Beautiful Broken Rules (Broken, Series #1)(102)

The first thing after that class, I went and requested a meeting with the Interfraternity Council President of our school. I explained to him our idea and how this would put out a good word about the fraternities and their generosity to help out other areas of the university. He loved the idea, but told me that some of the fraternities had been in trouble too often lately. He didn’t want people to think that they were selling sex. I thought that was a gross assumption, but I understood where he was coming from.

Professor Patterson suggested I ask Coach Chase if we could auction off his players now that they weren’t bogged down with Championship practices.Although, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that guys would pay more money for girls than girls would for guys. So I decided to ask Coach Chase if we could get all of his players to go to a Date Auction to raise money for the Journalism Trip.

Coach Chase liked the idea of the Auction, and as long as we said the football team sponsored it, he would make sure all of his players were present. I ended up finding twenty willing females to be auctioned off. It really wasn’t hard. When you post ‘Do You Want A Championship-Winning Football Player to Buy You for a Date?’ all over campus, you have to start turning away girls.

Originally, Patterson suggested we just use the gymnasium for the event, but I convinced a local hotel to donate their beautiful ballroom for the night. The event was blowing up and I heard people talking about it all over campus. I’m not sure at what point I became the coordinator for this whole event, but it was nice to be able to throw myself into something that required all of my attention. It had helped to keep my mind off of everything else, namely Jaxon.

Later that night, I pulled out my text to prepare for midterms next week. Typically, I would jump into a study group, but tonight I didn’t feel like being social. Professor Patterson always tried to make it easier for us college students when he could. With one of the journalism classes I had this semester, he let us use the same text we used in the prerequisite class, the one I took last semester with Jaxon. He and I just shared this text last time, but I assume by now that he had bought his own book for the class or that he’s sharing with someone else. Why did my thoughts always stream toward him, no matter the topic?

The only annoying thing about college textbooks is that, when you buy them used, they often come with writing and highlighting marks already in them. It’s very distracting when you’re trying to study. This text in particular had no rhyme or reason to all the marks inside of it. One word would be circled on a page and then you could go twenty pages to find one or two more words circled. I started to get distracted by the circled words. I started at the beginning and wrote down every word I came across. It took me two hours to find every word. I began thinking about how much time I had just wasted when I could have been studying, until I realized that all of the words together meant something.

I just met you and I’m amazed by you already.

Your beauty has me blind to all others.

My eyes will always find you in a crowd.

My favorite part of the day is when I get to hear your laugh.

One day you’ll let someone in and he’ll be a lucky bastard.

One day you are going to discover how beautiful and strong you are.

I hope that I’m standing right next to you holding your hand when you do.

My first thought was how impressed I was that he had found the word “bastard” in our textbook. My next thought was unimaginable heartbreak. I couldn’t believe what he had done in my book. I remember how he had borrowed it the night I came over to the guys’ place after work. I’d fallen asleep on him and he’d carried me to my bed. Then he’d taken my textbook, the very same one we both studied in countless times after, and he’d written the most amazing love note I’d ever read. Never in my life did I think I would get something like this.