Page 23 of Heart So Hollow

“What?” Katie scoffs.

I avert my eyes, “With Colson.” I glance up quickly and then pretend to check my phone.

“What?” Katie repeats, struggling to speak through her mouthful of banana, “You’re going to go out with him after what happened last week?”

Barrett raises her fingers into air quotes, “Going out…” she chortles from the hallway.

“So…” I sigh, trying to think of how to explain the situation without sounding like a desperate idiot with nothing better to do, “after I ignored him for most of the week, he gave me a first edition of Carrie signed by Stephen King.”

Katie and Emma go silent again, eyes darting back and forth between one another.

“He left it at our door,” Barrett croons from the bathroom.

“Holy shit,” Emma finally blurts out.

Katie swallows her mouthful of banana and straightens up, “You know,” she narrows her eyes with a coy smile, “I didn’t tell you this, but I knew about Colson before we went to that party.”

I clasp my hands over my stomach and squint at her, “I got that much, but what do you know about him?”

“Dominic knows him,” Katie replies, referring to her boyfriend, “he street races with him—or used to. Definitely ran from the cops, might’ve been involved in a high-speed chase…”

Emma pulls the curling iron away from her head, letting her hair spring back against her face. In her other hand, she furiously swipes her thumb across her phone screen.

She sets the curling iron down on the vanity and scurries around the back of the sofa, “Is this him?”

She leans over my shoulder to show me the screen. I recognize Colson immediately in the photo posted to a stranger’s Facebook page. He’s clearly at a Halloween party, dressed like an airline pilot in a white button-down shirt, black tie, and aviators with a pair of gold wings pinned to his collar. He’s sitting in the middle of a dingey maroon futon with a girl on each knee and three more sitting on either side of him. They’re all dressed as flight attendants, each in a short, skin-tight Navy-blue dress with a plunging neckline and silk scarf tied around their neck.

Colson looks like a douche. Much like he did at the last party I saw him at.

I nod in confirmation, “Yup, that’s him.”

Katie cranes her neck to examine the photo, “Lovely,” she says with a roll of her eyes, “oh, and I’m pretty sure Dominic said Colson spent last summer in Alaska out in the middle of nowhere—like, by himself—and he might’ve gotten attacked by a bear.”

“What?” I scrunch my face up, completely confused.

“Oh yeah,” she adds, “and he sleeps with all the Deltas.”

I blink, unsure of what to do with such a random smattering of information. Then again, I did ask what Katie knew about Colson. And the university rumor mill is alive and well, so accuracy cannot be guaranteed.

“So, let me process this,” Emma plants a perfectly manicured hand on her hip, “this guy, Colson, captain of the friendly skies, who also sleeps with all the Deltas—”

“Delta Airlines…” Katie interrupts with a snicker.

I cringe as Emma continues, “invited you to a party last Friday, blew you off, left a signed first edition of a book you like at your door, and then asked you to go to the library on a Friday night, to work on a paper?”

“Yeah,” I shrug, not knowing what else to say.

Emma taps the air with her index finger, “There’s something real sketch about this.”

I frown, feeling slightly offended, “Why?”

She squints at me skeptically, “Doesn’t it seem odd to you?”

I crossed my arms with indignance, “Yeah, it’s real sketch that some guy wants to spend time with me!”

Emma thrusts her arm out in desperation, “But it’s the library! And after what he did?”

Katie’s eyebrows shoot up and she smacks her knee, “Exactly! That’s the last place something sketch would happen!”

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