Misadventures of a College Girl (Misadventures #9)(51)

Wow, Tyler’s slaying his performance. He’s no thespian, granted, but for a football player, he’s damned good. “Then have my lips the sin that they have took,” I reply.

“Sin from thy lips?” Tyler says smoothly. “O trespass sweetly urged! Give me my sin again.” He kisses me again. But this time, he brazenly disregards my explicit instructions about the heat level of our kiss, and he devours me. Oh, my gosh! He’s kissing the hell out of me! He’s kissing me the same way he kisses me for real! Gah! I should pull away. People are beginning to snicker. And titter. And gasp. I can hear them. Indeed, the growing sound of our audience’s extreme titillation is becoming a veritable din.

But I don’t pull away. Nope. I throw my arms around Tyler’s neck and return his kiss with as much passion as I can muster, eliciting whoops and applause and catcalls from our audience. Screw it. If this turns out to be our last kiss, if Tyler is going to crush me after this performance by sticking to our original arrangement, then I want every person in this room—no, every person in the world—to know that, for five glorious weeks, Tyler Caldwell and Zooey Cartwright were passionately in love. That we shared a love story that was every bit as poetic and epic…and, yes, ultimately, as tragic…as the love story of our star-crossed doppelg?ngers, Romeo and Juliet.





Chapter Thirty-Two





Tyler twirls me around in front of MacGowan Hall, almost wiping out a random student walking by with my swinging legs. “We slayed it in there!” Tyler shouts. He puts me down, laughing. But when he sees my face, his smile vanishes. “What’s wrong?”

I take a deep breath. Swallow hard. “I’m just sad our projects are over, that’s all. All three of them.”

Tyler stares at me for a long beat. “You can’t be serious.”

I feel my lower lip trembling, but I can’t control it. I don’t reply.

“You seriously think I think we’re over, just because we’ve turned in our two midterm projects?”

“I have no idea what you think,” I reply honestly. “All I know is what you told me when you gave me the syllabus. And that you haven’t said anything to contradict it since then.”

Tyler exhales. “Come on, Zooey. We can’t call it quits now. We still haven’t checked off ‘Fun with Food’ or ‘Role-play.’”

He smiles, but I remain stone-faced. If Tyler’s not done with me yet simply because we haven’t checked off every naughty item on his freaking syllabus, then we’re most definitely not on the same page.

Tyler rakes his hand through his hair and exhales again. “Shit. Okay, I guess this conversation is long overdue.” He looks up at the sky for a moment and then trains his blazing blue eyes on my face. “I love you, Zooey. Okay? I love you. But the thing is, I’ve come to realize that doesn’t matter.”

I can’t believe my ears. He loves me? Oh, my God! How can he possibly say that doesn’t matter? It’s everything! “I love you, too,” I blurt, but it feels like a desperate plea coming out of my mouth, not something joyous. Why do I feel like he’s about to punch me in the teeth?

Tyler’s features soften. He takes my limp hands in his. “I know you love me, Zooey,” he says softly. “You’ve let me know how you feel about me a thousand ways for weeks. Thank you for that. But, sweetheart, we both know love isn’t going to be enough for us.”

I shake my head like he’s talking gibberish. “What are you talking about? I don’t understand what you’re saying to me.”

“I’m saying we’re Romeo and Juliet.”

“How is that a bad thing? Romeo and Juliet is the greatest love story ever told.”

“Babe, they both die in the end. They were star-crossed lovers. Doomed.”

“Okay, then, fine. We’re Jim and Pam! I don’t care what you call us. We love each other.”

Tyler smiles sympathetically. “No, baby. We’re not Jim and Pam. I wish we were. But we’re not. We’re doomed, sweetheart. It’s undeniable.”

I open and close my mouth, utterly flabbergasted. Tears flood my eyes. “Tyler.”

He shakes his head. “To be honest, knowing our doomed fate has, at times, made me want to pull away from you, just to save myself from the inevitable pain this is going to cause me. But I just can’t do it. For some reason, my heart doesn’t seem to care it’s going to get smashed at the end of this. It just wants you for as long as it can have you.”

I’m a deer in headlights. This is making absolutely no sense. “I don’t understand. Why are you saying all this? No one knows the future. Nothing is set in stone.”

“I know the future.”

“You don’t. No one does.”

“Come on, Zooey. Think about it. Six months from now, I’m gonna get drafted top ten and immediately head off to live in whatever city takes me—and under the league’s collective bargaining agreement for top picks, I’m going to be signed to a four-year deal. True, I don’t know which team will select me, but the chances it’ll be an LA team are almost nil. And what will you be doing for those same four years? Going to school here for at least three of them, except when you’re off for summers. But during summers, I’ll be away at training camp, getting my ass kicked. Explain to me when we’ll have a chance to see each other for the next three to four years?”