Dating doesn’t rid it from my mind. I’ve been on a couple more dates in the past week and a half. Coffee meetings with guys from my classes. One guy, who had flirted with me at Busy Beans until I wrote my number on his order, had advanced to dinner and kissing on my porch at the end of the night. I’d gone inside alone, however, and instead of considering my date’s suggestion of a second dinner, my attention had fixed on another offer entirely.
Is that what you want? Someone to help you get over Keeland?
Yes. Because with each lackluster date, with each night I get off with a pink toy, with each sex-deprived molecule in my brain focused on what I’d heard that night at The Six-Pack—I still check Ashton’s social media on a daily basis.
Even I’m fed up with myself.
Tugging off my headphones, I close out of my recording files on my computer. I’m getting no work done in this mood. I avoid the link to my social profile—it’s been raining in Naples, so Ashton’s been posting dull snaps of Italian cuisine. I pull up The Lakewood Weekly’s site, checking the digital version of this week’s issue with Melissa’s online dating article. I’d read it, begrudgingly deciding it’s pretty decent. Decent enough for me to click on one of the sites she mentions and hover over the link that says ‘Sign up!’
“Oh, I wouldn’t, Walsh,” a voice says over my head. “Don’t use that site.”
I jump as Summer Prescott thunks a basket of roses on my desk.
“Why not?” I ask, before I can tell myself not to indulge her.
“I mean, it’s your choice. Do what you must. I don’t judge.” She hops on the desk. “But what’s your stance on unsolicited dick pics?”
I close out of the window. Raise an eyebrow at the sorority girl.
While I hadn’t tried hard to continue Spencer’s interview, I’d emailed Summer to reschedule hers. An embarrassing amount. She never responded, and I began to think I would need to tell Brook that I’d failed her on this assignment, too.
“What’s with the flowers?” I ask.
“ABB’s Valentine’s Day charity drive. Happy Valentine’s Day, by the way.” Summer pulls her phone from a clutch purse hanging off her shoulder. She waves a flippant hand at the basket. “Wanna buy one?”
As if I need the reminder of the date. It’s all around me. Couples holding hands, smooching in the middle of sidewalks so I have to walk around them in knee-deep snow. Heart-shaped balloons by the library’s entrance that make my throat stop up. Summer’s frilly red polka-dotted dress.
Because not only is it Thursday, I haven’t finished my last Leopard Leap interview, and my brain won’t focus on things that aren’t sex, but today is a day literally made for love. Meaning constant reminders of everything I don’t have shoved in my face.
“What’s the cause?”
“Breast cancer,” Summer says, then grabs the basket to shake it at two guys walking past my desk. “Roses. Come get ‘em. Support Alpha Beta Beta and breast cancer all in one.”
One of the guys shakes his head. The other flips her off. Summer’s eyes narrow as they walk away. She raises her voice to call after them, “What’s that, you don’t like boobs?”
Other students glance up. The guys hunch their shoulders, properly chastened, as they come back and pay for two roses. Summer hands each a yellow flier as she sweetly tells them, “ABB appreciates your donation.”
I grab one of the leftover fliers. With a cartoon bee, it asks ‘Won’t you BEE my Valentine and join ABB in breast cancer awareness?’, followed by the time, date, and location for an event this weekend.
She wiggles her fingers at the boys’ departure, then counts their money out loud before stashing it in a lockbox buried underneath the rest of the roses. When she sees me reading the flier, she clicks her tongue. “Terrible, isn’t it? I wanted to go with ‘Save the Boo-bees’.”
I shake my head, and ask the question that’s on my mind. “What do you want, Summer?”
She grips the edge of the desk, kicks her legs under it. “I saw you weekend before last. At that dingy bar.”
“Kellermann’s? You go there?” The casual bar—not nearly as dingy as other places on the same strip—isn’t a place I’d see Summer frequenting. Maybe the bar on the flier. Bella’s, a swanky posh place.
“Sorority scavenger hunt.” She shrugs a shoulder. “But I saw you there. You threw a beer on Spencer Armstrong.”
I’m not as shocked that she knows him. Who doesn’t know Spencer on this campus?
I roll my eyes, turning back to my computer to check the homework assignment due for my class next hour. It’s completed, but I’m in a rotten mood and want Summer to go away. If I have to ignore her until then, so be it.
Impossible, though, when she nudges me with her foot. “Why’d you do it, Walsh?”
To shut her up, I point at the basket, “I’ll take three roses.”
I fetch cash, and she takes it. I stick the roses in the front pocket of my bag, stems leaning limply over each other. When I turn to Summer, she slides the lockbox over. “Count that, Madame Treasurer.”
With a sigh, I tally it for her, and when I announce the total, she curses. “I should have fifty more than that.”
I ask how many roses she started with, and when I run it by the amount I paid for, I discover the problem. “You undersold them.”
She grabs a crisp note from her clutch, then sets it on top of the rest of the money. Because regular college students keep fifty dollar bills on hand.
“Why not do that in the first place?” I ask.
“Ever hear that saying, something about flies and honey? I think
