Page 3 of Kiss-Fist
Mellie leans out the window again, his strawberry blond hair glinting in the sun as he shoots me a boyish smile. He has a single half dimple in his left cheek, and his eyeteeth touch his bottom lip when he grins. It shouldn’t look good, but he wears it well.
‘True-biz, why do you look like someone smeared dog shit on your front doorstep?’
Rhett’s eyes twinkle in excitement. ‘Did someone do that? Was it here? A student?’
I wave him off. Rhett’s a little too quick to jump to conclusions about the students. He loves a good conspiracy theory. The college we work for is not as bad as a four-year university, where you’ll have frat boys who think pranks are the height of entertainment.
But there are a lot of older people trying to start over in life here or single parents trying to better their lives, but at the same time, we also have some fresh-from-high-schoolkids who are still learning how to adult. So I suppose his assumption isn’t without merit.
Especially since he interprets when I’m teaching some of these kids how to get past their high school class clown phases.
‘Nothing happened.’ Well. Something happened. A couple of somethings.
Rhett gives me his annoying eyebrow.
‘I think Rome and I broke up.’
Mellie leans out of the window. ‘Were you two dating?’
‘No, but I don’t know what to call it. We decided it was over.’ Well,Idecided it was over, but that’s semantics.
He frowns. ‘Why?’
I shrug. ‘It was getting old.’
Rhett’s lips part, and his face does that thing that tells me he’s scoffing. ‘Good. That guy’s a dick.’
I want to argue, but it’s true. Rome is kind of a dick. It was why the sex was so fun. ‘Anyway.’ My fingers brush each other through the sign. ‘I guess it’s over.’
Mellie looks concerned. ‘Did he do something? I will beat his ass.’
I wave him off. ‘No, and I can take care of him myself.’
‘With those arms?’ Mellie signs something that looks a lot like ‘limp noodle’ as he points.
I hold up two fingers and tap the first one to indicate that I’m making a list. ‘First: Fuck you. Second: Fuck you.’
He bursts into laughter. ‘Come with me to the gym, and you’ll never need me to fight your fights again.’
‘I don’t need you anyway. And this isn’t really about him!’ My shoulders sag. ‘I got a terrible email this morning.’
Rhett looks worried. ‘Is it about work? Let me see it.’
‘No, but it’s still bad.’ Pulling out my phone, I tilt it toward him to let them read it because I don’t have the energy to explain everything. I’m trying to save what little I have left for lectures this afternoon. The department meeting this morning was draining enough as it was.
Rhett holds the phone at an angle so he and Mellie can both read it, and then he looks at me with those sad puppy dog eyes that make me want to smack him. That was the same look he’d given me when I came back from my doctor’s appointment and was told that I had far less muscle mass than I was supposed to at my age.
“You’re half-dead, and your skin is flappy.”That’s not verbatim what the doctor had told me, but it sure felt like it was.
Dickface.
But maybe Mellie has a point about the whole gym thing.
When I told Rhett what the doctor implied, he acted like I was falling apart and has been up my ass about going with him ever since. It’s…an idea. A terrible one, if I’m honest, but it’s something I’m considering.
And I’m really only considering it because a Deaf friend of ours works at the gym Rhett and Mellie use, which means I won’t have to type on an iPad to communicate, which I hate.
It doesn’t help that Mellie’s been shoving gym coupons for a free month of personal training under my office door. I highly suspect they’re fake ones, and I’m almost a hundred percent sure he made them using clip art because who even uses paper coupons anymore?
