Page 17 of Clichés & Curses

Even so, I had to be careful in pursuing whatever it was, because crushes or not, Colton was a cliché love interest, and I had to make sure to protect myself from succumbing to the curse.

I made sure I texted Nina before starting my nightly routine. As I took off my makeup for the night, something else occurredto me. It usually took around five minutes from the track team’s house to get to our old apartment, ten in case of some traffic. Considering how close that building was to our new one, my guess was it would’ve taken the same amount of time.

But the car ride with Colton seemed to be longer than usual, even though there wasn’t much traffic on the road.

That spark of hope—the rebel that she is—and my inner romantic self, unanimously decided that Colton had unintentionally driven slower to prolong our conversation.

I immediately pushed away those feelings.I must be more tired than I thought.

I tried reading a chapter ofIt Happened One Summer, the new romance book I had just started, but ultimately decided I couldn’t process any words, when a yawn escaped my mouth.

As my head hit the pillow, my mind started reliving the later events of the night on repeat when I finally drifted off to sleep, a smile present on my face.

Chapter Five

A feeling of excited anticipation had slowly been building up since the night of the party. I couldn’t fully understand what it was until Wednesday came around, and I was on my way to this week’s ASL class.

I made it to class earlier this time. For a moment, I thought about switching to a different seat than where I had sat previously. However, since the class was held in a classroom instead of a lecture hall, I felt that there was an unspoken rule: where you sat during the first week would be your unofficial assigned seat for the rest of the semester. Plus, the class did rely on students being in pairs, the wise decision would be to just sit where I had sat last week.

Not wanting to disrupt the peace and avoid any kind of confrontation that might erupt, I went to the back of the class and took my seat.

The class wouldn’t begin for another ten minutes, so I took out my book from my bag and tried to read whatever I could before Mr Albert got there.

I didn’t even manage to read a page when the seat next to me was pulled out and snapped me out of focus.

‘Hey,’ Colton greeted me, a smile on his face.

My heart started to flutter as he took the seat beside me. It seemed the excited anticipation was my heart waiting to get the chance to talk to Colton again.

Traitor.

‘Hey, partner,’ I greeted him back, closing my book. ‘How has your week been so far?’

‘Good. Practice is starting to get rough, but nothing out of the ordinary, with a match coming next weekend.’

Right, I remembered receiving an email about it a few days earlier. They only had three exhibition matches in total, two of them were away games, and the last one was to happen in our own college baseball stadium.

‘But don’t worry,’ he continued. ‘I’ll make time to practice ASL with you. When are you free?’

‘I should be asking you that, since you’re the one fully booked up,’ I pointed out, arching a brow at him.

Compared to his life packed with baseball practices, my schedule for the week had consisted of me either finishing my book and starting a new one, or finishing the show I had been watching, and starting a new one. I would find some time to doactualwork in between. ‘But I’m free after this, if you have time to spare.’

He thought about my offer for a while, perhaps going through his schedule for the week. ‘I think I can do that. I don’t have a class after this, and practice doesn’t start in a few hours.’

‘So that settles it then.’

Before we could continue our conversation, we were interrupted by Mr Albert opening the front door and entering the classroom.

‘Good day, everyone,’ he greeted, setting down his briefcase on the desk and taking out a piece of paper out of it. ‘I hope you already found your partners for the class. I was supposedto do this last week: so, before I forget again, please write down your name and your partner’s here, for my own record,’ he said, gesturing to the paper he was holding in his hand.

He passed the paper down to the first row of tables in the classroom. ‘All right, now let’s get started.’

Halfway through the class, the piece of paper finally made its way to us, after the person sitting next to our table passed it to me.

As I looked at the list of names, I couldn’t help but think of it as a contract of me willingly going through with this decision, risking myself to the possibility of being struck by the curse.

Was I actually going to do this?

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