Forever Innocent

Some mornings, she would look at me a certain way, and I’d know she was feeling all right, and I’d kiss her, and that connection would just charge through us like the sun blasting across the bed. It all got tied up together, loving on her and the beams of light on her hair, the swell of her belly and having all her skin to touch and look at. Mine. She’d been mine. We’d been crazy with it.

Enough.

I slung my pack over my shoulder and shoved sunglasses on my face. Keep it down. Even if she had dropped my class, she probably was walking to some other morning course. Seeing her would not improve my mood.

The jaunt to the engineering hall was mercifully short. I skipped the stairwell where we talked two days ago and hustled all the way to the other end of the building. Then I realized I was being stupid and went back down the hall, opened the damn door, and went up the damn stairs. I was acting like a sentimental ten-year-old girl, and I knew what they were like. My little sister had been ten when I took off.

My jaw tightened as I passed the spot where I caught Corabelle on the rail. She felt so different, lean and strong. The last months we’d been together she’d been pregnant. I’d forgotten her body.

Like hell I had.

The door yielded to my shove and swung open with another slam. At least there weren’t any moon-eyed girls this time. The classroom door was propped open, so I headed in and plunked down at the end of a center row.

“I don’t think that one’s yours,” a girl said, raising her eyebrows at my sunglasses.

“What do you mean?”

“We got assigned seats by the TAs.”

Shit. I stood up and looked around. Students dotted random chairs. Up at the podium, one of the TAs pointed a guy to a row. She must have the chart.

I strode up to her and yanked off my sunglasses. “Mays,” I barked.

She jumped a little. “What?”

“Mays. Where do I sit?”

Her face bloomed red as she consulted the page. “Fifth row, tenth seat.”

I turned away to head back, but then stopped. Corabelle was in the doorway, watching me with anger and disgust. My fist clenched, then relaxed, then clenched again. She’d seen me acting like an asshole. Whatever. I’m sure it made ditching me easier.

She took tentative steps along the back aisle, and I could see in her face how much she didn’t want to be here. I guessed she wasn’t able to drop the class. Didn’t surprise me really. Of all the years I’d been enrolled at UCSD, this one had been the worst in terms of getting the classes I requested.

I sank into my seat, unable to take my eyes off her. So much for lying low. She seemed a little lost, but some girl with pink hair pointed her toward the podium. Corabelle took the long way around to the other side of the room rather than pass me again. She asked the blond TA about her seat.

The pink chick watched me with distrust the whole time. I figured she had to be a friend of hers. She held that stare so long that I finally waved.

Corabelle looked at my row, and I realized we were going to be close to each other. My last name and Corabelle’s were only six letters apart, and in our hometown, we often were seated close together in school. With barely a hundred people in the class, I wasn’t surprised when she ended up just a few seats down.

She didn’t look at me, and I knew I had to stop staring. I shoved my sunglasses back on my face, not caring if it made me look emo or that the room was really too dark to see.

The professor came in and powered on the projectors. Students began piling through the door, wandering around, some forgetting exactly where they sat and having to shift around. The girl with the chart straightened everyone out. It looked to be the way she was taking roll, also typical. My enthusiasm for the class was all but gone.

Robert, the TA for my group, went up to the girl TA and they compared lists to the chart. Robert crossed a name off his list and the girl wrote it on hers. That gave me an idea. If I told Robert I had to work on Thursdays, maybe he’d put me in another group. That way, Corabelle and I would only have to suffer being near each other during lectures. And who knows, maybe I could skip half of them and still pull a decent grade. It would be a lot easier going to the star parties knowing I wouldn’t have to be up there with her.

I’d catch up with the TA after class and make that happen.

Chapter 7: Corabelle

I tied my Cool Beans apron around my waist and yanked my hair into a serviceable ponytail. With a year’s worth of seniority, which at a coffee shop was plenty, I’d been able to take off the first two days of class, but now work beckoned.

Jenny dumped the tip jar onto one of the tables, sorting through the change to trade for paper. “I forgot how cheap the students were.”

I nodded, snagging the empty tip jar on my way to the counter. “We’re bottom-feeders.”

The shop was mostly empty, just a couple students with noise-canceling headphones working on laptops in the corners. One of them was a big-time regular, a clearly impoverished student who always bought one tea bag then asked for so many mugs of hot water that he had to be drinking nothing but wet sugar in the end. A couple of my coworkers teased me about him, saying he only came for me, but I didn’t see it. He always ordered, then asked for more water, and that was it. Not like it mattered. Dating was out, and with Gavin around, I’d be way too riled up to pay attention to anyone else.

Jenny came up behind me to the register, dumping in a pile of pennies. “First star party is tonight! You ready?”

“I’ll have to bust my butt to get there.” Now that my labs were on Wednesday, I had to take morning classes, put in my afternoon shift, and race back to campus. “Thank goodness it’s only every other week.”