Touché, self. Way to maximize the suffering.
“Thanks,” I told him weakly, as I fumbled with the jacket, looking for the pocket. Found it. I slipped my hand inside and grabbed my key ring, the keys jingling as I pressed the little button to turn on the flashlight.
Still too bright, but not as bad as the overhead light.
“Think nothing of it.” In the darkness beyond my flashlight’s small beam, I saw his shoulders move up and down. “It’s Jill, right?”
How did he—oh, yeah. Shae must have told him my name. I nodded. “Yeah. Um…who are you?”
He chuckled, a sweet laugh that eased the ache in my heart enough to make me smile, too.
“Stuart.”
That sounded so familiar. Where did I know that name from? I didn’t have any friends named Stuart and Shae had never introduced me to one, but I was sure I’d run into him before.
“Nightstand is to your left.”
Oh, right. I was going to have some paracetamol—the English equivalent of aspirin or something—and water. I moved the flashlight so that the beam shone to my left. I hoped I wouldn’t drain the small battery before my eyes adjusted enough to deal with the room light.
But the glass of water and little tablets of pain reliever were right there, easy to spot. I scooped up the pills and popped them in my mouth, washing them down with a huge swallow of blessedly cool water, then groaned in relief.
“Better?” He sounded amused.
Great. Just what I wanted. This guy with an amazing voice, who smelled good enough to arouse me even through a broken heart and a hangover haze, probably thought I was a child who couldn’t deal with the adult world. I was twenty years old, for chrissakes!
Ugh. Stuart had been nothing but nice to me. I knew I was overreacting left and right, but I couldn’t stop letting my embarrassment take over my thoughts. Stupid, complicated emotions.
“Yeah. Much better.” I took a deep breath and squeezed my eyes shut. “I think I can handle the big light now.”
Again, I heard the click, followed by impossible brightness, but this time I managed to adjust, slowly opening my eyes to see—
Oh. Oh holy shit. Oh.
Stuart.
I repeat: Holy. Shit. This guy is a capital-HOT HOTTIE.
He had dark brown hair on the longish side, just the right amount of scruffy beard, clad in purple plaid flannel and dark wash jeans. His shirt cuffs were rolled up to his elbows and his forearms were so cut that even the short, dark hairs covering his golden skin couldn’t hide the ropes of muscle. And despite the torturous light and my quasi-hangover-but-still-kind-of-drunk state, I could make out the blue of his eyes as he faced me from where he stood next to the door.
Wow. Just…wow.
He wasn’t very tall—maybe a couple inches shy of six feet—but then again, I wasn’t very tall, either. Of course, I could get a better estimate of his height if we stood really close, maybe with our lips touching—
“You feeling okay then?” He eyed me with something like concern.
I was being pitied by the hot guy with the magical voice.
I couldn’t believe I’d actually been imagining us together, to the point where I’d assessed our respective heights to see if we’d fit. It had to be the alcohol. And the mind-numbing pain of seeing the guy I’d spent the past two years in love with, moving on in a major way.
Please get me out of here. Off this roller coaster and to somewhere safe and stable. Please just let me go home. Not just back to Montague, the residence where I’d been assigned, but all the way home. Over the Atlantic and through the woods, back to Penn State I go.
I nodded. “Yeah. I’m sorry about all this.” I gestured to myself, sitting in his bed.
He shrugged. “It’s all right. If you need the loo, it’s off the common area just outside the door.”
He pointed to his left, supposedly in the direction of the bathroom, but I didn’t really feel like getting up and traipsing out into the hall, then having to come back for more awkwardness.
Not that he was really making this awkward. That part was all me. He was being wonderful.
I shook my head, slowly, swallowing hard when the movement made me feel a little queasy. “Thanks. I think I’ll just get going, actually. I have to, uh, do a few things.”
Like book a plane ticket back home to the U.S. and leave behind this place and the heartache and the embarrassingly weird encounter with unexpectedly sexy Stuart. I swung my feet over the edge of the bed, but the second they hit the floor, I knew that had been a mistake. The medicine must have been too harsh for my already beleaguered stomach, and the acid rose too fast, too horribly, to stop.
I bent double and puked all over the duvet across my lap and onto the floor, tears joining the flow of liquid from my body.
Oh, God. This is so utterly, completely, devastatingly humiliating.
For a moment, all I could do was blink my eyes in shock…right before I bolted out the door.
Chapter 2
“Mom, please!”
I didn’t know how I’d managed to make it home last night—I had a vague memory of running away from the mess I’d left in sexy Stuart’s room—but when I woke up some time around one o’clock the next afternoon, I didn’t even bother with a shower before calling my parents. Securing my escape from this place was much higher priority.
Except that my mom and dad were flat-out refusing my request without even hearing me out.
And now I was trying not to wail incoherently into the mouthpiece of the phone. I’d bought a calling card when I’d first arrived, but my frequent calls home about my jerk of an advisor meant that it was nearly depleted. I had all of three minutes, forty-one seconds to convince my mother to change my plane ticket and let me come home early.
Begging was the only solution.
But Mom was having none of it.
“Even if we were willing to indulge you in this—which we’re absolutely not, anyway—it’s too late. The semester here started a month ago.”
“I could take a semester off. I’d get a job. I could—”
“Take a semester off?” Mom sounded furious.
Uh oh. That had clearly been the wrong approach.
“You do not get to take a semester off because your boyfriend broke up with you. You do not get to run away from your life and this experience, especially after all the time you spent convincing us that you weren’t doing this program just because Ben was doing it. You’re not coming home until Christmas, like we agreed, and that’s that.”
I couldn’t believe this was happening.
“Mom,” I whimpered.
“Honey, you’re twenty years old. It’s time for you to grow up.” Her voice had softened, but her words were still stern, and it made me want to fall down on the floor and hide from reality for the next four months.
Time for you to grow up.
There was no way I was going to get around this.
“Go enjoy the rest of your day. Forget about Ben. You don’t need him to make your experiences worthwhile.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” I mumbled, feeling like I’d just been dumped all over again. Except this time, it was my own mom who was turning her back on me.
“I love you, sweetheart.”
I sighed. “I love you, too, Mom.”
We hung up and I dropped my head into my hands for a minute, then trudged to the door to head out for a bathroom break. As I slipped my feet into a pair of flip-flops, the empty space on my shoe rack made me belatedly realize that I’d left my shoes in Stuart’s room when I’d bolted.
What was one more fuckup at this point? The list was already too long to manage.
I didn’t look at the corkboard that hung on the outside of my room door when I went out, and on my return I saw Shae had been by at some point and left a little scrap of paper pinned to it.
Stuart wants to know if you’re all right. So do I. Wake up, sleepyhead! –S
Stuart wanted to kn
ow? Even after I fell on him and fouled up his stuff and then raced back to my room like a crazy person?
No way was I going to live it down if I had to see him again. Thank God I could just tell Shae to please let Stuart know I was okay and pretend he didn’t know me and that last night never happened. Easy enough.
Except that I was going to have to get my shoes from him sometime.
Shit.
I wasn’t looking forward to that humiliating exchange.
Hey, Stuart. Sorry about not cleaning up the massive mess I made. Oh, and for completely invading your privacy. And also the weird way I sprinted off. Bet that made you feel all warm and fuzzy about helping me out. By the way, I just got dumped but I still think you’re super hot.
Classy American all the way.
But I could do that later. Right now, I needed to drink a hundred liters of water and then sleep some more. I was going to need my strength to face Ben in our classes this week. I prayed I wouldn’t see him around campus, holding hands with that girl he’d been making out with.
He used to hold my hand everywhere we went, back at Penn.
The truth was…I had come here because of Ben. I’d told my parents it was because I wanted the experience of living in another country, but in reality, I couldn’t bear to be apart from my boyfriend.
And yet here I was, an entire ocean from home, and still apart from him.
You don’t need him to make your experiences worthwhile.
I shook my head. So far, without Ben, all I’d managed to do was not eat, not sleep, embarrass myself in front of strangers, and cry. The only saving grace in this godforsaken city was Shae.
And maybe Stuart…except for the whole I-hope-I-never-run-into-him-again thing.
I leaned my head against the door for a second and closed my eyes, completely drained. I’d never been so lonely in my life. The thought of having to go it alone in a foreign country for four more months hurt like a deep wound.
It tried to turn it around and convince myself that it was only four months. Only four months of soul-destroying heartache. Less than that, even. Three and a half. Then I could leave and put this whole thing behind me. I could forget I’d ever been to England, in the first place…
Nope. Not working.
What I needed was the oblivion of sleep. Maybe I could try convincing myself again later.
I took a deep breath and took down the message that Shae had left, then wrote my own and pinned it up on the board:
Do Not Disturb.
Then I went back into my room and shut out the world.
* * * * *
I woke up around dusk to someone banging on my door. Only a low light came in through the double windows, and it took me a second to figure out where I was. But a second later, everything came rushing back and I wished I’d never remembered, in the first place. Even though my body felt a lot better after such a long sleep, I was also suddenly a hell of a lot sadder.
I stumbled to the door, trying not to hope that it was Ben, coming to apologize and beg me to take him back.
I pulled it open to find Stuart standing there.
“Oh, hi.” I couldn’t help the disappointed note in my voice, and he looked sheepish at my response.
Crap, I am such a jerk.
What was wrong with me? Stuart was hardly a disappointment. He’d been so good to me. Not to mention that, seeing him again when I was stone-cold sober made that funny feeling rise again—the one I’d felt last night when I’d realized how amazing he smelled.
Today, he was wearing a different plaid flannel shirt—this one in gray and blue—with that same pair of dark jeans. Disappointment expanded once again in my chest, but this time it was over the fact that his sleeves were rolled all the way down. I wasn’t able to see those fantastic forearms of his.
At least I’d confirmed that I thought he was a hottie even when I wasn’t drunk. And in the light I could see that he looked a little older than most of my classmates, like maybe he was a senior.
“You all right?”
His voice startled me, and I realized I must have been lost in my daydream about his sexiness. Damn. I nodded, wanting to give him my thanks and an apology that I wasn’t usually like this, but then he spoke again. “I’m sorry for intruding. I won’t stay long. I didn’t meant to, uh, interrupt.” He peered past me at the darkened room, no doubt looking at the rumpled bed that matched my rumpled appearance. At least at some point I’d seen fit to change out of my dirty clothes from last night and had managed to put on a pair of thin sweatpants and a T-shirt that didn’t stink.
His eyes flicked back to aforementioned T-shirt. And lingered.
What was he—?
Beneath the thin fabric, I felt my nipples start to pull tight.
Oh, yeah. I wasn’t wearing a bra. He could probably see the curves of my breasts, and definitely the tight points of my nipples, and judging from the slight color on his cheeks, he liked what he saw.
Holy crap. Hot, pulsing arousal shot through me at the realization. My breath hitched with the force of it just as his eyes snapped back up to my face and he cleared his throat, straightening his shoulders.
I might not have called him out, but apparently he’d done it to himself.
He was a good guy. A considerate guy. So I tried not to be disappointed for a third time, but failed, and now my breasts ached, the fabric of my T-shirt practically chafing against my suddenly too-sensitive flesh.
Damn.
“I brought your shoes by. And Shae’s been worried about you. I’ll tell her you’re fine.”
He held out my lace-up platforms—the ones I’d been wearing last night in one of the most ill-informed wardrobe choices for a night of drinking.
God, he was sweet. Why couldn’t he be Ben?
Because Ben would never have done something like this.
That’s true. Ben wasn’t exactly the type to go out of his way for anyone. Not even me, when I thought about it. I’d always been the one to follow his lead because he wasn’t willing to do it the other way around.
I frowned for a second. That hadn’t sounded the way I’d intended.
Or had it?
I pushed the thought away. I wasn’t ready yet to leave my self-pity party.
“Thanks.” I took the shoes from Stuart and gestured into my room. “Do you want to come in? I can turn on a light or something. I promise I’m not a vampire, despite the circumstantial evidence you’ve been presented with thus far.”
He let out a short bark of a laugh. “Are you pre-law, or something?”
I actually managed a grin at that. I got that question a lot, back home. Funny that no one had noticed until now how I sometimes slipped into legal-speak. I shook my head and stepped away from the door, moving to flip on the switch and let him in.
“Mechanical engineering. But my dad’s an attorney. Back home.”
Back home where I felt safe and loved and where I wouldn’t have to see Ben while I nursed my heartache. The melancholy washed over me anew, taking me down in less than a second, and my face fell, my lip trembling.
And of course Stuart noticed, judging by the way he frowned, his eyebrows drawing together. Going from depressed about my breakup to being wildly attracted to Stuart and back again—okay, fine, so the attraction part hadn’t actually subsided one bit despite the wash of sadness—was probably meant I was coming across like a total head case, but I still felt too raw to sort my emotions into something tidy and straightforward.
But somehow, Stuart read me in a way that no one else had ever been able to, and before I could even apologize for what a mess I was and how I’d puked all over his place last night, he stepped close and looked into my eyes, giving me a half-smile. “Do you want to come with me for a bit? I can show you something that I think might cheer you up.”
If that didn’t sound like a line, I don’t know what did.
Except that I knew it wasn’t a line. His eyes were sparkling with excitement, though I couldn’t figure
out if he was excited by the thing he wanted to show me or at the possibility of cheering me up.
Either way, it did something to my heart. Soothed it, I guess, just a little.
While lower, something much more base and sexual clamored for attention. But I pushed that aside. Yes, I was attracted to Stuart. And he…well, he was attracted to my breasts, anyway. But I wasn’t ready to think in any more depth about what that meant.
“What is it?” I asked, but I was already grabbing a sweatshirt and pulling it over my head, wanting instead to chase that soothing feeling he brought to my heart. My lethargy was gone at the prospect of something that promised even a little relief from the depressing aloneness of my recent life.
I looked like a total slob in my mismatched sweats outfit, but maybe no one would notice in the dark. Besides, covering my see-through shirt was less embarrassing than asking Stuart to leave the room so I could put on a bra.
“It’s a surprise.” His face was serious, but his eyes were smiling, and I knew he was teasing me. And then he shrugged. “Think of it as part of the required University of Leeds experience.”
You don’t need him to make your experiences worthwhile.
I paused, Mom’s words echoing through my mind.
Maybe I shouldn’t be jumping at the chance to see a “surprise” with a near-stranger, even though he was a nice near-stranger—a considerate one who’d brought back my shoes and hadn’t once mentioned my disgusting faux pas last night.
But I was going to do it, anyway.
I grabbed my keys and nodded at him. “All right, then. Surprise me.”
Chapter 3
Walking next to Stuart felt good. We weren’t even close enough to brush sleeves, but something about his presence was enough to buoy me up somehow.
“So where are you from?” Stuart angled his head toward me, but kept walking, heading across the street toward the main campus.
Where was he taking me?
It’s a surprise.
I grinned. “I grew up in Virginia. My parents are still there. But I go to school at Penn State. I’m doing the semester abroad thing.”
'90s Playlist (Romance Rewind Book 1) Page 9
