A Brush with Love(2)
“To start”—Thu shot Harper a sidelong glance that told her to buckle up for a wild ride—“he kept calling me ‘thuh.’ I get it, my name isn’t phonetic—whatever—I’m used to it. But, when I tried to make it easy on him and told him to pronounce it ‘two’ like the number, I shit you not, he stared at me for a solid minute before laughing and saying he liked funny girls.”
Harper snorted.
“Then, he took me to a shitty Chinese restaurant because he thought I’d ‘enjoy ordering in my native tongue,’ and ‘it would make me feel more at home,’” Thu said, using dramatic air quotes for emphasis.
“Stop it.”
“I swear. I first tried to explain that Vietnam is not China, but that seemed too advanced a geographical concept. Then I told him it didn’t even matter because I’m second-gen from Jersey, but this also must be a hard idea to grasp.”
“Who wouldn’t be confused?”
Thu shot Harper a look before continuing. “I suffered through mind-numbing conversation about his intramural Frisbee team, and the time he grew out his back hair for a year because he lost a bet. I didn’t even throw up. Aren’t you proud of me?”
“Was it the Frisbee or the back hair that made you want to vomit?”
“Frisbee. And when he drove me home, he asked me if, as a dental student, I had an automatic oral fixation.”
Harper slapped a hand over her mouth as she tried to stifle a laugh. “Shut the fuck up. What did you say?”
“I said, ‘Sadly, no. But if I did, you and Freud could suck my dick,’ then went inside and sewed my vagina shut.”
Harper cackled so hard, tears pricked at her eyes. “I’m sorry, it’s not funny. I shouldn’t laugh.” She choked on the words and tried fanning her face to gain some composure as they descended the few flights of stairs to the basement lecture halls.
“No, you shouldn’t. Because it gets worse.”
“Thu, it’s impossible for that to get any worse.”
Thu shook her head in defeat. “To put a cherry on top of the world’s most microaggressive first date, he sent me a full-frontal an hour later and asked me if Chinese girls liked sausage.”
“What! Let me see.”
Thu scrolled through her phone and handed it to Harper.
“Huh. Awful lighting,” Harper said, squinting at the world’s most unimpressive dick pic with a mixture of horror and delight. “What did you say back?”
Thu let out a long sigh as she took back her phone. “I told him the truth, that it looked like a crunchy Cheeto with the powder licked off. Harper, have you ever had the overwhelming urge to rip out your reproductive tract and use the fallopian tubes to choke the stupidity out of men? Because that’s where I’m at.”
Thu’s disdain made Harper laugh even harder.
“I’m glad you think my misery is so funny,” Thu snapped, working to suppress a smile.
Harper was about to ask if this gem could be The One, when her foot slid through a puddle on the linoleum floor, and the world fell from beneath her.
Adrenaline prickled through every corner of Harper’s body as she fell down the final flight of stairs. She clawed for the railing, grasping at nothing but air. Her breath slammed into a knot in her throat as her butt and back rebounded against the last few steps.
The last thing she saw before squeezing her eyes shut and smacking onto the tile floor was a long pair of legs crumpling as she crashed into them.
Her head rocked back, hitting the ground with a muffled thud, as something landed on her chest, knocking any remaining air from her lungs.
She lay still for a moment, not trusting the world to stop spinning, as she did a quick mental scan for injuries. She realized she was mostly fine, besides a throbbing head and bruised ass. Her biggest concern was trying to breathe as a heaviness weighed down her sternum and her heart pounded against it.
Never one to miss an opportunity for minor hysterics, Thu shrieked through Harper’s fog as she rushed down the stairs, adding to Harper’s already pounding headache. “Ohmygod, ohmygod, Harper!!”
But, as Thu’s voice hovered directly above Harper, it morphed from a dramatic shriek to a mischievous drawl. “Wow. Oh my God, Harper.”
Harper squinted her eyes open to look up at her friend, who was staring with a shocked grin at Harper’s chest.
Harper looked cross-eyed down her body in confusion. Short waves of chocolate brown hair fanned across her chest. Her eyes traced over a golden profile, down the graceful slope of a strong nose, to a cheek pressed firmly against her breastbone. A tan powder dusted the face and clung to long, dark eyelashes.
Head still spinning, she reached out, dusting the powder off the lovely nose. With a startling flash, the eyes shot open, and the head moved slightly to look up at her. The intense and uncomfortable feeling of falling swamped her all over again as forest-green eyes rimmed with honey locked onto hers.
“Are you okay?”
It took Harper a minute to realize where the voice was coming from. It wasn’t the words or the movement of the finely formed mouth that made her aware of it—not even the rumbling of the question reverberating against her chest—but the tip of a tongue darting out, wetting a delicious pair of lips and removing the coating of powder, that made Harper return to her senses … and fully acknowledge that a random man’s face was pressed extremely close to her boobs.