by Serena Vale
“Speaking of which,” she interrupted, looking at her watch, “where’s Nichole? I thought you two had a party to go to tonight?”
He took another drink from his cup. “No.”
“No?”
“No. It’s kind of awkward to go to a party with someone when you’ve just broken up with them.” He looked across the table at her. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever been in that situation, though, have you?”
She froze, looking curiously at him. “You broke up?”
“This morning… right before class.” He said it so casually it was like he was telling her that he stepped on a cockroach on the sidewalk.
She was stunned. Again, he had managed to surprise her with his words. Rick Tigh had always seemed to her like a stingy kid who refused to share his toys. And for him to have a plaything like Nicole and suddenly let her go…? The ideas didn’t even sit together inside of her mind.
Unless, Nichole was the one who broke up with him? That seemed more likely. She remembered what he’d been saying the previous night about how Nichole was filling his life with the kind of excitement that he didn’t like. Maybe her redheaded roommate had finally reached her limit?
If that was so, then Rick seemed to wear his rejection as easily as he wore their teacher’s beratement of his intelligence. Maybe there wasn’t a beating heart underneath all of that muscle after all.
“I’m sorry she dumped you,” she said simply.
“No, I dumped her,” he said. Again, his words were so casual it was like he was telling her the color of the shirt he was wearing. And yet again, she was surprised to hear him say so. But before she could say anything he pressed on. “I was tired of her shit, and she’s getting bat-shit crazy.” He paused, “Besides, my dad doesn’t want me to get – shall we say – too attached to any one girl.”
Jenny only stared at him, her mouth slightly agape. “Why?”
He shrugged. “If they get too attached to me, I’m supposed to unload them. My dad had three ex-wives before I was born. He only stuck to my mom until after I was born. He tells me that having women won’t be a problem when I get drafted by the NFL.”
He rolled his eyes at that and Jenny couldn’t help but detect a modicum of disdain that he had for his words. It was as if following in his father’s footsteps held no appeal to him at all. But she didn’t have the heart to interrupt, and she kept listening.
“My dad tells me that one day when my knees are too shot to keep playing, or I’ve had too many concussions to keep playing safely, then I can worry about having a woman in my life but not before.”
She was at a loss for something – anything – to say. She simply sat and watched him, all thoughts of studying forgotten. He only cut his meat, drank his water, or spooned up his mashed potatoes as they sat there. She could only sit and wonder why he was so calm about his life being planned as it apparently had been.
It was like he was talking about a playbook that he had memorized and was quoting it word for word. Every move he would make… every action he could take… everything that he could ever say; all planned out for him like “X’s” and “O’s” and connected by arrows on curved lines.
It was incredible.
But still, that expression he’d worn just a short moment ago… that look of dislike for having his life planned out by his father. That his life would have to be a shadowy reflection of what his father had achieved and how it seemed to hold no appeal to him… that was fascinating.
That was interesting.
And that he could possibly rebel against such strict tutelage was… interesting?
She paused at that. Yes, it was… he was interesting.
The thought made her worry a little inside.
Chapter 6
As the semester went on she began to notice a distinct change in Rick’s habits. She was unable to avoid thinking that these changes were an improvement on his part. He was less of an ass as time went on and she even noticed that his work took a definite upswing in class. Most of his essays had gotten wordier, his responses to class discussions made him seem less like a dumbass, and she had even taken to writing down a few notes when he spoke as he had some unique perspectives and insights. To her astonishment, he had even offered to come with her to study at the library every time that she went, a thing that he had never done before.
She had been surprised by that, and it had her feel a little warmer towards him. Jenny was not accustomed to having a partner with her when she studied. She had always been alone when pursuing academia. That was the way it had always been for her, and mostly by choice as she had never known anyone who had the same pursuits and desires as she’d had. But now, in college, when the stakes were considerably higher, it had felt strange having a study partner and a committed one.
It had felt good.
Rick’s performance in class even began to improve. The professor continued his usual bit of picking on Rick in class for one question or another, and soon enough their elder teacher had been surprised to find that Rick could offer some questions that even their professor could not answer. Much to her discomfort the old man usually attributed Rick’s improvements to the tutelage provided by his partner, her.
She had blushed a little at that. Their professor had complimented her, many times, on the improvement that Rick was showing. Though she knew that she had had little to do with Rick’s rising marks and that in truth, his insights had been entirely his own.
Odd as it seemed, she found that she was growing accustomed to having Rick around. They had begun to hang out even when not studying. He’d convinced her to come and watch a few of his games, which she had really only found mildly interesting at first but she had learned what it meant to get swept up in the mentality of the crowd when cheering for their own team and she’d enjoyed it. Once or twice they had attended a few lectures from guest speakers – each time it was Rick’s idea – and that had impressed her. They’d been to see a few movies together, shared a pizza once or twice, and sometimes they walked the campus simply talking.
She had learned a lot about him.
Mostly she learned about the kind of impact that his father had on him, and she was beginning to understand his slightly rebellious nature. He didn’t want to disappoint his father in his athletic pursuits, but he was also drawn to the idea of living his own life and the way he intended it.
“I always got good marks in school,” he had once told her. “I did the usual things that most brainy kids might do… Chess club… Mensa… I made the Honor Roll every year… four letters for academics in high school… you name it.” He’d put his hands in his pockets with a clear look of frustration. “None of it impressed my dad, though. Not until I tried out for my first ball team, he didn’t seem to care.”
“And that was important to you?” she’d asked.
He nodded. “He always seemed to… I dunno… ignore me, I guess. It was like he didn’t even notice that I was there, despite the fact that he was the one taking care of me. And then one day I decided to try out for a team, managed to make it, and when I came home and told him… he turned into a different person.”
Jenny was able to see a picture forming in her head. Rick’s father wouldn’t have cared for his son’s pursuits until they matched – or at least imitated – his own. Sports, it seemed, was the one thing that they had in common. And once Rick had achieved that, his father had finally taken an interest in him, and Rick would have noticed that. He would have kept up with sports following that just to keep his father’s attention, but she didn’t see the need to share that insight with him.
“So you kept playing?”
“Of course, I did. And I made every team that I tried out for… grade school all the way until now. I mean, how could I not make it? I’m Neil Tigh’s son. That means that I have greatness bred inside of me like a blue ribbon thoroughbred. And it’s only natural that I’m going to be drafted by the NFL as soon as I finish school… my dad’s been talking about me to every last pe
rson that he can in the NFL.” He scoffed, “Shit, I might end up playing for my dad’s own team after he retires. He’s got this fucked up idea about everyone in his bloodline playing for the same team and making it a family legacy.”
Jenny still didn’t understand much about the world of sports, but even that sounded more than a little unusual. Football players weren’t racing horses; they couldn’t be bred to carry on a family legacy. And just like horses, they could be bought, sold, and traded to people who had enough money. Even she knew that there was no guarantee that any one player would stick with the same team for the whole of their career.
“I’m sorry, Rick,” she’d said, “I can’t imagine being under that kind of pressure.” She felt a little guilty saying so. The truth was that her parents had always expected nothing less than a 4.0 GPA from her, and she had worked hard to achieve just that. But it had come at the cost of having good friends or anything that resembled a social life.
He sighed. “Yeah, I know… but what can I do? I’m here on a football scholarship. If my grades slip, I can’t play ball. If I don’t play ball, I lose my scholarship. And dad was proud of me because,” his voice changed, he imitated a man that sounded older and husky-voiced, “I’m so damned proud of my son… he’s got a full ride on a ball scholarship! Now that is something that I never was able to do!”
Despite herself, she laughed a little at his imitation.
Rick smiled at her. “I like it when you do that.”
She paused. “What? Laugh?”
“No… smile.” He smirked. “I think you’re pretty when you smile.”
She blushed again.
He made compliments to her like that off and on as time went by. She would have felt strange about it, considering that he had been dating her roommate when they’d first met. But she had settled into a new kind of equilibrium with her redheaded roommate as well. Often times Nichole was still nowhere to be seen and once or twice Jenny had had their room all to herself for whole weekends. When she did see Nichole it was usually only long enough for her roommate to stop in, change her clothes, share a little gossip about some party she was going to and then she would disappear.
Nichole never asked about Rick and Jenny had seen no need to volunteer any of that information. Nichole seemed perfectly happy without him and, well, strange as it was, Jenny kind of liked keeping her strange little relationship with Rick a secret. There was something exciting about it.
When their chem lab began to get into the physical sciences portion of the semester, she and Rick stepped up their game. Part of their new project was to try and develop a new solvent that would dissolve certain kinds of amino acids while not harming others. It had sounded like a ludicrous idea when she’d first heard it, but the class had been assured that it could be done.
On the fortunate side of things, there were plenty of vacant labs available for them to try and solve the problem and there were more than enough chemicals available for them to experiment with. Additionally, there were plenty of beakers, Bunsen burners, thermometers, Petri dishes, microscopes, and most importantly their privacy. Their teacher had stressed that if there were too many similarities in the results between teams, then all of those teams would lose points off their final grade.
“I can’t afford anything less than a 4.0,” she had told Rick.
He had silently understood and told her that they needed to take advantage of the chem labs when no one else was around. “Fortunately for you, you’re partners with a guy on the football team who’s tight with the overnight security guard… who happens to be a big fan and will let us in for a little extra studying time,” he’d told her one afternoon with a wink.
She had smiled at the chance.
They had donned lab coats, safety goggles, and rubber gloves while performing their work. They had gone over every possible permutation that they could come up with creating a chemical compound that would attack – at least in theory – certain kinds of amino acids while leaving others untouched. God, it still sounds so stupid! She had shared that thought with Rick and to her continued amazement he had said that he believed that it could be done.
But they had yet to succeed after several tries over the last week and a half.
“Alright,” he said, measuring the temperature of their latest concoction inside its test beaker with a digital thermometer, “reduce the heat… we need to drop the temperature about ten degrees.”
She did the math in her head and dialed down the Bunsen burners’ flame, reducing its size by a little more than a quarter. She watched the liquid as it slowly boiled inside the beaker. It was a reddish liquid, reminding her of red wine she had once tasted, slowly reducing from a medium boil to a gentle bubbling like the carbonation of soda.
The change in bubbling gave her a twinge of worry. “I think we backed it off too much.”
“No, it’s fine,” he said, his eyes glued to the digital thermometer in his hand. “We need to find the right boiling point. If we get the temperature just right… shit! No!”
Her eyes took in the disaster as it occurred. The liquid changed color, going from a wine-looking substance to something that was as thick as paint. The bubbling ceased almost instantly as the contents of the beaker almost seemed to solidify.
“Shit!” Rick said, spreading his hands out and putting his head against the tiled surface of the countertop. He groaned, “I thought for sure we had it this time.”
She tried to run the formula over in her head that they had come up with. Admittedly most of it was Rick’s arithmetic, and he hadn’t been wrong so far, and she had been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But she only admitted to herself that she didn’t entirely understand what it was that he was trying to do. “Maybe we added too much…”
“No,” he said, cutting her off. “I fucked it up… I pushed the temperature too hard and then tried to cool it too quick. I thought if we boiled it first we’d fractionally distil the softer substances out, but instead…” he lifted his head up and indicated the beaker filled with whatever it was now, “we made toxic pudding.”
Despite their failure, she chuckled a little. She looked at her watch. “Look, it’s already after eleven, and we’re nowhere near figuring this thing out. And we still have two weeks to get it done. What say we just try again tomorrow?”
He sighed and turned the burner off. “Yeah, might as well… tired minds don’t plan well.” He looked at his own notebook that sat a few feet away and with a pen in his coat pocket he drew a big “X” across tonight’s notes; indicating another failure. “So much for attempt number eight… maybe attempt number nine prove more fruitful.”
She smiled at him and together they began to clean up their mess. She disposed of the mysterious contents in their test beaker while he put away the assortment of test chemicals that they had gathered to try and make their project work. When they finished, she couldn’t help but notice that he looked a little more dejected than he had the last few times that they had tried. Though she wouldn’t have believed it weeks ago, it seemed that these failures were starting to get to him. If there was one thing that she had observed about him, she knew that he didn’t care for losing.
“Hey, it’s alright,” she assured him. “No one gets it right the first time.”
He sighed. “Yeah, I know… how many prototypes did cavemen go through before they perfected the wheel, right?”
She laughed again. That was a concept she had never really thought about. And that he would use science as a means of humor made him a little more endearing.
She was just about to gather up her backpack when she noticed that her hands smelled strange. She sniffed at them and found that there was some kind of a strange odor about them.
“What?” Rick asked as he put away his notes in his bag.
“My hands.”
“What about them?”
“They smell.”
He furrowed his brow and walked over to her, taking her smaller hands in his large
r ones and examining them. He lifted them up to his nose, almost as if he was about to kiss them like a gentleman in one of those old movies. The idea sent a little flutter of excitement through her heart. But no kiss came, he only sniffed at her skin and his nose crinkled.
“Ah, I know that smell… I think the talcum powder inside your gloves was a part of a bad batch, it happens sometimes. Nothing a little soap and water can’t cure.” He guided her to the nearest wash sink and turned on the hot water. “Here, let me help you,” he said.
“Uh, I can wash my hands on my own, thanks,” she said, feeling a little irritated at his presumption.
“Fine,” he said, not freeing her hands, “but you’ll only spread it around if you do it yourself. It’s your call.”
For a moment she couldn’t believe what she was hearing, but again she couldn’t detect that he was lying. She waited a moment and then finally just decided to give in. It was late, and she was tired.
“Okay,” she said, standing in front of the sink.
He smiled and wetted his hands and then pumped some soap from a nearby dispenser into his palms, rubbing them together. He lathered up his hands and then standing behind her he encircled her with his body, his hands running parallel to her own. His right hand gently cupped her right hand; his left did likewise with her left. Again, her heart fluttered at the strange proximity.
He guided her hands under the warm water and gently began to rub his soapy hands around hers. His fingers coaxed hers, rubbing at the webbing of skin between her thumb and index fingers. He gently massaged her knuckles… her palms… even the way he touched the tips of her fingers felt oddly delightful…
There was something incredible in the way he touched her. Something profound… something exciting… there was even something sensual about it.
She liked it.
He slowly began to rinse her hands, and she began to notice the other proximities that they shared. Feeling his chest pressed against her back, the way she felt cradled within his arms, that his head was so near to hers that their cheeks were all but pressing against each other… it was like magic.
