Page 5 of Guy's Girl
“I need to shower and change.” Adrian turns away, waving over his shoulder as he heads into his room. “Nice to see you, Ginny.”
His door closes. Ginny stares at its chipped white wood.
Huh.
Adrian pulls off his jacket and throws it onto his bed. His walls are bare, his desk undecorated. He spends almost no time here. He doesn’t have the energy to care.
The zombie returns.
There aren’t many people that Adrian actively dislikes. If his emotions were a graph, they would hit only subtle peaks and valleys—never exponential dips or highs. He cannot feel love, but he cannot feel hate, either; toward most, he feels entirely neutral.
But Adrian doesn’t like Alex Finch. He cannot even explain why, really. It’s a feeling he gets. One that stuck to the pit of his stomach the first moment he shook Finch’s hand, at once slippery and sticky, a leech that slides right through your fingers every time you try to pull it away.
It’s not that Finch is rude or unpleasant. On the contrary—whenever Adrian speaks, Finch goes out of his way to lean forward, squint his eyes, prop his chin onto his hand. Anything to make it clear that he’s listening,reallylistening.
But it’s something behind his eyes. Something Adrian cannot read and does not like.
Now he shakes away the feeling and pulls off the rest of his clothes. As he wraps a towel around his waist, he thinks of Ginny’s smile. Her cheeks flushed from tequila. She’s cute. Far cuter than he remembered.
The game begins. The boys dig into their fried entrées while Ginny picks at a hummus and tabbouleh plate.
“I’m all in,” Tristan says into a mouthful of fries, light brown hair bouncing as he chews. He pushes all his chips into the center.
“Dude, what?” Finch asks. “It’s the first hand.”
Tristan shrugs.
Finch throws his cards onto the table. “I fold.”
“Always the conservative.” Tristan licks his fingers and rakes in a small stack of chips.
“Says the man whose father is the literal embodiment of the Republican party,” Finch grumbles.
In the next round, Clay flips over the river—eight of clubs, six of clubs, nine of clubs. “Who’s got that straight flush?” he asks before tossing a dollar’s worth of chips into the center.
Tristan whistles. “Big dick energy over here.”
Finch shakes his blond hair. “This asshole doesn’t have shit.”
Clay grins and presses his fingertips together.
“I call,” says Ginny, parsing out a dollar from her chips.
Tristan smiles even wider. “That’s our girl. As my father says,No money was ever made without spending money first.”
“Shut up, Tristan,” say Ginny and Clay together.
They play for a half hour. Clay mixes more drinks. Tristan loses all his chips on a bad call and immediately buys back in. Finch slowly leaks money, dripping chips onto the table like a bad faucet. Eventually, he gives up entirely, picking up his guitar to pluck a rendition of “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room.” Ginny does her best to ignore what it does to her stomach.
When Ginny thinks of freshman year, she thinks of Finch’s voice. The first time she heard him sing—across the beer pong table, a crowd of Four Lokos between them—her stomach bent and flexed. His voice was lush and smooth, like taffy between his teeth. She watched his lips form the words to a song she could only half hear. She wanted to cup her hands around those lips. To capture the melody between them and bring it back to her dorm to listen to whenever she wanted.
When she thinks of freshman year, she thinks of his eyes, how they followed her wherever she went. She thinks of standing in Tasty Burger in jean shorts and bare feet, splitting a bagful of French fries, Harvard Square spinning around them. She thinks of him inside her. Of his whisper—I like you so much.
Here’s the thing about being a straight woman in a friend group of all straight men: there will inevitably be a complication. Either you’ll fall for one of them, or one of them will fall for you. Sometimes it’s mutual. In most cases, it isn’t. And in the worst situation of all, one of them will chase you. He’ll chase you hard, despite your repeated insistence that it’s a terrible idea. He’ll chase until you give in. Until you fall for him.
Then he’ll break your heart as hard as he possibly can.
Ginny checks her cards for the sixth time, studiously keeping her eyes from drifting over to Finch’s armchair.
