So Damn Beautiful (A New Adult Romance) (13 page)

After Peter, I’d decided that satisfying
lovemaking probably wouldn’t come after a night of studying, or
gnoshing on popcorn and watching a movie on the couch. Not that any
of that stuff was bad, but I was past wanting my lovemaking to be
comfortable and mundane. When I’d tried to explain myself to my
high-school girlfriends, they’d looked at me blankly. I wasn’t a
prude—I knew my body well enough to know that it was capable of
experiencing mind-blowing eroticism. It was just that I wanted
something special, with someone who knew exactly how to penetrate
my inhibitions and bring out the wild woman in me. But I didn’t
know exactly how to voice this to others without sounding like a
crazy person. And I certainly didn’t know if some college boy, even
someone like Harrison Waters, was the one who would take me to that
level of ecstasy.

At that moment, Harrison knocked on my dorm
door. He was as gorgeous as ever, wearing boot-cut black jeans, a
hunter-green polo shirt, and very expensive-looking leather shoes.
His freshly washed hair was still damp.

“You look beautiful,” he said, as he gave me
a kiss on the cheek, one that was relatively chaste but still made
me feel a little light-headed and giddy.

“Thanks,” I said shyly.

“Have a great time, kids,” Kendra sang out,
as she continued twirling her hair around the curling iron.

Harrison waved at Kendra, and then we were
off. Washington Square Park wasn’t far from my dorm, and Harrison
had been sweet enough to put together a picnic basket full of
goodies. We settled my blanket on a grassy bank of the park. The
fountain that made the park so famous was turned off, and a giant
white screen was set up for the film. We still had an hour to kill
before the movie started, and other groups of people—mainly college
students and couples in their thirties, it looked like—had
clustered on picnic blankets with their own coolers full of drinks
and baskets full of snacks.

My stomach grumbled. I hadn’t eaten since
early in the day, as I’d spent several hours in the library,
gathering books for a research project I was doing for a
medieval-art class. As much as I loved illuminated books and the
monks who’d made them, my workload seemed never-ending, which was
why it was nice to settle down a bit. A cute guy, a good movie, and
a warm October night in the city I loved—what more could a girl ask
for?

“Don’t expect anything too fancy,” Harrison
said, as I opened the basket.

“Why? Did you bring Kool-Aid and graham
crackers or something?” I joked.

He laughed. “Close. My fraternity brothers
haven’t been paying much attention to the domestic upkeep, and
nobody’s been grocery shopping in a few days.”

It wasn’t terrible, but I had to admit I was
a little disappointed he hadn’t brought a bottle of wine, maybe
even some chocolate, to enjoy while we watched the romantic film.
The pickings were fun but modest—Handi-Snacks, a couple bottles of
juice, two cold beers, sliced bread, cheese, cold cuts, mustard and
mayo, and a scattered assortment of cookies. It was, I presumed,
whatever Harrison had managed to salvage from the Sigma Phi Kappa
kitchen. I wasn’t that picky anyway. I opened one of the juice
bottles and a packet of Handi-Snacks.

“Have you been busy lately?” I asked.

“We have a big crew race coming up, and I’m
the coxswain, so yeah—it’s been kind of hectic,” he said, lying
down on the blanket and propping himself up on his elbow.

“The cox what?” I didn’t pretend to have any
facility for or knowledge of sports, and I honestly couldn’t have
cared less, but maybe Harrison would be able to change my mind. I
admired his long, strong arms, which I was quick to take note
of.

“The coxswain is the dude who faces the bow
and steers the boat. Basically, he manages everyone else on the
team: their power, their rhythm, et cetera. It’s a little
exhausting, because we have a lot of newcomers to the team this
year—people who are incredible athletes but whose coordination
skills are sadly lacking. And we’re trying to get up to speed as a
group, because our next race is against Fordham—and they’ve
consistently ranked number one in our region. So it’s time to edge
out the competition,” he said as he bit into a giant chocolate-chip
cookie.

He talked a little bit more about crew, as
well as some event called the Donut Cup, which I didn’t completely
understand. But I didn’t press with questions. For whatever reason,
the chemistry I’d sensed the first night we met seemed to have been
subdued a bit, like a giant wet blanket had been thrown over a cozy
bonfire and just a few smoldering embers were left.

Stop putting the carriage before the
horse, Annie!
I told myself. Harrison was nice, and while I
wasn’t sure if I was looking for a relationship right now, I also
didn’t want to be like Kendra, who’d become so rigid in her list of
desirable qualities for a guy that tonight was her first date since
she’d broken up with Alex Figueroa, back in the eleventh grade.

Still, I was a bit rattled about the fact
that I wasn’t feeling a whole lot as Harrison became more and more
animated about the intricacies of coxswaining, or whatever you
called it. I chalked it up to the fact that I was tired and cranky
about everything that had happened with Claudia and the committee
just yesterday. At the end of it, when I was on my way to the
subway station, Elsie had caught up with me to deliver another
murderously cold message.

“You know, it’s not too late to drop out,”
she said, eyes boring into mine. “I’d be happy to pick up your
project, considering I have way more doors open to me in this
world.”

I rolled my eyes, though inwardly, my heart
beat like a kick drum. “Elsie, I know you’re jealous, but I’ve got
this. I’m sorry if that messes with your belief in my incompetency.
And trust me, this is one situation where being born with a silver
spoon in your mouth and a house full of Andy Warhol originals won’t
work in your favor. We’re talking
street
art, not some fancy
fund-raiser where pieces are auctioned off to wealthy people who
don’t know the first thing about them.”

She gave me an indecipherable look and
stormed off in the other direction. Looking at Harrison now, I
couldn’t see the family resemblance—in either their looks or their
personalities.

Harrison suddenly sat up and looked at me,
like he was seeing me for the first time. “I’m so sorry—hearing me
talk about crew must be boring as hell to you. It’s just that we’re
neck and neck with Fordham this year, and I’m really counting on
things to pull through for us. But maybe I’m obsessing about
it.”

“Oh, no!” I exclaimed, feeling guilty that he
was now the one apologizing. “I should be the one apologizing—I’m
feeling a little distracted myself today.”

Harrison popped open the two beer bottles and
handed me one. “Why, what’s up? Penny for your thoughts?”

“Well, I got the Quentin Pierce curatorship,”
I started.

“Holy shit! Are you kidding? That’s fucking
incredible, Annie. Weren’t you up against hundreds of students
salivating for a piece of that guy?”

I blushed. Despite how much I’d obsessed over
getting the curatorship, I hadn’t actually given much thought to
the competition I’d beaten out.

“I’ve gotta hand it to you, Annie—he must’ve
seen how special you are.”

I smiled. Harrison was sweet, but I couldn’t
tell if he was flattering me or not. “You know your cousin Elsie
got the curatorship, too, right?”

He looked uninterested. “I don’t really keep
up on El’s drama. Most of the time, she takes for granted just how
good she has it, so when I see her, she’s usually complaining about
what’s not going right, rather than what is.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” I said. “I
mean, Elsie definitely knows her New York art, but she doesn’t seem
to recognize there can be more than one aspiring curator in our
year.”

Harrison waved his hand, as if dismissing
something minor. “Don’t mind El. She’s all talk. I mean, yeah,
she’s intimidating, but it’s all just posturing. She’s primarily
making up for the fact that her parents were too busy hobnobbing
with artists like Jeff Koons to pay enough attention to her.”

I almost felt bad for Elsie, but a deficit of
parental attention didn’t give someone carte blanche to be a
bitch.

“It’s not Elsie I’m worried about,” I
admitted. “It’s my part of the project. See, I was assigned to
commission a street artist to create a piece that sums up the
experience of New York life. But my primary interests are a little
more . . . well, classical. I don’t know the first thing about
street art, and I have no idea where I’m going to find the artist
who’s going to take it to the next level.”

Harrison wrinkled his brow, like he was
thinking. “Why don’t you just go to the places where people make
murals and get the best guy there to do it?”

“Well, that’s the problem. I tried doing
that, but it didn’t work out so well.”

My good mood instantly darkened when I
thought of my earlier conversation with Chase. He hadn’t actually
said no (after all, I’d never actually made a concrete request),
but after the shenanigans his friends had pulled, it was clear what
Chase thought of me. To him, I was just some ditzy small-town girl
with stars in her eyes and zero street smarts. My stomach felt
momentarily hollow when I thought about the harrowing story of his
childhood. Why had he told me any of it? But it didn’t matter. I
had too much pride to let myself go soft with Chase Adams one more
time. As cliché as it was, our worlds were just too different from
each other’s. And while that may not have been a deterrent to
brokering a professional relationship, Chase had made it perfectly
clear how he felt about graffiti “pros.”

So why, for the life of me, couldn’t I shake
him from my thoughts?

I turned back to Harrison. “Besides, this
isn’t about just getting a really good muralist—it’s about finding
someone who’s going to change the way we look at street art
forever,” I said, perhaps a little too intensely.

Harrison put up his hands in an
I-was-only-trying-to-help gesture. “Listen, Annie, I think you
should maybe just focus on having fun with it, not getting too
stressed out. I’ve been to a lot of exhibits before, and the best
ones seemed really effortless. I’m sure there’s a lot of work that
goes into it, but it’s just art—I mean, how hard can it be to find
someone?”

I didn’t really know how to respond to that.
I realized Harrison was just trying to cheer me up, but his comment
came across as highly uninformed and even a little hurtful. He was
brushing off the most important thing in my life, and even if it
wasn’t intentional, it still stung.

We still had about twenty minutes before the
film started, so I decided to excuse myself and run to the bathroom
before I found myself descending into a conversation that might be
a bit too premature to have.

As I turned the corner into the public
bathroom, something out of the corner of my eye caught my interest.
Spray paint on the concrete wall . . . and it looked fresh. I
peeked out around the outside wall next to the ladies’-room
entrance and found a familiar sight awaiting me. A small cluster of
guys with baggy jeans and spray-paint canisters were studiously
tagging the wall, seemingly oblivious to the looks of disapproval
on the faces of passersby. I rolled my eyes. I wasn’t a fan of all
the crap I was way too accustomed to seeing on random walls, but if
people were going to do it, they could at least do others the
courtesy have the courtesy of being somewhat stealthy.

“Annie?”

I spun around, and my breath caught in my
throat.

It was Chase.

A rapturous swelling of desire rose into my
throat as I looked at him. He was wearing dark clothes—black jeans,
black shoes, black T-shirt, and black hoodie—all of which brought
out the prismatic beauty of his eyes. He was standing close to me,
as usual, which meant he’d crept up like a cat while I was
observing the young taggers.
They could learn a thing or two
about stealth from him
, I thought.

Chase looked over to where my attention had
been. “Dumb kids,” he said. “These aren’t artists, so don’t get it
all wrong. Their style is totally fucked—if you can even call that
style. Most of us who grew up on this have a degree of
consciousness and discernment, you know.”

I sighed. I wasn’t about to have a debate
about art with Chase. Especially after what had happened with Pike
and Reynaldo, I was definitely giving him and his ilk a wide berth.
Without a word, I went into the bathroom, half-expecting Chase to
come after me. But, sure enough, when I came out, he was still
there, grinning at me.

“Well, Goldilocks, aren’t you even gonna say
hello?”

I crossed my arms and shot him an icy look.
“Why the hell would I do that?”

He shifted his weight and shoved his hands
into his hoodie pockets. “Listen, Pike and Reynaldo were dumbasses.
I didn’t put them up to that shit, you know.”

“Is that your idea of an apology? Because if
it is, you’re an asshole. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get
back to my date.” I shoved past him.

“Hey, wait a second, Annie,” he called after
me, sounding almost forlorn. “I really do want to apologize—not
just for my asshole friends, but for that night at the show when I
spilled wine on your dress.” A small smile played on his lips
before he laughed. “I’m sorry—it’s just, you were so cute when you
looked down and you had all that wine over you. It was like a
cartoon or something.”

My palms started to sweat. Chase Adams
thought I was cute? That would’ve been nice if he hadn’t been
simultaneously making fun of me. I shook my head and kept walking.
A few seconds later, I saw that he’d caught up to me and was loping
easily alongside me, as if we were the best of friends.