She’d saved a seat. For me.
Trying to be quiet, I squeezed between two of the desks to get there. Lifting my backpack, I made the tight squeeze and picked up the bag Jules had put on the seat.
“Mr. Vaughn, I made it very clear in my email to the whole class that lateness would not be tolerated.” Professor Buchanan didn’t even turn around from the whiteboard.
“I’m sorry I’m late. It was unavoidable.”
“It wasn’t. You’ll lose five percent off your final grade and you can leave now. Get the notes from one of the other students who made it a priority to be here on time.” He crossed his arms over his chest, holding his whiteboard marker like a sword.
My shoulders dropped. Already down five percent and I hadn’t gotten to show him the true depth of my stupidity yet. Could a guy catch a damn break?
Jules shot up from her desk. “He was buying me tampons!”
18
Jules
“He was buying me tampons.” The words were out of my mouth before I could think of something better to come up with. Like he was getting my medicine or rescuing my dog from a burning tree—not that I had one, but the professor didn’t need to know that. No, I went straight for the vagina problems: A professor’s kryptonite.
Someone’s desk chair combo squeaked across the floor. Probably as they were craning their neck to see which psycho had shouted out ‘tampons!’ in the middle of a full college ethics class.
“Excuse me.” The professor’s wide-eyed gaze swung to me.
A few people snickered behind me and my stomach knotted. Well, I was in it now, might as well pull out all the stops.
Leaning forward like I was telling him a secret and not broadcasting it to the entire class, I laid it on as thick as I could. “Professor Buchanan, I have an extremely heavy flow and I wasn’t sure I could make it to the student center without bleeding through my clothes, so I asked Berk to buy some for me. He was in the classroom before you even got here with me, but then he left to go get the tampons.”
“Wha—” The professor stared at me.
I side-eyed Berk, telling him to open the bag.
He moved his hands like if he touched the zipper he’d die of radiation burns.
With another nod from me, he gingerly unzipped my bag sitting on his desk.
I leaned over and shoved my hand inside and grabbed a handful of my emergency stash from my purse. The cotton-packed missiles were wrapped in bright paper wrappers. I raised them in the air, waving them like a pirate ship flag on the high seas of my period cruise. “See, super heavy duty.”
Berk stared at me, slack jawed. Hell, half the class did—scratch that—the entire class stared at me like I was undergoing a werewolf transformation in front of their eyes. My neck and cheeks were on fucking fire, but I had to save Berk from being unfairly punished.
I waved them at the professor. “Heavy flow.” I repeated the words, slowly enunciating every syllable.
Buchanan mumbled and sputtered. “Please put those away. I’ll allow it this time, but in the future, please take care of your personal needs before class.”
“Thank you, Professor. And I will do. You know how those periods are sometimes. They jump out of nowhere and hit you like bam.”
“Do you need to…” The professor eyed the door, clearly afraid that one false move from me and we’d have a re-enactment from The Shining going on.
“Right. Yes, I’ll go take care of that.”
I did a ginger duck-walk out of the classroom with my wad of tampons in my hand, and walked to the bathroom. I splashed some water on my face to look appropriately femininely distressed and waited for what felt like an appropriate amount of time to deal with a period snafu of such epic proportions that you’d blurt it out in front of the whole classroom.
When I went back inside, the professor didn’t even bat an eye as I slid into my seat. Berk mouthed ‘thank you’ and I tamped down that little giddy thrill that fluttered in my stomach.
The rest of the class went along without a hitch, except for the looks people kept shooting toward my ass like I was going to shoot up off my seat like a geyser at any second.
“Acting has shot to the top of your list of talents.” Berk walked backward in front of me as we crossed the main quad after class.
“What acting?”
“In there with Buchanan and the…” His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. “Tampons,” he whispered and looked over his shoulder.
“Oh, you mean the heavy-duty, super-absorbent tampons? Sure, you can have one.” I raised my voice.
His eyes widened and he stopped mid-backward walk.
I burst out laughing, skirting around him. “You saved me during my sister’s engagement weekend and at B&B, I figured I should return the favor.”
“It means a lot, Jules.” He switched from in front of me to walking beside me, bumping into me with his backpack that felt like he was transporting boulders.
“What do you have in here?” I reached for it.
He swung it to his other shoulder. “Just some crap. Nothing to worry about. Back to more important things. If I got screwed this early on, it might mess with my eligibility to play this season, and I can’t let the team down like that.”
“It’s important to you that you not let them down.”
“It’s the best thing going in my life. Got me through some tough stuff.”
“When you were a kid.”
He stopped. “Yeah, how’d you know?” He looked at me and my stomach dropped like an ice block had crashed into me. That was something he’d told me in his letters. In person, Berk talked like there’d never been a cloud in the sky, let alone bringing up something hard from his past.
“We’re only seniors. I figure you had to have played before in high school and stuff.”
He started walking again. “True. It got me outside and doing something physical. A way to burn off all that energy and pent-up emotions.”
“I’m glad you’ve found something so important to you.”
“And the paychecks won’t hurt, which is why I need to kill it this season to get a good draft pick.”
“How can they deny your skill on the field?”
“Know a lot about football?” He cast me a sidelong glance that required an underwear change.
“Even someone as uncultured as me can see how well you guys were doing in the last game.”
“Half of us, anyway.” He dragged his hands over his face. “Do you want a ride back to your place?”
I felt like the nerdy girl getting offered a ride home by the star football player. I guess that was appropriate, because that was exactly what was happening.
“I’ll repay you in peanut butter cup double chocolate cupcakes.”
“I’d give you a ride for free, Frenchie, but that doesn’t mean I won’t take you up on the offer.”
My phone buzzed as we pulled up to the front of my house. I stopped with my foot resting on the curb. Laura’s name flashed on the screen.
“It’s my sister.”
“Tell her I said hi.” Berk leaned over the hood of his car looking like he was starring in the next Marvel movie; all he was missing was the leather jacket and the motorcycle.