Page 24 of Choosing Her

saylor

I woke up to someone knocking on my door incessantly. I groaned as I stretched an arm out of the covers and grabbed my phone from the nightstand, then blinked at the screen at the time staring back at me.

The knocking at my door started again and I groaned as my head started pounding in time with it.

Couldn’t whoever it was at the door take a hint?

If the person doesn’t respond after the first three minutes of knocking, they probably aren’t going to answer at all.

Who would knock on my door, anyway? Poppy, Lilah, and Naomi would all just walk straight in if the door was unlocked—and one glance over at it told me that I’d forgotten to lock it when I came in last night.

Come to think of it, I couldn’t remember much of yesterday after I’d come in from my time in town with Naomi.

Had I just passed right out when I got back?

“Saylor!” A voice came from the other side of the door. It was too muffled to make out who it was. “Open up!”

I finally checked the calendar on my phone. Monday, October 20 . I groaned. Okay, so I was definitely supposed to be in class right now. I’d already completely missed first period and second period was going to start any moment, so I needed to get up if I was planning to go.

Was the knocking some sort of divine intervention to get me out of bed?

I groaned again but threw off the covers.

Immediately, I wanted to climb back into bed and hide under the covers for days, but there was no way I could relax with someone trying to knock down my door.

So, I wrapped the blanket around my shoulders and stumbled over, yelling “I’m coming, I’m coming!

” Who was so insistent that they needed to see me right this second?

Maybe it was my dorm advisor, Julia, coming to ask me why I missed class.

I was going to need to come up with a good excuse to stop me from getting detention for it.

Maybe something about my parents calling me— as if —in the middle of the night because they were in another timezone, and I answered because I hardly ever got to speak to them.

That had the possibility of landing me in the guidance counsellor’s office, but I could probably get out of there faster than detention.

I swung the door open, ready to pull out the fake tears, but stopped short when I saw that it wasn’t Julia on the other side of the door, like I’d expected. Instead it was… Crossy.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, frowning as I heard the rasp in my own voice. I cleared my throat, only now realizing how much it hurt. Once I got rid of Crossy, I’d find some water or something. Crossy frowned, then held up the cup in his hand—my iced coffee for the morning.

“You didn’t come to class,” he said. “I was worried.”

I stared at him, sure that I was somehow misunderstanding him.

He was worried? I guess in the time that we’d been sitting together, I hadn’t missed any classes, but that didn’t mean he needed to be worried about me not showing up once.

I could have had an appointment with the guidance counsellor.

I could have had a field trip. I could have just decided to skip class to sleep in on a Monday morning instead.

“This is for you,” Crossy said, shaking the iced coffee, making the ice rattle loudly. It looked a little melted, probably from him buying it before class, but I took it anyway and sipped. I frowned.

“No flavoring today?” I asked.

Crossy frowned back. “It has caramel in it. That’s your favorite, isn’t it?”

I took another sip to hide my surprise that he knew that was my favorite.

I didn’t like to think of Caleb Cross as being someone who understood me at all.

It was easier to keep up a wall between us if I could tell myself that we didn’t know each other better than I knew any of my sister’s other ex-boyfriends, none of whom I spoke to regularly.

If that was true, then I could see him as nothing more as a random student I was tutoring, who also happened to be Bear’s roommate.

But then he came in like this, buying me iced coffees every morning and knowing which ones I liked more than others, and I remembered that no, he wasn’t just any other student.

“Shouldn’t you be in class right now?” I asked. I hoped he would take that as the dismissal it was intended to be, but he stayed rooted in his spot.

“I thought checking on you was more important.”

“Why?” I asked, narrowing my eyes. He had to have some sort of ulterior motive here, right? Why would he risk getting in trouble by not going to his class, just to see what I was doing. “You could have just asked Poppy or Lilah where I was. You didn’t need to come all this way.”

“Neither of them knew,” he said immediately. I blinked. I hadn’t expected him to have actually talked to them.

“They both have my location on,” I said. “It wasn’t enough for them to tell you I was in my room?”

He shrugged. “Not when nobody had heard from you since yesterday.”

I leaned all my weight against my open door, suddenly feeling like all my energy had been depleted from my body. All I wanted to do was lie down again but there was no chance of me inviting Crossy into my room, so it would just have to wait.

“Well, you’ve seen me now,” I said flatly. “I’m alive. You can get to second period now—what class do you have anyway?”

There was only a handful of teachers that would let him get away with being this late to class without a note, and chances were, he didn’t have any of them.

It would have been just as easy for him to have come by at lunch instead of between periods, and he wouldn’t have had the risk of detention if he had.

I just really did not understand why he would come back like this when it didn’t benefit him at all.

Crossy grimaced and scratched the back of his head. “Well, what you need to understand…”

That sent warning bells through my head immediately. It was an extremely easy question to answer and there was no reason why he would need to explain anything to me about it.

“I just figured there was no chance of me being able to focus on math if I wasn?—”

It took all my willpower not to kick him in the shin as soon as the word math was out of his mouth. Actually, I probably would have, if I wasn’t so dizzy that lifting one foot would probably send me toppling over backwards.

“Crossy,” I said in a dangerous voice, “tell me you’re not saying what I think you’re saying.”

His guilty expression said it all: Caleb Cross, who was failing his math class, had skipped it to come see me.

I squeezed my eyes shut and counted to ten in my head. “Why would you do that that? Now, we won’t only be reviewing it, I’ll have to teach it to you.”

The words came out a little ruder than I intended, but I stood by the general sentiment.

My job as his tutor wasn’t to be the one teaching him all the content the first time he saw it.

I was helping him review what he needed help with and my job would be ten times harder if he’d never seen any of the content before.

Adding on the fact that I wasn’t even remotely trained as a tutor and frankly sucked at it, and he could basically kiss goodbye to understanding today’s lesson.

“Well, I had to make sure my tutor was up to the job, otherwise there was no point in me going to class at all,” Crossy said with a cheeky smile. “Don’t you know I can’t pass without you?”

I huffed and shook my head. “That is a terrible excuse for skipping and you know it.”

“Would saying that I didn’t want to let your coffee get too watered down be a better excuse?”

I took another sip of the coffee, still not tasting the caramel in it at all. Maybe they forgot to do the flavoring. Or maybe it really was just that watered down after an hour, because it didn’t even taste that much like coffee at all.

“No,” I said. I chewed a little on the plastic straw as I looked at him. “But I guess I appreciate you bringing it anyway.”

He smirked. “You guess?”

I rolled my eyes. “If you’re trying to get me to say something nicer, you’re gonna be waiting a while.”

He looked me over carefully and I only realized then that I was still dressed in my pajamas.

Sure, I had my comforter wrapped around me, but it didn’t cover the partially ripped bright pink MY FAMILY WENT TO VEGAS AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS STUPID T-SHIRT top—a gift from Poppy, because my parents definitely would never buy me something like this—that I was wearing as pajamas.

I pulled the comforter tighter around me, even though I knew it was too late to stop him from noticing it.

“Are you okay?” Crossy asked. For a second, I thought he was asking about my emotional wellbeing from being seen in this shirt, but then he added, “Why weren’t you in class?”

“Oh, I just overslept,” I muttered, rubbing a hand over my eye. “Guess I overdid it on the weekend, huh? What a cliché, sleeping through a Monday morning class.”

He frowned again. I wanted to tell him that I preferred it when he looked happier, that I hated the way he was frowning like that, but I wasn’t sure how he would take that and I was worried about offending him.

“Are you sick?” He asked, his frown deepening.

“No,” I said immediately. “Of course not. I just overslept.”

He hummed but looked over me carefully. “I don't know. You don't look too good.”

I rolled my eyes. “Gee, thanks.”

"You know what I mean," he said. He pushed me back towards my bed. "Lie down."

"I'm fine," I muttered, but sitting down did actually sound really nice. So I sat and continued sipping on the iced coffee he brought me. "And more importantly, you should be in class right now."

"Haven't we already been over this?" he asked with a small smirk.

I just stared back at him. "Okay, I promise I'll go to class soon," he said. "I just wanted to make sure that you were alive."

"Barely," I muttered. I pulled my feet up so that I could pull the covers over me. Then Crossy did the strangest thing he had done all morning. He pulled the covers up for me, tucking me in. I raised my eyebrows at him and he just shrugged and said, "I didn't want you to be cold."

"You are a weird, weird boy, Caleb Cross," I muttered.

I put the coffee down on my nightstand and leaned back, tucking my hands behind my head, and looked him over. "You were worried about me.”

He stared at me a little inquisitively. "I thought we already established that.”

"We did.” I continued staring at him though. Then, I let out a long sigh. "You were worried about me. You, Caleb Cross, were worried about me ."

He stared at me impassively, and then said, "Yeah, I was."

I wasn't sure why it meant so much to me.

Maybe because all this time I kept replaying those moments that we had, that moment we had, New Year's Eve, and then the pain that I felt following it when he never called me.

When he never showed up. And then when he finally did show up but he was with her.

It just felt like such a 180 from what he had been then that it was hard for me to understand.

"I should get to class," he said. "I don't want you to have to re-teach me this whole unit."

I watched him as he stood up and started to walk away and I said, "Crossy."

He looked at me over his shoulder, eyebrows raised. I just whispered, "Thank you."