something which, considering you were talking about doors…”
“What am I, your great
uncle?”
“You don’t have to be old,” She
paused on the word, practically rolling it against her tongue like a sourball,
“to tell a knock-knock joke.”
“No,” I said, “you have to
be an asshole.”
She laughed, her whole face
brightened, her brown eyes shining. “Now that’s a good joke.”
“I’m here all night,” I said,
opening my hands wide. My body relaxed—the sound of her laughter was like a
salve.
“Until you’re not,” she
retorted.
We turned to the deafening noise
of a few of the guys on the floor skateboarding down the hallway and hooting.
“I’m pretty sure they are
breaking like three rules right now,” she said, indicating them with her chin.
I sighed, but didn’t stop
them. They were having fun. They weren’t hurting anybody, except maybe
themselves if they fell and broke something. “At least they aren’t naked.”
“Something you’ve seen
before?”
I nodded. “And hope to never
see again.”
“So naked is the stepping
over the line point?” she asked.
I couldn’t stop looking at
her lips. My knees almost gave out at the sound of her throaty voice around
that word. “If you’re a guy on my floor, absolutely.”
“What about a girl?” she asked.
Her skin was so dewy, so soft, and so female.
I hadn’t been this physically
close to someone so beautiful in years. I wanted to kiss her, make the plump
lips she bit at playfully waiting for my answer, mine.
“It’s not easy being an
authority figure,” I said; for a lot of reasons.
“I don’t know why the hell
you’d want to be; keeping people who are out on their own for the first time
following any kind of rules seems impossible.”
I had no choice. I had to be
an RA and keep my nose clean until I could finally leave this place and not be
the guy who stood and “watched” the night Jeanie Pratt was sexually assaulted.
Even though I hadn’t stood
and watched, I’d run away like a chicken and hadn’t done anything.
It didn’t matter how you considered
what I’d done, or hadn’t done. It was all bad.
“I’m more of a puppet regime
than anyone with real power,” I said.
“So you can call a floor
meeting, but you can’t make anyone come,” she said.
“I’ve made some people
come,” I replied, before I could stop the words.
What was this girl doing to
me?
We stood in uncomfortable
silence. Me watching those lips, the way her teeth made small indents in them,
her tongue wetting them. The way they seemed to be inviting me at the same time
they were pushing me away.
This was the place where I could
have asked her to dinner, could have said something to make her stay. But
keeping thoughts in my head was safe, acting on them was where things would get
complicated.
Especially once she found
out who I really was.
“I should probably get back
to wielding authority,” I said.
“We wouldn’t want anyone
getting naked on your watch,” she shrugged. “Or maybe you like to watch,” she
added as she walked out of the lounge.
My whole body exploded in goose
bumps. What kind of freshman talked that way? What kind of person talked that
way?
I liked it.
I wished her parents were
still alive so I could thank them for making someone like her.
Though, in some ways, Kate
was lucky not to have parents to deal with. I’d meant what I’d said about wishing
mine were dead sometimes. My father wanted the charges against me to go away, so
he paid off Jeanie’s family just like a bunch of other guys from the frat had.
He also paid off the college.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t
enough money in the world to bring me relief for what I didn’t have the balls
to stop my frat brothers from doing.
Was one hundred thousand
dollars enough to make what those guys had done to Jeanie okay? Or should the
ones who’d held her down, who’d put their hands over her mouth, be in jail?
Was living the last three
years as