Page 49 of Icing on the Cake

Jackson

You love me?

Me

Debatable.

Jackson

Elliot! Please! I’m gonna drown!

I let him sweat it out for a few minutes before replying.

Me

I’ll see if Sarah has a spare.

Jackson

You’re the best!

I love Jackson—as much as one guy can platonically love another. But walking across campus to the gym in this weather? He better kiss the ground I walk on for the rest of our lives.

“Jackson needs an umbrella,” I tell Sarah. “He’s stuck at the gym.”

She snorts. “Of course he is.”

“Do you have a spare?”

“Maybe.”

As Sarah digs through her oversized tote bag, a guy in a hockey jersey walks up to the circulation desk. He’s tall and muscular, with wavy blond hair that says he just rolled out of bed. “Do you know the Wi-Fi password?”

“It’s ‘GreatGatsby123,’ all one word.”

“Thanks, man.” He flashes a grin and saunters off toward the study tables.

I watch him walk away, wondering why he doesn’t make my heart pitter-patter the way another blond-haired boy does. He’s as conventionally attractive, and his ass is definitely biteable. But I feel nothing.

Sarah mutters under her breath, pulling my attention away from the guy who’s now slapping hands with those reckless bastards from earlier.

She slams a microbiology textbook onto the desk, tosses a half-eaten granola bar into the trash can, and becomes overly excited when she pulls out a tangled mess of earbuds.

“I thought I’d lost these forever!”

A compact mirror, a pack of gum, and a handful of pens join the growing pile of shit on the circulation desk.

“Do you have a kitchen sink in there too?” I raise an eyebrow.

Sarah flips me the bird as she continues her excavation. “Very funny.”

I blink in disbelief when she presents me with a small pottedcactus with a pink bow tied around its terracotta pot. How the hell did she fit that in there? And more importantly, why is she carrying around a cactus?

As if reading my mind, she mutters, “It’s for a project.”

“Sure it is.”

The bag yields a few more treasures: a pack of highlighters, a copy ofPride and Prejudice, and an opened bag of trail mix.

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