Page 60 of Arctic Titans of Northwood U: Volume 1

Of course a guy like Sawyer needed my help. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t notice me even if he tripped over me. I’d been shoved into my locker by guys like him my entire life. It didn’t make me crave them any less, but it did adjust my expectations.

“An athlete?” I asked. He sort of looked like a baseball player. Maybe. I didn’t know much about baseball.

“Hockey,” Matt said. “He’s the Titans’ goalie.”

“A keeper,” I mused, looking at the two people he’d charmed fighting over him.

“I was here first,” the girl was shouting.

“Yeah, but maybe we should let him choose,” the guy insisted.

“He already chose. Didn’t you, Sawyer?” the girl pressed.

“Don’t involve me.” Sawyer was shaking his hands and head, careful not to spill his nearly full plastic cup of whatever he was drinking. “I’ll go either way.”

I snort-laughed because I’d expected him to say he didn’t want anything to do with the fight. But the fucker was fanning the flames and loving every moment of it.

The crowd dispersed slightly and I found myself pushing closer to the three squabbling lovebirds, Matt on my heels. And just as I tried to seem less like I was staring, the fight went nuclear.

“He’s been making eye contact with me all night,” the big guy was saying. I wouldn’t have minded making eye contact with him all night, too, if I were in Sawyer’s shoes. But he seemed equally enthralled with the girl, too.

“And we’ve been chatting all night, asshole,” the girl was saying. “You’re ruining everything, Zach. And if you’re so desperate to get a piece of him, then wait your goddamn turn.”

“I’m not taking your sloppy seconds, Sis,” the guy snarled. And as it got heated, Sawyer lifted his cute, straight eyebrows and turned around as if to sneak out of the way. I couldn’t see his face now that his back was turned to me. But just as he was fully facing away from me, the girl grabbed his wrist, and the guy, Zach, grabbed his shoulder. They insisted something into his ear from each side and Sawyer jerked back, his arm suddenly free of the girl’s hold. It shot up, together with the plastic cup he was holding, and slammed against his shoulder.

Newton’s First Law played out in real time as the contents of Sawyer’s cup were in motion and remained in motion even when the cup stopped abruptly. The liquid — vodka with orange juice, I soon discovered — crossed the distance between us in an instant and splashed all over my face, glasses, shirt, and bowtie, soaking my hair and making me gape.

“Fuck,” Sawyer said, spinning around from the two siblings who stopped fighting the moment there was collateral damage.

I blinked twice, dripping with booze and smelling like orange juice. “Um…”

Sawyer moved his gaze from me to my companion. “Matt? Is this…?” As his gaze returned to me, it grew ten times more horrified as he recognized me. “Oh, no. Oh, shit.”

I licked my lips. “I think I’ll head back now.” Using my sleeve, I wiped some of the vodka-juice off my face to no point or purpose and cut through the crowd toward the door.

“Noah, wait,” Sawyer said, but I was already so embarrassed that my cheeks couldn’t get any redder. As the shame mixed with the terrifying fear of being in the spotlight — as I very much was — I barely knew what I was doing. I raced out of the frat house, telling myself that I had known all along that a party was a terrible idea.

I ran faster, losing breath soon enough, then slowing down. Dormitories were lined up on the northern part of campus, only a little distant from the houses that fraternities and athletes had. And mine, a long, two-story building, was the closest. I rushed in and up the stairs, then down the first floor hallway until I reached the last door on the right. I barged in as soon as the key turned in the lock, then slammed the door shut and released a deep exhale. Fucking fuck. There were many ways to embarrass me, for sure, but none were as effective as the public splashing of a beverage onto my face. And that goddamn, puck-loving, ice-skating, physics-failing asshole did just that in a house that packed half our campus. By morning, everyone would know about it. And everyone would laugh at me behind my back.

I was so screwed.

I needed to transfer to another college. Preferably another state. Or maybe to Germany. That sounded nice and far enough. And, ideally, I would pull that off before sunrise.

After I showered the stink of juice and booze and other people’s sweat off my body, I pulled on my black boxer-briefs with eggplants printed all over them as some charm to attract, er, eggplants.

Back in my room, I slipped under the comforter and lifted a copy of Principles of Stellar Evolution and Nucleosynthesis that I’d found in the library a few days earlier. The room was warm, but the heat of embarrassment was warmer. It radiated out of me. It tugged on my attention in every way. There was no reading tonight.

I dropped the textbook and looked around. It was Friday. It was night. The campus was buzzing with people falling in love, having sex, vomiting, eating junk food at odd hours, and living their lives to the fullest. And here I was, lying in my bed.

It was a good bed. Winning a Physics Olympiad guaranteed a lot of perks. Scholarship, a spacious dorm room all to myself, access to all physics teachers at any time of the day because they wished to network and shape me. It also guaranteed a nice income from tutoring, especially when I realized that demand was such that I could choose my own students. So I chose the best of the best. Gone were the days of tutoring football jocks in exchange for protection like I’d had to do in high school. Little good did that do.

My room was a cozy place. In fact, it was the coziest place I’d ever lived in. Its walls were a dark cream, the closet and bookshelves matched the same type of wood and shade of brown, and the rug was a dark red over the deep brown hardwood floor. The desk was slightly off in tone, a lighter shade of brown than all else, with a black office chair screwing up my feng shui. Lamps were my main source of light, although there were lights on the ceiling, too. The bed was bigger than the one I’d had at home, where my parents had designed a room with a lot of workspace and little comfort. My trophies from local, state, and national level science fairs and physics competitions dotted a shelf above my bed. Rocket models and spaceships added soul to the same shelf. Posters of alien worlds in all their retro sci-fi glory featured Foundation’s Terminus and Dune’s Arrakis, as well as a few others that weren’t based on any existing intellectual property, but were simply an artist’s ideas of what a gas giant’s surface would look like.

Above my bed, a string of dim white Christmas lights stretched under the bookshelf, over another poster — this one was of Babylon 5 — and down to the outlet behind my nightstand.

I closed my eyes and dropped my glasses on the nightstand, then sank into the big, soft pillow and exhaled with a groan.

As I did, I realized several things at once. It was lucky beyond belief that Matt had turned Sawyer away for me. I had no time and no use in that endeavor. However, at the same time, I found myself imagining sitting next to him, our knees touching by accident, his long locks of hair falling over his face as he followed the equations I was explaining.