Page 60 of A Totally Platonic Thing
Problem solved. Plan in place.
I ran into two friends before I even got in the door at Aeon, and we met a few more on the way to the bar where we found the birthday boy and the rest of the party. The first glass of wine went down pretty fast, and I got another right away, because hey, I could only have a few but I might as well get my buzz on for a little bit.
And then one of my friends handed me a vodka tonic.
Okay, so I hadn’t meant to drink any vodka, but he’d already bought it. That would be my limit for the night.
I took it with me to the dance floor, and the lights went crazy, and I had so much freaking fun, and someone handed me another drink, and I didn’t even realize I’d started drinking it until half of it was gone.
Someone started yelling and hooting. I turned toward the bar, where Mason had produced a crown for Josh to wear and a cake. We gathered around and sang, while the DJ obligingly turned the music down for a minute, and I took a shot to toast the birthday boy…and from there, it got a little hazy.
I’d get a ride home. It’d be fine. Drink a couple of glasses of water, sober up…it’d be fine.
Besides, Lucas wasn’t even home to notice.
I took the drink a friend handed me, and things got a lot hazier and brighter and more full of snatches of shouted conversations and laughter.
It would totally be fine, and everything was awesome! I’d known Josh for years and he’d always been such a good friend. He deserved an amazing night.
And I’d deal with whatever tomorrow.
Chapter Fourteen
Lucas
The weekend went by in a blur. The few hours of sleep I caught on Amanda’s couch early on Sunday morning barely made a difference, and by Sunday night I’d started to lose all sense of time and space outside of the fiddly little steps of putting together the new panels that should’ve taken weeks of work.
Fuck Dr. Park. Fuck himsideways. He’d never liked me, but he’d been the only faculty member available to advise me when I started on this project, and I’d hoped he’d ease up a little as time went by.
Spoiler alert: he fucking hadn’t. I still didn’t know why he was such a dick to me, and it only made it slightly better that he was a dick to almost everyone, showing immense favoritism to his female students.
Which they hated even more than the guys in the program did, because Dr. Park was so condescending and borderline creepy about it that it made it even worse.
Basically, the guy was a douchebag, and he particularly didn’t like me.
And now he’d told me that he couldn’t approve my project as it stood, even though he’d approved the plan for it, and I basically had to start from scratch. And then, oh yeah, he’d sent out an email on Saturday morning to all the seniors telling us that we’d be giving a lab tour on Monday morning at ten to someone from the aerospace company who’d have veto power over any applications from this crop of graduates. Our department had an arrangement with that corporation that gave us some priority when we applied for entry-level jobs, since their headquarters were only a couple of miles from campus.
But that all depended on whether or not they were impressed by our final projects.
I wiped sweat off my forehead with a filthy forearm and looked up for the first time in what felt like, and might actually have been, several hours.
Amanda sat cross-legged on the floor a few feet away, frowning down at the wiring she’d been doing for me.
God bless Amanda. And God bless her incredibly tolerant and kind boyfriend Jim, who’d shrugged and told her to have fun when she explained she’d be spending her entire weekend helping me do the impossible. And that we’d be turning up at the apartment to sleep and raid the fridge in between.
When she focused hard, Amanda tended to raise one of her eyebrows at whatever she had in her hands, making her look even more like a female Spock than usual. She had the shiny black hair and the prominent nose and the looking-down-her-nose attitude already, and the eyebrow clinched it. I’d always thought Amanda was kind of hot, but she scared the crap out of me, so I’d never even considered trying to go there. Jim was a brave and lucky man.
Not as lucky as I was, though.
No one could be as lucky as me. Chris. Sweet, funny, clever Chris, who was thoughtful and kind enough to remember Amanda’s complicated coffee order and kept texting me encouragement even though I didn’t have time to reply to most of them. I’d fucked him, and fucked his mouth, and had him on his knees in front of me, and I couldn’t stop thinking about shoving my cock in him again and again and pounding him until he screamed.
And if I let myself focus on him for even a minute, I’d get so sidetracked I’d never finish. My career would be over before it started. And okay, that might be a little dramatic—but not by much. Dr. Park had really fucked me, hard.
But even that little reverie had been too much inattention, and I burned myself for the fifth fucking time that day, solder dripping down onto my thumb.
I dropped the iron and started cursing a blue streak. Amanda set down her work and stood, coming toward me to help, but I waved her off and headed for the lab sink, running my hand under cold water. Amanda watched me as I rinsed and kept cursing, that damn eyebrow raised at me this time.
“Lucas,” she said. And then sighed deeply. “Lucas.” As if that said everything. And maybe it did.
