Learning Curve

Scottie

Steam filters off the grass in front of the Delta Omega house as some of the frat lackeys hose down the slip ’n slide again with water and bubbles. The air is cool, but the ground is still warm from the sun of the day, and the difference in temperature shrouds the front yard partiers in a cloud.

I let the curtains fall back into place and turn back to the party inside. It’s loud—so much so I can’t even make out the song that’s playing—and there are bodies everywhere. Some people are dancing, some people are chugging beers out of helmets with funnels, and a whole other contingent is playing flip cup on the dining room table.

I shove through a group of giggling girls and head toward the group of cheerleaders that’s congregated in front of the kitchen, glancing back toward where I’ve just come from more times than I’d like to admit on the way.

I am at my first college party, action all around me, and I can’t keep my eyes off the stupid door.

A frat guy snags a stack of pizza boxes from an Uber Eats driver, and two more groups of scantily clad girls trickle through the door on arrival, but still, there’s no sign of Finn Hayes.

“You waiting on someone, Scottie?” Nadine questions, her eyes narrowing on me as I make it to my teammates.

I shake my head. “Just wanted to see what they were doing out there. Two Delta Omegas just did the slip ’n slide together in their bras.”

Nadine laughs at that. “I bet that had the tongues wagging.”

“Come have a drink with me!” Dane slurs as he roughly wraps his arm around my shoulders, fresh from the kitchen with a new drink. His big frame makes me trip over my shoes, and he laughs when my hip bone careens into a nearby chair. So does Nadine.

I wince from the discomfort. That’ll probably leave a bruise.

“Uh-oh…looks like your boyfriend is shit-faced, Scottie,” Kayla, one of the cheerleaders I came to the party with, comments. It could be catty, but from her tone and what I know about her, she seems to be saying it sympathetically.

“Don’t be such a downer, Kay,” Nadine purrs and flashes a wink at my lazy-eyed and loose-lipped boyfriend. “Let the man have some fun.”

“Damn straight, sweetheart! Let the man have some fucking fun!” Dane agrees enthusiastically.

Nadine giggles, but I don’t see the humor. Instead, I stand on my tiptoes to whisper into Dane’s ear. “Don’t you think you’ve had a little too much to drink? Don’t forget you’re in season right now. Technically, we both are.”

Once you make any team at Dickson, you have to sign a contract that pledges you won’t drink or do drugs of any sort while in season. If the university finds out you’ve broken that contract, they’ll kick you off the team. And they’re allowed to test any time they want to.

“Damn it, Scottie,” Dane snaps back, shoving me away from him hard enough that my back impacts the wall this time. His gray eyes grow dark with annoyance as he stares down at me. I don’t think he’s actively trying to hurt me, but the booze has pretty much ensured he’s not feeling remorse either. “Why do you always have to be such a killjoy?”

“Hey there, buddy,” a different male voice chastises from behind before stepping in between us. “Go easy on your girl, yeah?”

“Suck my dick, Boden,” Dane retorts to the Blake Boden, his teammate and nationally recognized starting quarterback for the Dickson Dragons.

Blake’s gaze moves to mine, a concerned warmth making his eyes look like the Caribbean, and I shake my head toward him. It’s a silent I’m okay, even though I’m not necessarily feeling it.

At the end of our senior year, Dane really got into drinking more heavily, and sadly, it only seems to enhance every asshole bone in his body. We wouldn’t have lasted two years if this was the way he’d always been, but the majority of our relationship was different. We were different.

He was different.

He used to pick flowers for me from the front of the school and write notes to me during class, and every Friday night, we did movie night in his parents’ basement, just the two of us. I still have the fake movie stubs he made me for all of them.

But when he acts like this, I have to fight my inner-child instincts to go fetal and cower in the corner. He reminds me too much of my mom before my dad divorced her and took full custody of my sister Wren and me. Our mom always turned into the worst kind of drunk when left to her own devices.

She’s been to rehab too many times to count—her latest stint having just finished up a month before I graduated. Wren and I still haven’t given in to her requests to see us. She says she’s really turned over a new leaf this time, but after seeing her as nothing but a mean drunk for most of my life, her words don’t hold any power.

Blake Boden eyes me for a long moment before three bouncy Delta Omegas wearing Boden jerseys that have been cut to reveal everything but their nipples drag him toward the large living room of the house, where a makeshift dance floor has been created in front of the DJ.

I watch as Blake smiles down at the girls, dancing with all three of them in a way that makes it apparent this isn’t his first time handling more than one woman. I guess that’s how it goes when you’re the star quarterback of the school. Add in the fact that Blake is single and has the kind of shaggy strawberry-blond hair and blue eyes that would make most girls my age describe him as stupid hot, I have a feeling he rarely spends his nights alone.

“You coming, Scottie?” Dane asks, unconcerned with Blake Boden on the dance floor or any of his own transgressions against me.

I shake my head. “I don’t think so.”

He lets out an annoyed huff, but that’s squelched when Nadine pipes up, her voice a classic eager beaver. “I’ll go, Dane.”

“Hell yeah! Someone who wants to have some fucking fun!”

And off they go, my boyfriend and another girl, straight into the kitchen where there’s more booze than I’ve ever seen in my life. It covers every counter and available surface, and coolers line the whole back wall.

“You okay?” Kayla asks, placing a gentle hand to my shoulder, and I nod.

She leans closer to search my eyes, a twinkle in her deep brown eyes and perfectly white teeth. “You sure?”

“Promise.” I shrug it off with a smile that feels foreign on my lips. “He’s just drunk, and Nadine’s just Nadine.”

Kayla laughs so hard at that, her whole head of spiral curls shakes—everyone on the squad knows how Nadine can be.

“How long have you been together?”

“Two years.”

“And you both decided to go to Dickson?”

“Not exactly.” I shake my head. “I got a cheerleading scholarship, and Dane decided he wanted to go here too.”

“Interesting.”

There’s a small part of me that wishes Dane would’ve done his own thing. That there would’ve been a university that wanted to recruit him. But Ivy Prep’s football team never garnered the kind of attention that our cheerleading squad did.

We won Nationals all four years that I was in high school. The football team, on the other hand, was lucky to end the season with a handful of wins.

“I want to tell you something, but I don’t want to come across as rude,” Kayla says and steps closer to me, wrapping her arm around mine. “Promise you won’t get mad?”

I tilt my head to the side. “Well, that depends. I mean, if you’re going to tell me I look like a troll tonight, then consider my claws out because I spent an hour trying to get this smoky eye right.”

“Shut up. You’re gorgeous.”

“And so are you.” I nudge her playfully with my elbow.

“I don’t want to talk bad about your boyfriend, but…”

“But what?”

“He’s, like, really careless with you.”

I furrow my brow.

“I just think you deserve better. That’s all I’m going to say.” She raises both hands in the air before pretending to zip her mouth shut. “Consider my lips sealed from any more commentary for the rest of the night.”

I’m at a loss for what to say—mostly because I feel a burning embarrassment at the thought of being a girl who has to be told she deserves better—but an interruption by one of our fellow cheerleaders shuts down the conversation entirely before I have to say anything anyway.

“Ladies, it’s time to dance!” Tonya exclaims, grabbing us both by the wrists.

On a giggle, Kayla goes along willingly, but I find myself staying rooted to my spot. “You guys go ahead. I’m going to run to the bathroom. I’ll catch up with you soon.”

“Scottie, your cute ass better make its way on the dance floor soon, or else I will come find you!” Tonya calls toward me, and I just laugh, holding up both hands.

“Be there soon. Promise.”

Once the two of them get lost in the sea of writhing bodies, I lean my back against the wall and let out a deep exhale. Normally, I’d be one of the first people on the dance floor, but tonight, I don’t know… I’m just not feeling it.

Surely it’s just been a long week with lots of adjusting. Between practice and classes and Dane being a bit of a dick lately and simply trying to figure out this whole college thing, my anxiety is at an all-time high. It doesn’t help that the Delta Omega house is filled with more people than the whole of Ivy Prep—which was K-12—and my nervous system is telling me I need to go back to my dorm, put on some pajamas, and binge-watch One Tree Hill.

Music pounds through the speakers that sit on either side of a local DJ who is currently doing a mashup of “Party Rock Anthem” and a song I’ve heard a million times in stadiums.

The one that goes whoa oh oh oh-oh.

When the beat drops and the lyrics Shots! Shots! Shots! echo inside the room, I don’t miss Dane in the corner doing exactly that. One, two, three, he downs the small glasses of amber liquid in quick succession and pounds his fists against his chest like he’s Tarzan.

Good grief. My annoyance makes a pit form in my stomach, but the small crowd of people around him is verbally celebrating his dumbassery with chants and fist pumps. Nadine claps and cheers so hard, I fear her tits might make a bid to escape her crop top like cats coming through a newly opened door.

Nadine Jones, put simply, doesn’t like me. Sure, she’s flirtatious with everyone, but I’d have to have been born yesterday not to understand Nadine’s underhanded comments and blatant seduction of my boyfriend stem from our current situation on the cheerleading squad—I’m the only freshman with a starting flyer spot—exactly what Nadine was gunning for. So, unless something happens to me or one of the other flyers, she’s stuck at alternate.

Cheerleading can be cutthroat, so this isn’t something I haven’t experienced before. It just sucks that it’s another thing I have to deal with while I’m trying to adjust to college life.

And truthfully, I’m not good at the whole drama thing. I’m a people pleaser to my core. A lover, not a fighter, and the type of person who clams up in any type of confrontational situation. It’s like my brain misplaces all its words for a few days and then finds them again when I’m revisiting that confrontation in my mind.

I’m the queen of “I wish I would’ve said that,” just like Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail.

Dane appears to be pouring himself another round of shots, and I can no longer witness the drunken clown show. I pull my phone out of my jeans pocket to check the time—12:30 a.m.

Still no sign of Finn Hayes.

Yeah, I don’t think he’s coming. And I think it’s time to go home.

On a sigh, I start to head for the mudroom of Delta Omega’s massive three-story brownstone to grab my purse, but before I can round the corner into the hallway, someone shouting, “Ace Kelly!” fills my ears.

I spin on my heel, my eyes going straight for the front door.

Ace Kelly and a super-pretty blond girl who’s in my calculus class named Julia Brooks are there, and someone else is right behind them.

Dark hair. Warm brown eyes. With my contacts in tonight, I can see both just fine.

Finn Hayes. Here. In the flesh. And looking as hot as ever.

Did he come here because I invited him? Or did Ace drag him here against his will?

It takes every bit of self-control I have not to run directly to the door to find out. Frankly, I don’t know that it would have held out if it weren’t for Kayla grabbing me by the hand and pulling me into a quiet hallway back behind us.

“What’s going on?” I ask, trying to pay attention to her and split focus with the door at the same time. It’s out of my eyeline, though, so I have no choice but to behave pretty quickly.

“Girl, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Dane and Nadine just made a bet with someone to take three more shots each.”

Well, hell. If that isn’t karma telling the girl with the boyfriend that the hot guy she’s crushing on is going to have to wait, I don’t know what is.