Adrian Lessons

by L. A. Rose

  “I heard he made Chelsea Kennedy come so hard she squirted across the room and onto a picture of her grandmother.”

  “I heard he models in Paris and had sex with Scarlett Johansson.”

  They all round on me at once.

  “So why won’t you go out with him?”

  “Girls, girls,” I laugh as four pairs of hungry eyes bore into me. I resist the urge to run screaming for the rest of my life. “We’re getting off topic. This is Psychology Club, not Why-Won’t-Cleo-Bang-the-Hot-Guy Club.”

  They confer for a moment, heads together, before turning toward me and nodding in unison.

  “We’re okay with the name change,” says Tanisha Melville, a sophomore with the world’s biggest hipster glasses.

  “I’ll order the new T-shirts,” chimes in Elise Brown, our secretary, who always has at least two pencils in her hair.

  “We’re not going to let this go without some sort of explanation,” adds June-Ann Weatherbee, who is Southern, weighs two hundred pounds, and has more sex than any of us combined.

  I wave my hands, privately plotting my escape route if they do decide to kill me after all. Jump over the couch, triple-backflip over June-Ann’s head, and out the window like Catwoman. “Fine…I’ll tell you what really happened. I went to his apartment…”

  They lean in closer.

  “And I opened his fridge…”

  Elise accidentally bonks heads with Tanisha.

  “And that thing was a mess. I’m talking milk that was two days expired, stuff in Tupperwares that should definitely have been thrown out by then, and the vegetables in the crisper were probably moldy.”

  Tanisha blows air out her mouth. “I thought you were going to say his fridge was full of human heads.”

  “Oh, it was. I was getting to that! Heads galore. Like Macy’s was having a clear-out sale on heads and he got there first on Sunday morning. All the heads.”

  “You totally made up his messy fridge.” Elise scowls.

  “I have writer’s block, okay? Nothing I come up with is any good,” I moan.

  June-Ann offers what I think is meant to be a gentle pat, but instead is a wallop that nearly separates my ribcage from my spine.

  “Honey, even if he has thirty heads in his fridge, you still need to ride that pony. Have you seen him? That boy is the stuff of legends.”

  “I am not going out with a boy who has sex with a ton of girls for the sole purpose of getting really good at sex and running some bogus advice column about it.”

  “You don’t need to marry him. Just screw him!” declares Elise. I stare at her. Elise is so conservative that she once forced June-Ann into one of her sweaters when she thought her top was too low cut.

  “And take detailed notes so we can we get off to them later,” says Tanisha primly.

  June-Ann groans. “I would lick that boy until he forgot how to speak English.”

  I can’t explain the real reason I’ll never be able to have a one-night stand with Adrian, as much as that sentence is making my uterus wave picket signs and lodge a formal complaint with my brain.

  It would be too embarrassing. The campus sex god in bed with the campus—

  “Back to the topic at hand,” I bark. “We’re analyzing Marie to figure out how to get her to forgive me, remember?”

  “Right. Marie.” Elise scribbles studiously in her notebook. “Textbook anxiety disorder, trust issues, so you’re going to have to prove to her that she can still depend on you.”

  “Nah, I don’t think she’s got anxiety. She’s obviously a sociopath,” says Tanisha happily. “She’s going to use this situation to her best advantage, so whatever she asks you to do, just do it.”

  Elise pokes her with a pen. “You think everyone’s a sociopath.”

  “Everyone is a sociopath.”

  “What is that,” roars June-Ann, and we all stop to instinctively cower. June-Ann is pointing at my bag, which has slipped open to reveal its contents.

  “A tampon?” I try.

  “Besides the tampon. Cleo Reynolds, don’t you dare lie to me. Adrian King gave you that flower.”

  I knew I should have thrown it away. It’s just that yellow roses are my favorite. Although there’s no way Adrian could have known that.

  I shrug, knowing June-Ann can smell lies like she can smell fear. “Yeah, he left it outside my door this morning with a note asking me out again—”

  “HE GAVE YOU A ROSE…!”

  Tanisha and Elise huddle together for safety. June-Marie grabs a copy of Introduction to Psychology and beats me with it, chasing me out of the room. “Get out of here. You’re an insult to women everywhere!”

  So much for the Psychology’s Club’s help.

  I trudge down the stairs, pausing to stick the stupid rose upright in a bookcase. It looks a little lonely, so I make it a note that says ‘Free to a good home.’ Then I add, ‘Warning: may contain traces of playboy.’

  Since this morning, Adrian has asked me out three times. Once with the rose. Once during lunch, when he showed up in the dining hall, deposited a strawberry cupcake in front of me—again, my favorite—and left without a word. Two rolled-up movie tickets were stuck in the buttercream frosting.

  Five girls congratulated me on my way out of the hall.

  The last time was an hour ago, in the library. I was innocently reading when he came up behind me, put his arms over my shoulders, and seductively whispered, “Dinner, this Friday?” into my ear.

  At least, he got to the “Dinner, this Fri—” before I screamed and accidentally punched him in the nose.

  His only response to my desperate apologies and attempts to mop the blood of his shirt was a “In Japan, a nosebleed is considered a sign of attraction.”

  I’m surprised I’m not in the middle of a full-blown facial period.

  Any other day, the fact that Statham’s resident sex guru has become inexplicably obsessed with me would take greater precedence in my life.

  But Marie still hasn’t spoken to me since yesterday.

  Nor does she speak to me the day after that.

  Or the day after that.

  It’s sort of fascinating, sharing an apartment with someone who won’t speak to you. You can follow them around the kitchen for an hour while they make dinner, enumerating every single thing you love about them in detail—from the cute ankle hair they always miss while shaving to the drool spot they leave on their pillow every morning that miraculously always conforms to the shape of Kentucky—but they still won’t acknowledge your presence or put a piece of garlic bread into your open and waiting mouth.

  Amazing.

  I changed her phone alarm music to To Forgive by the Smashing Pumpkins. I tried to make her pancakes. Admittedly I set the stove on fire, but at least the firemen were hot. I’ve offered her cookies, booze, apology letters, Adrian’s movie tickets, my body, and a pony. Eventually I got fed up and sat on the edge of her bed, chanting “Marie Marie Marie Marie” for twenty minutes while she calmly read her book.

  The girl has a will of steel.

  I understand why she’s mad. I did the one thing I swore up and down and sideways that I’d never do—admit that I write her sex scenes.

  Our freshman year at Statham, we were assigned roommates. She was a shy, romantic bookworm who spent the first week of school hiding down our room, and I was a weirdo who spent the first week with my head in a toilet.

  Because I had the flu! Not because I was drinking my little freshman heart out. You’re so judgmental.

  Okay, I was also drinking my heart out, but that’s beside the point.

  Anyway, everything changed between us the night I came home and found her on my laptop. And not just on Facebook.

  She had found the motherload.

  My erotic fiction folder.

  After I tried and failed to convince her that it all belonged to my sister-friend-mother-great-great-aunt-twice-removed, and that I would NEVER write about Daenerys Targeryen sucking Robb Stark’s c
ock until they both passed out (that was my Game of Thrones period) she turned to me, and that was when I got my first taste of Business Marie.

  Business Marie shoved my face in her computer, scrolled through a seventy-thousand-word romance novel, and showed me the blank pages where the two characters needed to be banging, blowing, and licking or something of the like.

  “I can’t write it,” she’d said. “But you can.”

  She promised to give me a third of her advance if the book ever sold. I did it mostly out of pity, and because writing sex comes to me as easily as water—or used to.

  Imagine my surprise when, five months later, she landed a sixty-thousand-dollar deal with Harper fucking Collins.

  That’s right. Sixty thousand.

  Which isn’t a normal advance for a first time author, just so you don’t decide to quit your day job. Somehow her book got caught up in a vicious bidding war with Penguin, and suddenly…dollar signs.

  She made me swear I’d never tell anyone that I wrote her sex scenes. She said she’d lose all credibility as an author, especially considering the first book did well enough to warrant a sequel.

  And so I never told.

  Until Adrian.

  Curse that gorgeous green-eyed bastard.

  In my heart, I know it’s not actually his fault. But something about the way he looks at me makes me want to spill all my secrets.

  Even the secret I swore would stay locked up inside me until the day I died.

  “Cleo!”

  I look up. I’ve been meandering across campus, lost in thought. Tanisha is waving at me. She and a few other girls are stretched out on a hill, enjoying the last of the September sunshine, textbooks lying neglected in the grass.

  “Has she broken down yet?” asks June-Ann, lying on her back under a tree and peeking out from between her fingers.

  “No,” I sigh. “Although this morning I covered her bedroom in little paper hearts that say ‘Cleo + Marie 4ever’ and I think I’m wearing her down—”

  “Not Marie!” June-Ann says in horror. “You. Regarding the Sex King.”

  “Adrian?”

  “How many Sex Kings are there at Statham?”

  I raise an eyebrow.

  “I’m a sex empress,” June-Ann clarifies.

  “Right. Well, first of all, you shouldn’t say ‘she’ if you mean ‘you’, that’s very misleading. Second of all, no, I have not broken down yet, and the Sex King is the least of my concerns right now. My best friend hates me!”

  “The Sex King is the least of no one’s concerns,” says Elise in a hushed voice, and I wonder if a cult has been initiated in my absence.

  “Cleo. Honey. Darling. Sweetpea.” June-Ann sits up, shakes a few bits of grass off her back, and takes me by both shoulders. “You need to think about the rest of womankind here.”

  “It’s like how they say beautiful words of art belong in a museum for all of humanity. Like the Mona Lisa. Adrian’s cock belongs to us all,” says Elise in her sweet Catholic schoolgirl voice.

  I blink. “You’re saying his cock is like the Mona Lisa?”

  “No, because everyone’s always surprised at how small the Mona Lisa is.” June-Ann licks her lips. “I bet Adrian’s sweet piece of meat is huge.”

  The girl’s all sigh as the mental image of Lower Adrian floats to them on a golden cloud, winged cupids trumpeting its arrival. I bat my hands around my head to drive away any unwanted imagery. “One—ew. Two—what are you guys even talking about? I haven’t cast a spell on him or anything.”

  “Oh, but you have,” says Tanisha tragically. “You haven’t heard? He’s sworn off other girls.”

  They all nod solemnly.

  I laugh. “No way. The Sex King would swear off sex like I’d swear off Netflix. Isn’t sex like, his whole personality?”

  Elise pouts. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  Tanisha shoves the latest copy of the Statham Blotter at me. “Read it and weep. We all did.”

  It’s the corner between sports and Westby Eats, the one usually saved for the Sex King’s column. But instead of a question-and-answer, there’s a little letter.

  To my readers,

  Thank you guys for everything. Really. But I’m going to be shutting down my column for now. Truth is, I’ve met a girl who I want to save all my time for, and so I don’t have any to spare on this column. So I’ll leave off with a question.

  C—dinner on Friday?

  “He’s basically confessing his love to you,” says Elise in awe.

  June-Ann takes my shoulders again. “All our hopes ride with you now. With great power comes great responsibility.”

  “Two words—dick pics,” adds Tanisha. “Actually, no. Seven words. How did you pull this off?”

  “I don’t know!” I explode. Everyone stares at me. Soon they’ll be staring a lot harder, because I’m about to start tearing my hair out and doing a monkey dance. “I have no idea what I did. I’ve known the guy for literally five minutes. He saw my boobs, I volunteered to let him taste me in Psych Lab, I proceeded to taste him, and suddenly it’s his holy mission to get me to go on a date with him. He’s probably on crack. I’m probably on crack. We’re all on crack, because there’s no way this is real.”

  I’m panting now like a maniac, and Tanisha slowly raises one finger and does the universal crazy sign around her temple, but I’m right. There’s no way this is real.

  Except…it is real. Adrian King is into me, for absolutely no reason at all.

  A tiny smile comes to my lips, and I banish it fast. I vanquish that smile with swords and fire. Begone, beast.

  Because Adrian and I are complete opposites. It would never work.

  I’m about to announce this to the group at large when my phone rings. I dive into my bag for it, praying to the gods of friendship that it’s Marie, finally relenting.

  But it’s not—it’s my sister, Therese.

  “Baby sis!” she trills into the phone, and I wave a hasty goodbye to the Cult of Adrian, formerly known as the Psychology Club. “How are you?”

  “Oh, fine. My roommate hates my guts for spilling her deepest secret to the school Sex King, who is now asking me out in a manner verging on the obsessive. How’s your Thursday going?”

  “Amazingly,” she gushes, not hearing a word I said. “Your life will be hell for the next couple weeks.”

  Which is not, in fact, what she says. What she says is, “I’ve met someone.”

  Same thing.

  “Great,” I say in the cheery tone of someone having each tooth slowly pulled out and then fed to them.

  “He’s not like all the others, Cleo. He’s sweet and kind and he has a great sense of humor!”

  She’s doomed.

  “And he’s drop-dead gorgeous. You’ll love him!”

  I wince. “That’s great, Therese.”

  “You’ve always so supportive,” she says in a singsong-y voice. “I have to run now because my phone’s about to die, but I wanted to let you know about my new squeeze.”

  “Okay,” I say. For a second I consider asking her advice about the Cosmann Grant, but then I realize I might as well ask my big toe.

  “Tootles, love.”

  And she hangs up.

  I let a long sigh escape through my teeth. The sigh doesn’t want to be around when Therese’s latest romance blows up any more than I do. And it will blow up. You know when you stick a bag of popcorn in the microwave and you don’t know exactly when the first kernel will pop, but you will know it’ll be soon, and you expect it, but it startles you anyway? And then suddenly everything’s exploding at once?

  Therese’s romances are like that, but without the buttery reward at the end.

  And I’m the one who has to pick up all the pieces off the floor after the bowl turns over when someone gets a little too excited watching Grey’s Anatomy.

  This popcorn metaphor has gone on long enough.

  I pick up Marie’s favorite decaf chai latte at the
campus café and make the short trek to our apartment building just outside the school, looking both ways before I make a run for the elevator.

  I’ve been on Adrian high alert ever since Monday. In fact, I’ve perfected diving into the nearest bush whenever he walks by. The campus landscape architect had to pull me aside and tell me to stop damaging the shrubbery. My tuition dollars paid for it, after all.

  But it’s starting to look like they won’t be paying for next semester’s roses. Between Marie’s quiet simmering and Adrian’s inexplicable affection, I haven’t written a word since Friday afternoon, when the sexy-yet-troubled Jonathan turned into a giant lizard mid-makeout.

  Poor Jonathan. My rut doesn’t feel any less rut-ish and the next time I get my hands on him, he’ll probably turn into a large taco.

  Which Adrian will not be tasting.

  I steal a sip of chai in the elevator before getting off on the third floor and heading to my apartment door, steeling myself for another confrontation with my nonverbal roommate.

  “Oh dearest most excellent and not to mention stupendous best friend, I brought you—” I announce, stepping into the kitchen with a flourish, only to be brought up short. “Adrian?”

  “Actually, I brought Adrian.”

  Marie is standing beside her desk, smirking. Most definitely not a good sign. And Adrian King is sitting at our kitchen table. He is also smirking. Being smirked at by the Sex King and my most-recently-furious-now-probably-scheming roommate is not what I wanted from this evening.

  I hold out my cup. “I have a hot chai and I’m not afraid to use it.”

  “I have a hot boy and I’m not afraid to use it,” Marie counters. The first thing she’s said to me all week and I can’t believe it just came out of her mouth.

  “I don’t mind being used, if it’s by the right person.” Adrian’s smirk gets bigger. “Although I resent the use of ‘it’.”

  I point at him with my chai-free hand. “What is it doing here, Marie?”

  “I see,” Adrian muses. “You’ll only do what I don’t want. In that case, I definitely don’t want you to go on a date with me this Friday.”

  I groan. “Marie…”

  “Silence,” she says like a medieval queen. Marie would win the game of thrones, for sure. “Here’s the situation. You’ve told our lovely Mr. King here, whom I’ve spent the afternoon getting to know, my secret. Our secret. The one you swore up and down on with your hand on your favorite burrito that you would keep. Remember that secret?”