Page 3 of Scars of Anatomy

Introductions Part II

After lab, I head to one of the dining halls on campus to meet up with Chase and some of our teammates. After filling up my tray and paying, it doesn’t take me long to find them since they’re sitting smack-dab in the middle of the dining area, causing a ruckus.

“Aye! Look who finally decided to roll his ass out of bed,” Chase greets me with a grin on his face, prompting other members of the team to holler and give me a hard time as I sit down.

“Shut up,” I say, picking a fry off my plate and throwing it at Chase, hitting him in the chest.

“Seriously, if I didn’t see you at football practice I would’ve thought you were dead the past few days. You sleep like a rock, dude,” he comments before picking up the fry I threw and eating it.

“Well, yeah, it’s tiring carrying all of your asses out on the field,” I comment, earning a bunch of “Ohhh”s and “Burn”s.

Chase shakes his head. “Whatever.”

A well-manicured hand with black nail polish lands right next to my tray, causing the table to go silent. I look up to see Adrianna, her other manicured hand resting on her hip as she looks down at me.

“Bronx.” She says my name in a tone that has me dreading this conversation.

“Adrianna.”

Her eyes narrow and her lips tug up into a closed-lipped smile. “You didn’t want to be my partner?” she asks in a sickeningly sweet voice that tells me she’s actually pissed.

I shrug, taking a bite of my sandwich. “Your table was already full.”

She lifts her hand from the table, crossing her arms and shifting her weight onto one hip. “Nessa was going to move, so you could have had her spot.”

“Didn’t look like it,” I comment, continuing to eat my lunch. If I remember correctly, none of the girls at her table looked willing to move. “Don’t worry about it, Ads. I like the partner I got.”

She scowls. “You’re at a table full of nerds.”

“More chance of passing the class, I guess.”

Fed up with me and my curt answers, Adrianna lets out a sound between a groan and a growl before stomping off.

She’s just mad that she couldn’t snag me as her partner, trapping me for an entire semester.

That and the fact that I left her low and wet after our little late-night rendezvous in the showers over the weekend and haven’t talked to her since.

“You didn’t want to be her partner?” Chase asks, slight amusement in his voice. He already knows the answer to his question, knowing my dynamic with Adrianna.

“Nope,” I say simply, opening my water bottle and taking a drink.

“Ouch, harsh,” Brennen comments, not sounding too sincere. “Who’s your partner, then? Some random nerd?”

“Nah. Her name is Olivia McCausland,” I say.

“Olivia?” I hear JC’s voice pipe up, and look down the table a few seats to see him leaning in, looking at me. “Did you say Olivia McCausland?”

“Yeah,” I say slowly.

A wide, fond grin spreads across his face.

“Dude, Olivia’s awesome! I had her as my physics lab partner last year, and she’s so fucking smart.

Get this, the TA for that lab was a total dick.

He made the lab way harder than necessary, but Olivia breezed right through it.

She didn’t let me slack off either. Just when I thought she’d be the type to do all the work and ask me to stay the hell out of her way, she actually sat there and explained the material to me by having me help her.

She probably taught me more than the TA and teacher combined.

“And back to the TA being a dick. Even after she would sit there and walk me through it, explaining everything, we’d still end up getting the lab done way before everyone else, but the TA wouldn’t let us leave until another group finished.

Even after he checked our work and interrogated me about the material—which I actually understood thanks to her—he wouldn’t let us leave early.

So to pass the time, Olivia calculated how much force it would take for both me and her to bust through the window and jump out.

” He laughs, shaking his head. “She’s the best. You’re lucky, bro. ”

I feel a smile tug at my lips. I already knew she was brains and beauty, but this just makes me even more excited for lab.

After lunch, I walk across campus to the language arts building for my English class. On my walk over, just ahead of me, I spot a powder-blue backpack and long caramel-colored hair pulled over a white T-shirt clad shoulder.

“Olivia!” I call, jogging to close the distance between us.

She looks over her shoulder, some wisps of hair flying in front of her face in the hot summer breeze. She tucks the strands behind her ear, smiling when she spots me and slowing her stride to let me catch up.

“Hey,” she greets me when I finally reach her.

“Hey, where are you headed?” I ask, falling into step with her.

She pulls the textbook she’s holding away from her chest, flashing me the cover. “English.”

“Me too,” I say, feeling hopeful as we reach the old cobblestone building. I hold the door open for her. “What teacher do you have?”

“Professor Hobb.”

That name sounds familiar. I pull my phone out of my pocket, double-checking my class schedule to see that I’m in fact also heading to Professor Hobb’s class. “Room 112, right?”

She grins, rounding the corner that leads to room 112. “Right.”

“Looks like we have another class together,” I gloat, following her into a small room that seats about twenty-five people.

She walks to the far side of the class and slips into a desk three rows back. I take the desk right next to her.

“I guess this means we’ll be seeing each other every day,” she notes, bending over to reach into her backpack, which is propped against the back leg of the desk chair. She pulls out a white notebook and a pencil, setting them on top of the textbook in front of her.

I think about it for a moment before realizing she’s right. Our English class is Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, while our anatomy class is Tuesday and Thursday, with the lab on Wednesday. “I guess so.” I smile, feeling excited that I get to see her more than once a week.

Suddenly, I feel a presence to my right. I look over to see a girl standing next to my desk, staring at me while tightly clutching her books.

“Um, hi,” I acknowledge her, not recognizing her whatsoever.

Her eyes narrow and she quickly turns on her heel, scurrying to sit in a desk at the back of the room with a huff.

I stare at her for a moment before slowly turning back to Olivia, baffled. “Okay, I have no clue what all that was about.”

Olivia bites her bottom lip, trying to suppress a giggle. “I think you stole her seat,” she whispers.

“I stole her seat?” I look down at the top of the desk, as if it’ll have the girl’s name carved into it. “Were we assigned seats?”

She shakes her head. “No.”

“Okay, then, at least now I don’t feel like a complete dick.” I chuckle. “From her reaction you would’ve thought I committed first-degree murder. Do you know her?”

That earns me a small laugh. “I believe her name is Lacy. She was the president of the chemistry club for a semester, and she can be a little intense at times,” Olivia admits with a slight cringe.

“I believe it,” I mutter, just as the teacher walks in.

Professor Hobb’s heeled clogs click against the tiled floor, and her black flowy pants with a wildflower print swish around her ankles as she gets ready at the front of the classroom. She’s in a long-sleeve V-neck shirt and her gray hair is tied up into a bun.

“All right, class,” Professor Hobb mutters, loud enough for us to hear. She pulls out some papers from her tote, making stacks and laying them across the front of her desk. “If you missed the first day of class please come up and grab the syllabus, along with some other papers.”

Olivia glances at me expectantly, knowing I missed the first day. I hop up from my seat to grab the papers—something I typically wouldn’t do if she wasn’t staring at me, because there’s a 90 percent chance I’ll lose them within the next couple of days anyway.

I make a slight show of grabbing the papers and taking them back to my desk, pretending to thoroughly glance over them to appease Olivia.

“Okay,” Professor Hobb addresses us as soon as everyone is in their seat and class is officially scheduled to start. “It looks like we have a full class today, so why don’t we do introductions since we skipped those last time?”

A low groan erupts from the class. I look over at Olivia to see her shoulders sagged and her lips slightly turned down into a scowl, also not thrilled.

I lean over and whisper to her, “I’ll introduce you if you introduce me?”

That causes a spark to twinkle in her eye, and one side of her mouth tugs up in a smile. “Deal.”

“I didn’t know you were double-jointed,” I exclaim to Olivia, referring to the fun fact she’d mentioned when we had to list one about ourselves during our introductions. She even demonstrated her skill by bending her thumb all the way back to her wrist.

“Well, we just met, so we don’t really know anything about each other,” she states as we walk out of the building, our class over.

True, and I want to know more .

“Still, that’s sick, Liv,” I tease, feigning disgust and cringing at the thought of her twisting her fingers around in an unhumanlike way, imagining the pain it would cause if I even tried.

She shrugs, unaffected, a satisfied smirk on her face.

As we walk across campus, she opens up our English textbook, skimming through the pages.

“We have to read all of that?” I gawk, watching as Olivia rests the book on her forearm and uses her free hand to flip through the pages she bookmarked. Professor Hobb assigned us some poems to read and be prepared to discuss on Friday.

“It’s only five poems.” Olivia giggles, examining them.

“Yeah, but that one’s two pages long,” I retort, a slight whine in my voice, pointing to the text. “Aren’t poems only supposed to be a few lines?”

She chuckles, closing the textbook and hugging it to her chest. “They can be longer. It’s not that bad. It shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes total to read them all.”

“Still.” I huff, exasperated. “Who assigns homework during the first week of class?”

Olivia presses her lips together, trying to suppress a smile while giving me a sympathetic look, but I can detect the laughter dancing behind her eyes.

“Yo, Bronx!” I hear someone yell, and look to my right to spot Brennen walking our way.

“Hey, man,” I greet him with a bro handshake, and he falls into step with us. “What’s up?”

“You going to Kohan’s party tomorrow night?” he asks.

I let out a low curse. “I almost forgot about it. Yeah, I’ll be there. You wanna come?” I ask, turning to Olivia.

Her eyes widen in surprise. “Oh, no. Thank you, though. Parties aren’t really my thing,” she admits nervously.

“You sure? It’s going to be fun,” Brennen tries to persuade her, leaning around me to talk to her directly.

“Oh, Olivia, this is Brennen. Brennen, Olivia,” I introduce them.

“Hi,” Olivia says, giving him a small smile and wave. “And, yeah, I’m sure.”

“Positive?” I press, slight hope that she might change her mind in my voice.

“Positive,” she confirms, and I feel myself deflate.

“Where you heading next, Miller?” Brennen asks, looking at his watch. “There’s still over an hour before we have to get ready for practice.”

“I have to run to the bookstore to pick up my books. Teacher’s already assigning homework.”

“Already?” Brennen asks, appalled, and I nod. “Damn, bro, that sucks.”

“Tell me about it,” I mutter.

From my peripheral vision I see someone approach Olivia, and I turn my head to catch Delilah looping her arm with Olivia’s, and now walking with us. “Hey, girlie,” Delilah greets her friend. “Since when do you hang out with football stars?”

“We’re just walking together, Dee,” Olivia states with a slight eye roll.

Delilah shrugs. “Ready to start MCAT prep?”

“Yep. We’re meeting Quinton in the computer lab, right?” Olivia confirms.

“Correctomundo, but his class doesn’t get out for another thirty minutes, so guess who gets to stand in that long-ass line with me at the coffee shop,” Delilah sings cheerfully.

Olivia lets out an exaggerated groan. “Really, Dee? It’s way past noon.”

Delilah grins. “Really.”

“You’re going to get an arrhythmia from the amount of coffee you drink,” Olivia mutters. “See you, guys,” she announces to me and Brennen before she veers to the left with Dee, toward one of the campus’s coffee shops.

“See ya, partner,” I call after her with a wave.

“Ready to hit the bookstore?” Brennen asks.

“No,” I admit honestly, but we head there anyway, Brennen deciding to pick up his books for the semester too.