Page 26 of When We Are Old

Oh, come on, Matthew. Dial it back, just a notch.

She gasped and at the base of her throat her pulse raced under her skin. “Maybe I should go home.”

“Veronica!” My fingers reached for her hair, tucking the strands of blonde around the curve of her ear. I’d been craving the touch for days. It ate away at me, hollowing me from the inside out. “I’m joking. Come along, and I promise to protect you. They are good guys.”

She nodded; her gaze guarded.

“So, you coming?”

“Maybe.”

I’d take a maybe.

“Meet you at eight.” I tried to stop the words coming out of my mouth. If I met her it would make this something else. I’d be weighing a level of expectation on the friendship that I didn’t know I should rightfully give. After all, I wasn’t free to stand outside a door and walk her to the bar.

I’d do it anyway, scumbag idiot that I was.

“Eight.” She nodded and I patted the study desk and turned away.

“You’ve got it bad.” Scott waited for me by the door. He didn’t want to venture onto the floor with ‘the books in it’ in case it gave him a dose of ‘loserism’.

“I haven’t got anything bad.” I focused on jabbing my finger on the button for the only lift, but when it didn’t come, I nodded to the stairwell. “Let’s run.”

The five flights down were easy. Conversation dodging not so much.

“So, Ronnie, huh? Personally, I think Ange is hotter. She’s keen too. Mark Abrahams said she gave him a BJ the other night when they’d only been comparing two novels together.”

I held in my shudder. I knew that Ronnie hadn’t made a vast number of friends, but Ange… she just made me uneasy.

“Ronnie and I are just mates.” Her name thrilled me, dangerous and futile.

We walked along campus, him making small talk, mainly about the team we’d both got into, filling the conversation; me thinking about the blonde in the library.

Close to the dorm where he lived on a different floor, I hesitated by the payphone inside the entrance. There was no one hunched over the handset, whispering into the black plastic, and time ticked me closer to the hour I dreaded.

“See ya, I’ve got calls to make.”

Scott smirked. “You spend far too long talking to your ‘Mammy.’”

“Fuck off.” I zapped him the finger and then turned, hunkering down over the unit on the wall. Shoving some coins in, keeping enough back so I could get the bus later and make sure Ronnie got home safe, I jabbed at the buttons and waited for it to connect.

“Julie. Floor eight, room ten,” I grunted when the call got picked up.

A loud crash as the handset must have got dropped made me wince and pull the handset away from my ear.

I waited, watching the numbers tick down until feet echoed at the other end. “Matty?”

Try as I might I couldn’t hold in my wince. “Hey, babe.”

Tell her it's over… tell her…

“How’s it going?” she asked. The phone crackled. She must have been holding it tight. “I miss you so much, my little teddy bear.”

I laughed; she didn’t need to know my stomach chilled with ice. “I’m too big to be a teddy bear,” I whispered, less anyone else heard my conversation.

“You’ll always be my cutesy little teddy bear.”

No answer existed, so I cleared my throat. “How are lectures?”