Page 36 of Heartbreak Kings
Take the bait? Even knowing that it may be bait, and I may end up disappointed, hurt, and angry again?
“Find us a good steak place, and I’m in.”
Chapter 14
Nathaniel
My mind wasfull of extraneous things as I took my walk across campus to Sabine’s dormitory. The taste of my breakfast. Marcus and Daniel’s low-key argument over who would ask Sabine out after Blake’s turn with her. The three species of birds I had observed in the bright-leaved trees on the way over. The song I had caught from a passing student’s cranked-up headphones.
I had an eidetic memory, and sometimes it was a nuisance. Distracting. Disorienting. It stuffed my mind full of facts and sensory information that became difficult to sort through at times. Yet it was also useful in both my schooling and certain aspects of my day-to-day life.
Mom had called me her “little professor” until I had outgrown the “little” part. Although I had intended from the start to go into the sciences and not academics, I could still understand why. I had practically grown up in tweed and had been prone to giving lectures. I supposed it was a mild case of intellectual narcissism, but I tried not to be obnoxious about it.
But given all the missteps we had made with Sabine, someone had to be the brains of this operation, and Blake’s pride and the demands of his position ruled him out. Besides, brains were exactly what Sabine needed right now. They had sent me to provide academic support, and that was exactly what I was going to do. There was no one among us who was better for the job.
I paused at the corner across from her dormitory and checked my phone for the list of her classes I had obtained, as well as the schedule of her tests. She had five midterm exams and a variety of projects. The projects, which were mostly in journalism, I could not help her with. But getting high test scores—and helping others to do so—was a personal specialty of mine.
“Introductory journalism. Panel on journalistic ethics. Survey of journalism and publishing law in thirty countries. English literature. Introduction to political science. Calculus. Astrophysics.” I lifted an eyebrow. Eighteen units. It was quite a heavy course load for a first-year freshman. Especially taxing given the environment they had forced her to study in. But she seemed to hold herself to a superior standard, so I wasn’t all that surprised.
There was still a small, milling crowd gathered at the main entrance to her dormitory building. I could see Carmody in their midst, trying to stir them up. His face was red. His eyes were wild, and despite the cold, his visible skin was coated with sweat. His appearance was like a mad prophet plucked from a street in the Holy Land, left unbathed and unshaven for a week, and squeezed into a trench coat.
“If we let them get away with this, if we let that female stay in our space, it will open the door to dozens of them. Another men’s space taken over by females who refuse to know their place in the world!”
“You mean on my dick?” a blond freshman crowed, and his buddies laughed.
“This is serious!” Carmody’s voice cracked with emotion as he went a shade darker.
I gave the scene a quick assessment and nodded once. I could understand Sabine’s concerns about this individual and why she wanted to get a protection order. The more boys who surrounded him, joked about the situation, or lost interest and walked away, the wilder he got. I still remembered how he had blindly risked expulsion in his rage because a female professor wouldn’t sleep with him. Everyone else remembered too.
In her shoes, I would probably want a protection order myself.
Yet part of me wondered if Sabine doing so wouldn’t goad him further. Carmody had an “I do what I want” streak far wider and deeper than I had ever seen in an adult human being. It was like he had stopped maturing in his midteens. I didn’t know if trauma, spoiling parents, or the internet had made him like this, but he was rapidly becoming a danger to himself and others.Especially to Sabine. And that, I cannot abide.
I turned and walked down the street, losing myself in the thin crowd before turning and circling back behind the building. I did not want to set Carmody off or give him any clue what I was doing. He had already spied on us once and gone into a fit over that awful dinner party. No point in clueing him in that I was visiting Sabine. People would definitely talk, and not just Carmody either.
The parking lot was dotted with patches of black ice. I skirted around them and around the little half-melted and refrozen snowdrifts that had dropped on us late last week. I had absolutely no idea why the weather resembled that of early January, but here we were, seeing our breaths every morning as we stumbled off to class. And this was just a foretaste of what we were in for.I hate winter.But winter would come, regardless, and there was no point in distracting myself with that either. I needed to focus on Sabine and how I could be of help to her.
Blake rarely asked me for anything outside of my usual duties to the fraternity. But we needed to regain Sabine’s trust and goodwill, and that would require work. Gifts of help. And I was more than a game, especially since I wanted the chance to speak with her alone.
The others talked about “sharing” her like some delicious sexual treat. I was nowhere near that immature. I wanted to know her mind. I wanted intellectual intimacy, the sharing of ideas. I wanted debate and negotiation. I wanted to impress her. There was something offensive about her thinking of me as a cold-blooded insect of a man. But perhaps I deserved that assessment. I’d given her nothing else to go on.
At least I wasn’t as bad off as Jude. I’d forgotten how insufferable he had been at that age. We had gone to high school together. He was two years behind me, a close acquaintance then if not a friend, and I had been the one who had sponsored his pledge to Alpha Omega. The others had demanded to know why, and I had explained his potential and how much I had seen him mature in the three years of knowing him.
His behavior the night of that horrible dinner had practically given me flashbacks. He had truly been intolerable in his midteens. But he had grown. We both had. I wanted to show Sabine that I was not as she expected.
As for Jude, well, he would have to prove who he really was to her himself. It wasn’t entirely fair, given that his bad-cop act had been Blake’s idea. But he had gone along with it, like all of us, and now we all had work to do to make up for it with Sabine. If Jude’s was the harder road, that was ultimately his problem.
I walked into the lobby and entered the elevator, pressing the button and closing my eyes as the doors closed.Focus. She will need me at my intellectual peak if I am to be of help to her.
The problem was, I knew that no matter how much I concentrated, I would face yet another distraction once I reached her room…her.
Laying my detachment aside and showing her the truth of me would leave me even more vulnerable to her charms, which were prodigious.
I leaned against the wall of the elevator as it slowly ground its way upward. When I closed my eyes, my eidetic memory turned into a curse—every part of her haunted me. Her voice, her face, her hair, her delicate scent when she had brushed past me on her way to the door. The way her hips swayed when she walked. Those bottomless dark eyes.
I couldn’t control my body’s response to her beauty or her fiery personality, and I struggled with my emotions. In her presence, it would be even more difficult. But I couldn’t let that stop me. Otherwise, I would lose any chance I had to connect with her.
Nobody was in the hallway as I approached her door. I stepped up and rapped on it gently, saying almost at once, “Sabine? It’s Nathaniel. I believe Blake told you I was coming.”
