Demanding Ransom

Chapter EIGHT



“Did you see that bike, Mags?”

I shake my head and settle into the leather couch cushions as I slip off my shoes. Mikey’s back from the pool hall, yet his clothes still hold the lingering stench of cigarettes and stale pizza. Too bad I just finished his last load of laundry.

“Not really.”

“Ran must really like you if he was willing to swap with me this afternoon. That bike is top of the line, Mags.” Mikey shakes his head, still not believing the less-than-even vehicle exchange that took place. “Like worth at least five times more than that junker of a jeep of mine.”

I quirk my lips indifferently and give him a shrug. “I don’t know.”

“He’s got a crazy expensive bike and he’s off the charts hot? Not fair, Maggie, not fair.” Cora slinks down next to me, propping her arm up on the back of the couch as she twirls her blonde hair around a slender finger. “Who is this guy and why are you keeping him to yourself?” She snaps a piece of bright pink gum in her mouth, chomping it loudly between her teeth. “Sounds like perfect jealously bait for Brian.”

“I’m not interested in making Brian jealous,” I say, pulling on the string of my hoodie. “And I’m not interested in Ran.”

“Well, you must be both blind and stupid,” Cora asserts. “Because Ran is gorgeous, and Brian is an ass that deserves to made a little jealous if you ask me.”

“I don’t remember asking you, Cora.”

She tucks her head onto my shoulder and wraps her hand around mine. “That’s never stopped me from giving my opinion before.”

For only knowing Cora since our first week of college, I’m amazed at what a fast and rock-solid friendship we’ve forged in such a short amount of time. She’s the sister I’ve never had, and never really knew I wanted. Cora’s the opposite of me in so many ways: overly affectionate—to the point of making things uncomfortable—steadfastly loyal, and she’s got a crazy good sense of style that everyone seems to appreciate. Cora is all of the things I’m not. Including easily infatuated.

“Ran is a hot piece of meat. What’s his story?”

“I don’t know,” I say, but it’s a complete lie. I do know his story. He’d given me a very precise, one paragraph summary of it over our awkward lunch date. I’m just not quite sure how his story fits into mine. “He’s the paramedic that took me to the hospital the night of the accident.”

Cora’s green eyes pull open. “That was two months ago, Mags. And he’s still smitten with you?”

“First of all, the 1950’s called and they want their word back,” I tease, pulling my hand from hers so I can resume my nervous hoodie-drawstring-tugging. “Second, I saw him again two weeks ago when Mikey went to the ER.”

“How many times has this hottie come to your rescue?” she asks, twirling her gum around her finger this time rather than her hair.

“Two times too many.”

Cora turns to face me, her eyes surveying me head to toe. “I think the fact that he came to your house and still took you out after seeing you dressed in that ratty sweatshirt and those faded jeans proves he’s into you, Maggie.” Her gaze scans me once more. “Believe me, this is not you at your best.”

I tug the hood of my sweatshirt up over my head, almost wishing the act would drown out Cora’s incessant chatter, but no such luck. She continues for the next hour—and the entire duration of our car ride back to Davis—talking about how I need to get some and ‘how long has it been since Brian, anyway?’ I tuned her out somewhere around exit 46B and forced myself to focus on other things while I faked sleeping in the passenger seat of her daddy’s BMW.

Unfortunately, the only images I could summon on the underside of my eyelids belonged to Ran: his nice face, lips, and newly discovered body art. Every time I closed my eyes, it was Ran I saw in my head. And it was his voice I heard rattling around in my brain, not Cora’s much too high tenor that sounded like it belonged to an eight-year-old girl.

“Maggie?” Something pushes my shoulder and my head wobbles unsteadily. “Maggie, we’re here.”

I blink rapidly, forcing the lingering effects of sleep away, and unbuckle my seatbelt. “Yeah. Yeah, I see.”

Slipping out of my seat, I unlock the passenger door. Cora’s already out of the car and pulling open the lid of the trunk to withdraw my suitcase from inside it.

“Sawyer!” She calls out to a black haired boy I recognize from one of the frat parties we’d attended the first week of school. “Help Maggie with her bags.”

Sawyer jogs over to us and scoops my luggage out of Cora’s grip. “Hey Maggie. Glad you’re back.” He flashes me a pearly smile, though his bottom lip is packed with dip.

“That crap will give you cancer, Sawyer,” Cora scolds, hiking her designer purse up her shoulder. Her three-inch heels click across the asphalt as she walks.

“Not the kind that will kill you.” The three of us skirt around the mad rush of bicycles and students scurrying across campus. For a Saturday, it’s unusually jam-packed.

“Any kind of cancer can kill you, moron.” Cora gives me a sympathetic look, but I wave her off. If coming back to school means being on the receiving end of insincere empathy and false compassion, then I’m ready to hop back in Cora’s car to drive ninety miles straight in the opposite direction. I came back to Davis to escape all that I’d left at home, pity being one of those many things.

“Sorry, Maggie. I heard about your brother.”

“It’s fine.” I hobble into the entry of our dorm lobby, wishing my stupid leg would stop giving me such grief. I know the original injury was bad, but I figured I’d be patched up and good as new by now.

The three of us ride the elevator to the fifth floor, and I’m grateful when Sawyer offers to carry my belongings all the way into our room. It’s taking all of my effort to walk without a noticeable limp, and being weighed down by a suitcase full of clothing probably wouldn’t make that any easier to do.

“You’ll be in O-Chem on Monday?” he asks, setting my bag onto my bed against the far wall. Our room isn’t big; Cora had arrived on campus a day before me and claimed the half closest to the long stretch of windows, leaving the bed against the cold, cinderblock wall for me. I didn’t complain at all, because truth be told, I’d figured I wouldn’t actually be spending much time in our dorm. I had assumed I’d be sleeping most nights over at Brian’s off-campus apartment. How wrong I’d been in that assumption.

“No.” I shake my head and unzip the luggage, pulling out my clothing and walking to the closet with them in hand. “I had to drop all my classes this quarter. All but Anthro—Professor Long did me a huge favor with that one.”

“Well, if you end up taking O-Chem again next quarter, chances are we can be lab partners because I’m currently failing.” Sawyer flashes another award winning smile, then reaches for an empty red cup on Cora’s desk and spits into it, throwing away any of the charm he might previously have exuded.

“You’re not going to fail,” I assure. “You’ll do great.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Sawyer says, stepping backward toward the door. “But I’ve got about 53% in there right now. So I’ll be seeing you in class next quarter, Maggie.”

I offer a smile. “See you then.”

Sawyer walks out of our room and Cora comes to my side to finish transferring my clothing from my suitcase to the closet.

“There’s a movie showing tonight on the quad,” she says, slipping a gray, wool sweater onto a hanger. “Most of our floor is going. Wanna come?”

“I don’t think so,” I say as I fold my underwear and socks into the top drawer of my dresser. “I think I’ll hang low tonight.”

“Suit yourself.” Cora takes the now empty luggage from my bed and stands on toe to try to place it on the top shelf. “But there are supposed to be some mighty fine upperclassmen attending.” The suitcase wobbles into place, and Cora keeps a steady hand in front of it until she’s satisfied it’s not going anywhere. “Probably won’t be any guys hotter than Ran, anyway.”

“Probably not,” I reply, my eyes burrowing into the stained concrete floor underneath me. I chance a glance up at Cora, and her mouth is pulled into an ‘I told you so’ smile.

“Probably not,” she says once more.

***

When the bright light from the hallway slices into our room, I have to squint my eyes to fight the glare, even though they’re still closed.

“Cora?” I croak, lifting up slightly in my bed. “Cora, what time is it?”

Two giggles—one female and the other distinctly male—offer me the only answer I need. It’s late. Like middle-of-the-night-and-Cora’s-brought-someone-home-with-her kind of late.

“Seriously Cora?” I heave a spare pillow across the room toward the intertwined couple and one of them mutters, “Thanks.”

Ugh. This is so not how I wanted to spend my first night back at school. I’d take the muted sound of Mikey throwing up on the other side of our shared bedroom wall over Cora’s midnight romp. Not that she’d go too far. That’s the funny thing about Cora. She pretends to be this girl that’s been around the block and then some, but the reality of it is that she always stops things before they get to that point.

We had a conversation the first night we met about our experiences, and I was shocked to learn that Cora was a virgin, and that she intended on staying that way until her wedding night. Cora proved herself to be the perfect example of ‘you can’t judge a book by its cover.’ On the outside she looked experienced, overly confident, and well practiced, yet on the inside she was completely innocent.

I’d never been jealous of Cora over much, but that was one thing about her that gripped me with envy.

“Can’t you guys get a room?” I yank my pillow and blanket under my arm and push past them toward the door, snatching my cell phone on the way out.

“Yeah, we kinda just did,” the boy-of-the-week utters as they tumble onto Cora’s bed with a thump.

Though it’s the dead of night, you’d never know it based on the amount of noise and bustle on our fifth floor. The movie on the quad finished up hours ago, and my guess is that the following parties and keggers have also just recently wrapped up—or were broken up.

Foggy with sleep, I trudge to the student lounge at the end of the long hallway and toss my makeshift bedding onto a vacant loveseat. Fluffing up my pillowing, I lie down and stretch myself under the patchwork quilt, hoping to summon the deep sleep I was in just minutes before Cora and her boy-toy barged into our room.

There’s another student folded into a small armchair to my left, his glasses resting on the tip of his nose, about to slide right off, and a copy of Wuthering Heights held loosely between his fingers, hovering just inches over the ground. I’m tempted to go over and push the glasses back up to his bridge where they belong and pull the book from his grasp, but I stuff down my OCD tendencies and rotate over to face the wall.

I’ve tucked my cell in the top edge of my sports bra, knowing how loud our floor can get in the morning and how good I’ve become at tuning out the white noise. Keeping my phone close should help ensure that I’ll hear my alarm go off in just a few hours. I’ve only got the weekend to crank out Professor Long’s paper. I’m going to have to start early if I have any hope of making this quarter count for something.

Just as the commotion on the floor slowly drags itself into the hazy transition of slumber—the point where I don’t know what sounds are real and which are fabricated in my dreams—something vibrates against my chest.

A text.



U will never guess what I just did.



It’s 3:30 in the morning. Must be the wrong number.

My phone buzzes again.



BTW, this is Ran.



Seriously? Ran’s never texted me before. Why would he choose this hour of the night to send his first one?



Me: What did you just do? (And why do you feel the need to share it with me at 3:30 in the morning?)



Ran: We just transported a 5 yr old that ate his pet goldfish.



I chuckle quietly and my student lounge sleeping partner shifts in his too small seat. His book clatters onto the floor.



Me: Is he OK?



Ran: Yes. His older bro told him it was sushi.



Me: That’s a mean older brother.



Ran: That’s an awesome older brother and even more awesome prank.



Me: You are cruel. Does that really warrant a trip to the hospital?



Ran: Yeah, seafood allergy.



I bite back the smile that’s edged onto my lips and force myself to breathe when I notice I’ve stopped doing so while waiting in between texts.



Ran: I haven’t told you the best part.



Me: And that would be?



Ran: That I stopped by PetPalace earlier today (2 for 1 special) and had an extra goldfish in the front cab of the ambulance. So I gave it to him. Made his night.



Who is this guy?



Me: That’s awfully nice of you, Ran.



Ran: IS THAT COMPLIMENT #5?!?!



I roll my eyes and my fingers tingle as I punch the letters on my phone.



Me: Don’t flatter yourself, you stalker.



Ran: Dang it, Maggie. You keep deducting them.



A ten second pause.



Ran: Why am I a stalker?



Me: Because you showed up at my house and just texted me without me giving you my number.



Ran: That doesn’t make me a stalker. That makes me resourceful.



Me: Kidnapper, Hostage Holder, Ransom Demander, and now Stalker.



Ran: Shoot Maggie. I’m just going to count those each as 1/4 deductions since they were in the same text. You’re going to be in the negatives soon.



Me: Really? Don’t get me too excited.



Ran: I’m sure I can get you excited.



My body goes instantly hot.



Me: Shut up.



Ran: I forgot to tell you I downgraded your 5 compliment award to just a kiss, no licking.



Me: And what if I don’t want to?



Ran: At the rate you’re going, Insult Queen, you’re not going to get the chance ;)



My heart twitches inside my chest. He must be drunk. That’s the only thing that makes any sense in this scenario.



Me: Are you drunk?



Ran: No.



Me: You sure?



Ran: Pretty sure you have to drink alcohol to get drunk, and since I don’t do that, I can say with certainty I’m not drunk.



Me: Ok.



Ran: Are you? If so, you’re an angry drunk.



I groan under my breath and the glasses slip from my new friend’s face as he rotates over again in the armchair.



Me: No, I’m not drunk. Just tired.



Ran: Get some sleep. Talk tomorrow.



Me: Is that a threat?



Ran: No, it’s a promise.