Scared of Beautiful (Scared #1)(16)

I tell her about my parents, how my father is half Caucasian and half African American, and my mother is Hispanic, so I’m a mixed breed of the highest proportion. I tell her how Jade and I met, and that I dated her best friend Shana for a while so that’s when we got close.

I feel guilty for not telling Maia more about Shana, but for some reason I can’t bring myself to. I don’t love Shana anymore, that I can guarantee, but I get the impression from Maia that until she trusts me, that’s the kind of thing that would send her running. And chasing her is damn hard work! So I briefly skim over that facts, telling her that I worked at my father’s mechanic shop for 4 years before coming to Brown, neglecting to mention the reason why I stayed in Atlanta for so long. And I feel like a f-ucking liar. We’re obviously both not telling each other the whole truth, so I guess we’re even. Some shit just goes too deep to talk about sometimes. I get that. Although I find myself wishing I knew what she wasn’t telling me.

Her phone rings a few times as we’re talking, but she glances at the screen and silences every call. When she goes to the bathroom and leaves it on the bed, I steal a glance at the missed calls, knowing that I shouldn’t and hoping that I don’t see the name of some random dude, or a number of them for that matter. Call me cynical but when your first love leaves you without an explanation, you get kind of paranoid about the shit around you. I’m relieved to see that all of the missed calls are from her mother.

I offer to drive Maia back to her dorm when we realize that it’s nearly one o’clock in the morning. On the way, she talks about her creepy Comparative Literature professor, who’s about seventy five and appears to be undressing the female students with his eyes whenever he asks a question. She shudders at the thought, and I laugh at her disgust. She playfully punches me in the arm.

I walk her up to the dorm and she leans in to innocently kiss me goodbye, only we find ourselves pressed against the wall next to her dorm door, with her hands under my shirt. f-uck me, this is going to be difficult, this friends first thing. I see myself spending many hours in a long, cold shower over the coming weeks.

Suddenly, the door swings open, and a sleepy-eyed Jade peers into the hallway. f-uck! But thank God for the intervention, because my resistance was weakening in this hallway. Her eyes widen as she takes us in and says, “Y’all are noisy as hell, and some of us are trying to sleep. Wanna bring it inside and I’ll leave?” She flashes a cheeky smile.

“I was just going,” I answer.

“Going or coming?” she asks coyly.

Maia’s cheeks flush all kinds of red, redder than I had them a few seconds ago.

“Breakfast tomorrow?” Jade asks the both of us.

“Sure,” I answer. “Don’t have classes till eleven.”

“I have one at eight so I’ll have to pass,” replies Maia.

I’m slightly gutted to hear this. “Pick you up at eight then,” I say to Jade, before turning to Maia. “Sweet dreams,” I say, flashing her my most suggestive grin before I turn and walk off.

I drive home anxiously awaiting that cold shower. Besides the fact that Maia makes me want to throw her over my bed every time she’s around, she also makes me want to stay up talking ‘til all hours. Most women are confusing as shit, but Maia is on a level of her own. She doesn’t trust men; that I got from her tonight. So, I’ll have to remedy that first. But she also skimmed over the details of her life as if she was recounting a bad movie. I understand personal shit, I have a lot of it that has done some damage to me, but hers I think is on a whole other level. I decide that whatever she wants to tell me, she will, eventually. As long as she doesn’t lie; after Shana, lies are a deal breaker for me.

I took a cold shower last night, but the memory of Maia and I pressed against that dorm wall forces me to take another one in the morning. Jade is waiting outside the dorm when I arrive, perched casually against the small wall along the perimeter, playing with her phone. She walks over, and I have to admit that Jade is smoking hot, even though I don’t look at her that way anymore. She’s also not as hot as Maia. But post a picture of her online with a tag that says lesbian, and men the whole world over would cry tears of joy and sorrow, all at once.

“Hey!” she greets as she falls into the passenger seat. She wears the same irritating ‘I know what you did’ grin that she wore last night. I sigh, knowing that she’s just giving me time to drive far enough from the dorm that I can’t turn around and drop her ass right back there before she launches a probe. “So, I see you wasted no time in corrupting my innocent roommate,” she says sarcastically.

And there it is. “I did not corrupt anyone, Jade, I returned her the way I found her. Just smiling a whole lot more,” I retort, grinning. This is what happens when Jade and I converse. Two smartasses together.

“That you did,” she laughs, “whatever you did had her walking out of the dorm room wearing the goofiest grin I have ever seen. And that’s no small feat. Maia has turned down every dude that has approached her since I’ve known her. And she very rarely smiles, either. So you, my friend, clearly have the magic stick.”

We arrive at the Bean and walk in. “It wasn’t even like that,” I say to Jade. But oh, how I wish it had been. “I didn’t bang her, if that’s what you’re asking.” And that took every inch of will power and restraint that I had.