Pulse (Contemporary new adult/college romance) (Club Grit Trilogy)

Pulse (Contemporary new adult/college romance)

Chapter One, #ThrowbackThursday:

Chapter Two, #FollowFriday:

Chapter Three, #StarbucksFail:

Chapter Four, #DTF:

Chapter Five, #Swag:

Chapter Six, #OutWithTheGirls:

Chapter Seven, #SOS:

Chapter Eight, #TheHungoverGames:

Chapter Nine, #TriggerWarning:

Chapter Ten, #NewDigs:

Chapter Eleven, #ThingsBoysNeverSay:

Chapter Twelve, #Wasted:

Chapter Thirteen, #YouDontKnowMe:

Chapter Fourteen, #NoFilter:

Chapter Fifteen, #ItsComplicated:

Chapter Sixteen, #Recovery:

Chapter Seventeen, #ThingsGuysDoThatGuysHate:

Chapter Eighteen, #LikeThisIfYouCryEveryTime:

Chapter Nineteen, #WastedYouth:

Chapter Twenty, #ThingsGirlsNeverSay:

Epilogue, #YOLO:

The Playlist

About the Author

This one goes out to my besties (especially you two, Lexi and Lil J). Love you, bishes!!! xxx

C
OLLEGE WAS A DREAM COME TRUE
.
I was accepted to my top choice college: University of California, Beverly Hills. Although I’d never been to California, I’d dreamed of living there ever since I’d been a kid and read about movie stars and their glamorous lives. I wasn’t an idiot. I knew that to get successful in California, or Cali, as I now called it, I’d have to have a real job, a real skill, so I’d worked hard in high school to get into UCBH, and as a woman in engineering with a compelling story about my life living on a farm in Iowa, I had gotten accepted to my program.

The only thing better than getting into UCBH? My parents winning the lottery.

No, I totally swear it was true.

We had a tradition, on Monday nights, of buying a single lottery ticket with the same numbers we always used: our birthdays, our home address, and the year my parents met. We always caught the numbers being announced on TV and had always laughed that we’d never win, but it was a cheap, one dollar way to ensure that we started out the week together, in the same living room watching our old thick television together. My parents had given me the best they could, sending me to public school but supplementing the curriculum with activities like 4H and Girl Scouts. It hadn’t been enough to get a scholarship, just to get accepted to UCBH, but after I got my financial aid package (or rather, lack thereof), I’d been hoping for a miracle and got one, as well as a substantial increase in my allowance.

What I hadn’t expected: getting into the top tier sorority on campus, Omega Mu Gamma. I’d participated in pledge week because my roommate was, and I didn’t want to go to the normal freshman mixers alone, so I’d gone with her to meet the houses. All week, I heard about how I was “cute”, “precious”, and “adorable” from the sisters of the house, who were immaculate in their pastel sweaters, tiny diamond stud earrings, and kitten heels. For once, I felt proud of how I looked. I didn’t feel like some country hick that people would think was uneducated just because I was naïve.

They were the kind of women I wanted to be, instead of the girl who was wearing high-top sneakers, jeans with the knee holes worn in (and not on purpose), and a flannel shirt I’d had passed down from my brother but wore because it was practical around the farm. This wasn’t Iowa anymore: this was the big leagues and I had to step up my game. The next week, I spent a good chunk of cash on Rodeo Drive, on clothing to look like the other girls I’d seen, if not better. The sorority sisters noticed and extended a pledge invite. Before long, I was a part of Omega Mu Gamma, although my roomie didn’t get in. When I got that envelope under my door, with “Emma Nelson” written in curly cue font framed with curled dingbats, my heart pounded so hard I had to sit down. I knew my life would finally start.

Although most sororities had a reputation of being full of blonde clones, Omega House was different. The women here were all alpha females in their own fields. They had brains as well as beauty, and hidden behind that beauty was power. They could wrap professors around their finger just as easily as they could entwine frat boys, luring them in with well-constructed arguments and well coifed hair.

Omega girls worked hard, but on the weekends, as I soon learned, they partied hard. The pledge girls that did the best during a given week were given the privilege of partying with the older members of the house at the hottest clubs off campus. This year, that club was Club Grit, a club that only let in people like the Omegas: people that were of an elite, select few that were allowed entry into the kind of world you’d seen captured on digital film and liked by the thousands on Instagram. This was the world of #luxury, #party, #yolo, #swag. This was the world I belonged to now.

It was also the world of #420blazeit.

And of #popping.

#Molly.

#CokeNotCola.

I’d passed pledge week already. Unlike some sororities, OMG went fast instead of taking things slow. Life was no fun in the slow lane. I already had a Big, Samantha, and she and her Big, Kim Lee, and their friend Becca were taking me out clubbing that night. “It’s just a pill. I don’t see what the big deal is,” my friend had said. We were friends, right? And friends wouldn’t let their friends get hurt. I popped it and at first, felt nothing, so I took another shot of tequila mixed with orange juice. Although we were not exactly bartenders, we could make some basic stuff, to cut the edge of the alcohol and make it seem like we were just drinking some extra sour juice. That’s all it really was, anyway: just juice, with a bit of alcohol.

The cool thing? The more pills I took, the more I could do. I could stay up later if I wanted and get all my homework done for the week, so I’d have time to pop a pill and meet up with the cute frat guy that my friends had said would be a smart match, and finding it easier and easier to sleep with more and more guys. It wasn’t a big deal, really. Everyone was doing it and it wasn’t like this was Prairie University or something. I wasn’t some prude, right? I was a fun girl. I was always up for anything.

That’s how I’d ended up at Club Grit on a spring semester Thursday after spring break in Fort Lauderdale with my sorority. The last three quarters had been a fucking blur. We’d done so much in so little time. Winter break in Aspen at a ski resort wasn’t a vacation, it was a privilege. These were the lifestyles of the rich and the famous, of the young and the beautiful.

For some, spring break was the highlight of their school year, a big middle finger at the colleges that had given us harsh midterms and were about to give harder finals. For us, spring break was just the beginning of the spring social season, not the end. It was #ThrowbackThursday, the retro night at the club where there was a different theme based on a decade. This week, it was the 1980s. My sorority sisters were all in Lilly Pulitzer and so was I, the neon prints glowing under the black light in the private VIP section, along with the cosmetics case filled with pills that my Big, Samantha had snuck into the area.

We’d already pre gamed at home, so I didn’t get why she had risked bringing more Molly to the club, but apparently, I hadn’t done enough ecstasy. In her words: “If you have to ask, you have to take another”. Ecstasy was harmless enough though, so I chose a glowing pink tab with a cute fashion designer logo and popped it into my mouth, chasing it with the classic cranberry Cosmo that a cute guy at the bar had added to our order which I’d been sent to fetch by my Big. They were paying and it was only fair I made myself useful, even though it meant I was on my feet all night. I didn’t understand why they didn’t just get a cocktail waitress to bring the drinks to them, or a bottle service girl, but the club was crowded. They were my friends.

Soon, after we’d had enough to drink by Samantha’s pills, and I started to feel the ecstasy take over, my heart pounding faster than usual and yearning for someone to hold me, to love me, to hug and to kiss me, we hit the dance floor. A cheesy retro song you’d hear a morning shock jock play back home came back and the girls and I did the song that went with it, hand motions and everything. A few other people joined in and afterwards, the guy from the bar approached me again and introduced himself. Before long, we were dancing, and then, making out in a corner of the dance floor. Things moved a lot more quickly in LA. I hadn’t kissed my high school boyfriend at all for the first three months lest he think I was a hussy. Now, here in the heart of Orange County, in the soul of California? Being a slut was chic and anyone that disagreed was a prude. I’d lost my virginity a few weeks after joining Omega, with a guy from Beta Rho Omega, the hottest frat at UCBH if not all of LA, all of the Orange County (but really, nowhere else in the OC mattered). I didn’t even remember his name, just that he’d been tall and it’d been dark, that it hadn’t hurt as much as I’d been told it was because I’d been so fucked up on a mix of pills and vodka and candy, the chemicals and the alcohol and the sugar putting me in a state of otherworldly numbness.

Like a lot of the LA douchebags, though, this guy with me on the dance floor, while cute, wasn’t all that good when it came to actual moves. His perfect hair was held up with gel that was too sticky for me to run my fingers through. His shirts were slim fitting and he was almost skinnier than me. As I wrapped my arms around his neck, he told me to watch his collar, because “that’s designer shirt”. Meanwhile, he felt up my breasts, and I was sure he felt my heart beating faster and faster as the pills pumped through my veins, through my heart, with his sticky fingers through my own expensive shirt. Ugh, guys like him were pigs but the kind that my sorority sister recommended I use as practice, so the only damage done was to my dry cleaning bill. So, as we made out and I looked over my shoulder to see my sorority sisters giving me thumbs ups as they grinded on the laps of the men that they hoped to bring back to the house that night, I looked around the club to see who I wanted to take home too.

The bartender from earlier? No, too much of a man slut. He probably didn’t have to put in any effort. I watched as he laughed at some joke that probably had a mangled punch line like a pig in a slaughterhouse and wondered what the appeal of impressing a guy like him was anyway. Didn’t these girls see that he wasn’t the kind of guy they could take home to his parents?

The mysterious man in bottle service surrounded by models? Probably peacocking to lure in girls like me. Although his suit looked designer, maybe it was the only one he had. Maybe he didn’t have some mansion in the Hills that he held lavish parties at. Of course he didn’t: this was the wrong coast for a girl to find her Gatsby, but a girl could dream.

But the guy by the door in the plain black shirts, well fitted dark black raw denim jeans with whiskers on the front under the pockets, honeycombing on the knees, and black shoes that looked like they could belong anywhere, on a dance floor or at a fancy restaurant or at the gym? The one with honey brown skin I could practically taste from across the room, and hair so dark black that it almost blended into the darkness of the club? With his tattoo sleeves almost undulating, pressed by the pressure of his firm muscled arms?

Of course, I wanted the one thing I couldn’t have.

That was the man I wanted, even when he turned around and I read his shirt: “BOUNCER” was written in all white capital letters with a thick font. I couldn’t help but stare at him. Was this animal magnetism or something? His clothes were so plain but that made sense given the fact that he was, well, a fucking bouncer. The question was, would I be soon? His arms were covered in tats, but what kind, I couldn’t tell yet. I wanted to go up to him and pull out his arms and look at the lines, the colors, and read the art. I wanted to read him. I saw him look across the floor and smile, although none of the girls were approaching him like they were approaching the other two guys. It was like he wanted someone to come up to him but nobody was brave enough.

Maybe he wasn’t so unattainable after all.

Although I knew that the girls at the sorority would judge me if I dated someone other than a frat boy or a wealthy businessman’s son, I’d probably get major kudos if I managed to nab somebody that worked at the club. There were so many perks with dating a nightclub employee: I’d get the 411 on parties as well as more free drinks and maybe some extra benefits too. Plus, I’d never had sex in a coat room or in a nightclub bathroom, and a guy like that bouncer? Although he was sexy as hell, with his firm pectorals and broad shoulders nipping to a tight but firm waist and hips with thighs like a football player, I doubted most girls went after him. Most girls just walked right past the bouncer and only needed one if some guy was messing with them, and instead, they pursued the guys like the one in the VIP or the bartender, trying to get free drinks.