“It will have to be before I start my night at the Fitz.”
“Okay, we can study from three to five p.m. and grab dinner.”
“The cafeteria isn’t conducive to studying, and the extra expenditure of takeout defeats the purpose of our lunch deal.”
“I can get dinner. It’s not a big deal.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “This is sounding complicated.”
“Not at all. We have to eat. I have to study. What’s complicated about that?”
“Okay, but if anything starts to get messy…”
“Completely one hundred percent mess-free,” Benji assured me. He seemed confident enough.
“Okay. My last class is over at two thirty, so I’ll grab my stuff and meet you at Charlie’s.”
“See you then,” he said before walking away with a little more skip to his step.
I rolled my eyes and shook my head. Benji Reynolds was incorrigible.
By 2:42, I was standing at the entrance of Charlie’s. Pulling out my cell phone, I texted Benji to let him know. But before I could press Send, he opened the door.
He was wearing a pair of gray sweats, a plain white T-shirt, and green Nike sneakers. His white laces were pristine, as were the white soles. They could have been brand-new, but knowing Benji, he probably took a toothbrush to them every night.
Benji held open the door and pulled my backpack from my shoulder at the same time. His biceps bulged as he moved, and it bugged me that I noticed how his skin rippled over the muscles and veins running through his thick forearms. It was probably just because I’d never seen him in a short-sleeved shirt before. Definitely not because anything about Benji could catch my eye. Or at least, that was what I was telling myself.
“Sorry you had to wait out here. I wasn’t expecting you so soon,” he said.
“Why? I said I was coming right after class.”
I walked into the lobby of Charlie’s and glanced around at the drab furnishings, wood paneling, and posters only a dork could appreciate, such as No, Sterile Neutrinos Haven’t Been Castrated and Val Kilmer wearing bunny slippers and an alien antenna headband. It all created an atmosphere that matched the blank expressions of the handful of students sprawled out on the worn couches and chairs. Some were watching the small television while others were staring off into space.
Benji looked up at me from under his brow. “Truthfully, I didn’t think you’d come at all. I figured you’d text me with an excuse.”
I kind of liked that he anticipated that from me. “Well, I’m here. Where’s your room? I’m going to have to pop some Zoloft if I stay down here much longer.”
Benji slung my backpack over his shoulder and nodded toward a flight of stairs. I followed him up the steps and then to the right and down a long hallway that was just as underwhelming and unpretentious as the lobby.
Rounding the corner, Benji paused, turned the knob, and swept his arm across his body, gesturing for me to come in. Unlike the doors in the women’s dorms, the guys didn’t adorn the outside of theirs with dry erase boards or bedazzled letters.
Benji’s room was immaculate and high tech. The bed was on one side of the room under a small window with broken dingy white mini-blinds. His gunmetal gray comforter was perfectly made, complete with military corners. The walls were decorated with rolls of electrical and duct tape and wire mesh.
The desk on the opposite side of the room spanned an entire wall. One side appeared to be a workbench, complete with a small plastic container filled with even smaller plastic drawers full of tiny components that required the lit magnifier hovering from the ceiling. The workbench also contained an oscilloscope, power supplies, and coils of different types of wire. In the center of the desk, in front of a brown leather office chair, were four open laptops and one single perfectly sharpened pencil.
Dozens of books and folders were both alphabetized and organized by color in the bookcase that rested inside the long desk on the other side of the room. The books were backlit with blue LED lights glowing through frosted panels that lined the backs of the bookshelves.
On the other side was a pivotal LCD monitor that, because of the movies stacked beside it, appeared to double as a home theater PC.
“I control that via remote and can check email from my bed,” Benji said.
Even the walls were customized with white panels. I glanced at Benji, silently asking for an explanation.
“They’re backed with multicolor LED lights.”
“For what? Mood lighting? Housing allowed you to do this?”
“I get bored,” he said. “And I didn’t ask Housing. They would have said no. If they find out, I’m sure they’ll take it all down.”
“And kick you out of Charlie’s and probably every other campus residence.”
Benji pulled out one of two chairs parked at his desk. “Would you like to do it here, or do you prefer the bed?”
“Excuse me?” I choked out.
My surprise wasn’t because I was a virgin. Quite the opposite. After my parents died, I became a statistic, rebelling and giving myself to anyone—male or female—who didn’t mind if I lost myself in him or her for an hour or so. The thought of Benji proposing something like sex so casually was unsettling though. He was predictable, and I needed him to stay that way.
“Do you prefer to study at a desk or the bed?”
“Desk,” I said, pulling out my own chair. I sat and took a deep breath, letting the adrenaline soak back into my system.
I cracked open the first book, Frontiers of Astrobiology, and pulled my notes from my backpack. After Benji finished comparing our notes from the last two classes, we silently read the chapters we were assigned, only stopping when Benji had a question.
At four thirty, someone knocked on Benji’s door. He smiled and hopped up from his chair. It was then that I noticed a two-foot-tall plastic ear hanging from the back of the door. I watched him as he walked across the room and opened the door, greeting the skinny, pimple-faced kid holding two small paper sacks. Benji reached into his pocket and handed him some money, and then he kicked the door shut, tossing me one of the bags.
“What’s this?”
“Dinner, remember?” he said, bending down to the small refrigerator nestled under the desk. He pulled out a bottle of water and twisted open the cap before setting it on the desk in front of me.
“Oh,” I said, unrolling the top of the sack. I peeked in, and the pungent smell of Chinese food saturated my senses. My mouth began to water. I didn’t realize that I was hungry until that moment. “Thanks.”