“Wait, no.” I gasp, struggling to breathe. “Stop. Stop.”
“What?” he asks, tipping his head back to look at me. I push his hand away, my own trembling slightly.
“I don’t…sorry, I can’t. I need to leave.” I search for anything to use as an excuse, backing up a step and hitting the wall. I feel trapped. “I have to get up early tomorrow—I’m doing a 10k with a friend of mine.”
“It’s eight o’clock,” Christopher protests incredulously.
“I have to leave,” I repeat shakily, because while the 10k is a valid reason, it’s not the only one. Mostly, I just want to be safe at home and not doing this. I feel like I need to brush my teeth and take a shower.
“Are you serious?” he asks, the look on his face morphing from surprise to annoyance. “What the hell?”
He steps back and shakes his head. I glance over at my jacket on his roommate’s bed. It’s my only one—I can’t leave without it.
“Sorry,” I tell him, but all it does is earn me an eye roll.
“What was the fucking point,” he mumbles, grabbing my coat and tossing it to me angrily. I fumble with it, starting to put it on when he waves at the door. “Bye. Thanks for dinner.”
He adds the last part so sarcastically, I flush. He paid for dinner. He also talked most of dinner. And now, I’m leaving without holding up my end of the bargain which was apparently having sex. The door handle is slippering under my damp palms, and the buzzing in my ears only seems to be getting worse as I leave the dorm. The cold outside air is such a blessed relief, I decide to leave the jacket off for my walk home. The only thing that could make my body hotter right now would be to actually light me on fire.
I walk quickly in the direction of my dorm, desperate to get there. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m being chased.Unfortunately, no amount of fast walking would keep shame from catching up to me. By the time I’m halfway home, I’ve come to the embarrassing conclusion that I should never have agreed to going back to Christopher’s dorm. Of course he thought that meant we were going to have sex—why wouldn’t he? I shouldn’t have agreed to go, and I shouldn’t have let him kiss me if I wasn’t going to do more. I gave him all the wrong signals, right from the beginning. Probably, I should have just gone through with it instead of kicking up a fuss like I did. I don’t understand why I can’t just do the correct thing one single time in my life.
Nate is barely panting eventhough we’re halfway through the 10k. We’re jogging next to one another, elbows bumping every now and then, with mostly silence between us. I glance at him, noting the damp areas of sweat staining his shirt. He’s wearing the crop top I bought him, which shows off his trim waist, tattooed back, and muscled stomach. It also makes him a danger to society. I’m pretty sure I saw someone accidentally run into a tree as they jogged past, too distracted by Nate to pay attention to where they were going.
A little way up the road, a water table is set up on the left side of the street. He makes a beeline toward it, beaming at the little girl handing out the cups.
“Thank you!” He takes two, throwing one back and handing the other to me. We toss them into the trash and get back onto the course, once more falling into a steady rhythm. Nate lifts his shirt to wipe his forehead.
“So?” he asks, nudging me gently with his elbow.
“What’s up?”
“How was your date? You didn’t text me last night. It’s a good thing Marcos recommended we share our locations, or I might have been worried you didn’t make it home.”
I blush beneath my already warm, and likely red, face. Not mentioning the date had been purposeful. I should have known he’d ask.
“It was fine.”
He glances over at me. “So, bad, then.”
I’d laugh if I wasn’t needing all my extra oxygen for running. Nate—who’s not only beautiful, but also possesses a supernatural ability to make friends with anyone—has probably never had a bad date in his life. He probably rates closer to epic on that scale.
“Well…yeah, kind of. I fucked it up, of course.”
“You’re going to have to expand on that, Micky Mouse,” he requests.
“Dinner was fine, but then he asked if I wanted to go back to his dorm,” I admit. “And I was actually having an okay time, so I thought, ‘why not?’”
“Snuggle on those tiny-ass single beds, and watch a movie,” Nate agrees with a smile. I return it—he knows me so well. That’s exactly what I’d been hoping for. Safe touching, with the buffer of a movie as a distraction. I didn’t want to kiss anyone, and I definitely didn’t want to have sex.
“Right. He did say he liked anime when I asked during dinner, so.” I shrug, taking a break from talking to focus on running for a second. I’m fit, but I’m notNatefit. I give it a solid five minutes of silence—nothing but the sound of our shoes on the pavement and panting breaths—before I continue. “But he thought we were going to hook up, and I didn’t want to, so he got a little annoyed. Which, you know, is fair.”
Nate scrunches up his nose. “What?”
“That’s the story. Nothing else happened.”
“But you watched a movie?” he asks, lifting the hem of his shirt to wipe at his face again and showing off his nipples to all the people staring at him.
“No, he was mad that I didn’t want to—” I stop talking as Nate comes to an abrupt halt, turning around and jogging in place. I gesture down the road in the direction we’re supposed to be running. “Come on.”
