’t deny that she was gorgeous.
“My lab partner is kinda cute and I don’t know, I just don’t wanna look like a mess in front of him.” Tyler was a junior like me, and we’d been lab partners in a few classes. He always looked like he stepped out of a Men’s Wearhouse magazine rather than someone who just realized today is a school day, jumped out of bed, and came to class like more than half of my school’s population did.
I swore I thought I saw one of my classmates wearing PJ’s during Professor Chi’s lecture.
Scott turned the car on and started to drive.
I didn’t think much of it until we were five minutes in, and he still hasn’t said anything.
He was quiet usually, but not that quiet, especially with me.
He usually talked about practice and asked me about my day.
Since we were meeting Rikko, I had to stop by my apartment and we’d go from there.
“GQ, stop sulking,” I teased.
Sometimes I called him GQ, or sometimes David because he reminded me of David Beckham.
I rubbed my left hand against his right arm. An arm that was solid muscle and covered in a dark green shirt that complemented his green eyes.
He still didn’t say anything.
“Tyler’s a classmate,” I started and I kept rubbing his arm softly, I could see the fine hairs on his arms slowly rising. Goosebumps. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
The muscle in his right jaw ticked.
Jeez, he was jealous.
“If it makes you feel better, he asked me out once and I turned him down.” I saw him as a friend and that was it.
His left hand thumped on the steering wheel, and I decided that maybe that wasn’t the best thing to say.
He was still quiet when he parked in front of my apartment five minutes later.
“I’ll be back,” I said to apparently no one since the gorgeous man beside me wasn’t talking to me. “Give me ten.”
Before I could step out of the car, I felt a strong pull on my hand, and he tilted my head so I could meet his lips.
His kiss wasn’t gentle.
It was scorching, punishing, dominating.
It was hard and when his tongue met mine, I knew that he was trying to exert his power over me.
I placed my hand on his jaw and let him dole out his frustrations against me, my lips, my mouth, and when his hand grazed the front of my shirt, he whispered, “Mine.”
Slowly his lips retreated and my eyes met his stormy greens, “Yours.”
“I’m not sorry,” he said this with his face inches from mine.
“For what?”
“For wanting to smash any guy you find cute.”
I shook my head, “He’s cute. But you…you’re more than cute.”
Our heads met in the middle over the car console, his forehead pressing to mine, and I felt his hair still damp from his shower, “What am I, Bridge?”
He’d started calling me Bridge the day after he stayed at my apartment. Sometimes he said babe, baby, cutie. Anything he called me gave my spine a frisson of warmth and gooeyness.
“You’re my Scott,” I said, knowing that I was claiming him as mine. And even though I had no business of doing so, even when the future was unpredictable, and even when common sense was telling me no, I wanted him.
I wanted to be his.
I softly pressed my lips against his, “And you take my breath away.”