Page 4 of College Boy

“I mean, not quite, but...”

Mitch hemmed, stately in hisCoastal Colleget-shirt and sagging blue jeans, a good three inches taller and at least ten years younger than Emma. If not more. Not that it mattered, obviously, but for some reason her brain kept pointing that fact out to her. Particularly during those times when her eyes strayed down his long, sinewy arms to his big, veiny hands, or lingered too long in the soft, gentle green eyes that peered out at her from beneath his shaggy brown mane.

“All the same,” she insisted, reaching for the nearest doorknob with only the slightest hesitation. “I owe his mother the courtesy of making sure her house isn’t totally trashed while she’s away and...”

She held her breath vaguely, swinging the door open to find two scantily clad co-eds spilled across the room as if the nearest sorority house had just thrown up all over its single bed and faux shag throw rug. She counted quickly—two girls, no Reggie—before swinging the door shut again and moving on to the next.

“The house isn’t totally trashed,” Mitch insisted, sounding surprisingly well-spoken for someone who had been doing body shots and beer bongs all night. Then again, his sedate duds had somehow managed to emerge from the all-night bacchanal suds and stain-free as well. “And I assure you Reggie is in, uh, good hands?”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” Emma huffed, swinging open the second door without preamble and seeing exactly what Mitch meant—her young next-door neighbor, buck naked in all his young, sweaty sticky collegiate glory, arms and legs akimbo across, underneath and between a similarly nude coed who gave new meaning to the phrase well-endowed.

“Oh. My!” Emma swung the door shut almost as quickly as she’d opened it, but not before realizing the lurid images and miles of hot, sweaty, naked young flesh would stay with her for months, possibly even years, to come. “Why didn’t you tell me he was otherwise occupied?”

“I tried, Emma, sheesh,” Mitch insisted almost playfully, as if he was enjoying her downright prudish reaction to the hardcore porn set she’d just stumbled upon next door. “Stubborn much?”

Emma sagged, her legs no longer holding her up as the long, sordid night and the latest sexual mic drop sapped the last of her dowdy, late night, spinster energy. The stairwell behind her was sturdy as she sank down against it, panting from the effort and defeated in the end. “Well, I certainly can’t tell Shannonthatpart,” she insisted, as if to herself.

Mitch sank against the wall across from her, pretty young face scrunched curiously beneath his nest of scruffy brown hair. “Shannon?”

“Reggie’s mother,” Emma explained. “My god, the way that woman talks about that boy, you think he had a halo around his shitty little head. She’d never believe he’d seen a girl naked if I told her, let alone did untold things with one after one too many keg stands in her precious backyard.”

Mitch’s tone was vaguely paternal. “Again, I tried to warn you.”

“Not hard enough,” she huffed. “That... I’ll never be able to unsee all ... that.”

Mitch looked casual against the wall across from her, as if it wasn’t the middle of the night and she wasn’t surrounded by extras from some cut rate stag film. “Surely you’ve seen ...that... before?” he teased, a cocky grin on his soft, angular face and quiet mirth in his shimmering young eyes.

“Cute,” she huffed. “It’s notthat, per se, it’s— The kid used to mow my lawn, you know? I’ve shoved candy bars in his trick or treat bag every Halloween for years. Suddenly I’m supposed to believe the little tyke I watched grow up is banging college chicks under his old sports posters?”

Mitch nodded quietly. “I can see that,” he murmured, their eyes meeting almost familiarly in the small space between them. “But he had to grow up sometime, right?”

Emma nodded, hardly believing she was having this conversation with some sleek, sexy stranger in her next-door neighbor’s hallway in the middle of the night. About a little shit like Reggie, of all people.

“I take it you don’t have kids?” Mitch offered.

Emma had pulled her knees up to her chin, as if they were two besties sipping wine between romcoms on a lazy summer night. “We’d been planning on it,” she mused, voice quiet to match his own. “When I found out my husband was having an affair and, well ... kind of killed the mood, you know?”

Mitch was making a wincing, “ouchy” face that made her snort with surprise and adoration. “Sorry,” he said with the tone of a boy who could never imagine such a scenario yet wanted to say something sweet and understanding all the same.

“He did me a favor, actually,” she said, as she always did when recounting the sad, sordid, pathetic little tale. “You think I could afford a house in this neighborhood running a food truck downtown? Or afford a food truck downtown, let alone six of them? But that divorce settlement? It was the one time my chickenshit husband being so nonconfrontational worked in my favor, so...”

“Sore subject?” Mitch offered, his scrunched up face indicating that it surely was. For him, anyway.

She favored him with a soft, resigned smile. “Sorry, it’s ... been a night.”

“I’m sorry, too,” Mitch insisted, waving a big, boyish hand around the stairwell as if to indicate the party that had been raging on for most of the night. “For what it’s worth, I tried my best to keep the volume down.”

Emma peered back at him nakedly, no longer hiding her gaze or quiet admiration for his youthful form. “Come to think of it,” she mused for her own benefit, “I don’t seem to recall you doing body shots or belly flops with the others.”

“You were watching?” he teased, cheery green eyes taunting her playfully as they widened in mock surprise. “Stalk much?”

“Only for accurate descriptions when I called the cops,” she teased right back.

“You could have just come over,” he murmured, the hungry gaze in his eyes as naked as her own. “Joined the party instead of hated on it.”

She ignored his subtle trolling. “Sorry if frat boys and coeds aren’t my bag.”

“Oh, no?” he chuckled. “What is?”

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