A Kiss Like This (Kiss and Make Up #3)(2)

My stomach twists into a knot.

“Are you sure you don’t want to exit out the, oh, I don’t know, perfectly good door?” His head jerks toward the opposite side of the room, to his sturdy, solid door. With perfectly functioning hinges.

“Um, yeah, I think I’ll pass. They are still out there. Waiting. No freaking way am I getting caught up in that… that…” I wave my hand around airily, at a loss for words. “I can’t face them. It’s humiliating; I couldn’t bare it.”

I will not go out in that hallway. No matter how badly I have to use the bathroom to pee.

I’m too reserved. Most people, especially those who don’t know me well, might even call me shy—and I’m sometimes so easily embarrassed it borders on absurd.

My ears perk up, and I can still hear the chanting from my spot in the narrow window frame, the loud, boisterous voices filling the small space that is my cousin’s bedroom. Somewhere within the long corridor, another door opens and closes, setting off a chorus of cheering, laughing, and shouting.

“Those guys are such f*cking morons,” Tyler says as he rolls his eyes, checking the clock on his nightstand and sitting up straighter to fish for his glasses.

“Yeah, and those morons are your fraternity brothers,” I mutter, staring out the window, nervously plotting my best course of action. “You choose to live with them. On purpose.”

“I’ll just stick my head out the door and tell them not to shout at you.”

I shake my head vigorously. “And you think they’re going to listen to you? Please. Those guys have zero boundaries.” I glance down at the gutter, mentally calculating its distance from Tyler’s window, estimating it to be approximately three feet away. Close enough that I could make it, and, if I can safely grab on to the awning, I just might be able to drop down without breaking my neck. “Listen, don’t think for one second they won’t sing that song to me. In fact, they’d have a field day if they knew it was me in here with you.”

“Abby, stop being so damn dramatic.” Tyler sits up and shrugs into a ratty tee shirt randomly plucked from the ground. “It’s just a song. It hardly means anything.”

I stare at him, my mouth agape. “Just a song? Ugh, have you heard the lyrics? They’re foul. Why any girl with self-respect would purposely set foot out in that hall is beyond me. No, I like my chances better.”

I would rather change my name, appearance, and join the Witness Protection Program than walk out into that hallway.

“It beats going out the f*cking window.” He stands in his boxers and stretches. “Whatever, man, just hurry up. I’m starving and need to take a leak.”

I shoot him a few daggers. “Wow. Are you this charming with all the ladies?”

“No. Usually I tell them to grab their shit and get out of my room,” he says with a laugh.

Raucous laughter from the hallway fills the room, and someone begins banging on Tyler’s door. “Darlington, get your boney ass out here. Two skanks just came out of Ackermann’s suite.”

My lip curls and I brace myself for the lyrics. Loud singing fills the corridor outside my cousin’s room, and I shake my head, giving him the See? I told you so look.

The girl was fair who went upstairs with her fav-o-rite ?KOC.

She knocked around and came back down,

and now she takes the walk!

The walk of shame, she’s not to blame!

Who could resist the KOC?

The walk of shame, she found her fame,

and now she takes the walk!

Wow. Aren’t they charming?

After the brothers of Kappa Omega Chi are done shouting at what I assume are innocent, albeit slutty, collegians, Tyler looks at me and shrugs his shoulders. “What? We didn’t write it. It’s from the movie Sorority Boys.”

I hold out one of the hands I had been using to brace myself with to stop him from talking. “Please. There’s no need to explain, but that was all the motivation I needed. Tell Aunt Monica I say hello.”

And with that, I ease myself out his window.





Caleb

If you thought that at seven o’clock in the morning on a Saturday, I would have peace and quiet, sitting outside on the front porch of my house—on any other day you would be absolutely correct. On any other Saturday, in fact, except this one.

And this isn’t just any other Saturday.

Other than the chick trying to shimmy out a second-story window next door, then yeah, it’s been a relatively uneventful morning.

Just as I’m about to take the first sip of iced orange juice from the perspiring water bottle in my large hand, a slight movement catches my eye from an upper window of the crumbling piece-of-shit fraternity house next door. My ears perk up immediately, my head tilting with interest, when the first denim-clad leg emerges. All of my senses are instantly on high alert.

I watch—wide-eyed and mesmerized—as a single slim leg emerges from the window at the same time a sheer white curtain billows out into the open air and momentarily wraps itself around the face of the leg’s owner. I can hear her spitting at it as she pulls it out of her mouth, slapping it away. Meanwhile, her boot-covered toe begins feeling around blindly in the air to gain footing underneath the windowsill.

My trim torso inches forward on the swing, bottle of orange juiced poised just at the tip of my parched lips. The ice clanks together and a few beads of perspiration fall from the bottle onto my shirt when I jiggle it.