Title: Bruins and Rebels | Chapter Six | Sore Thumbs and Welcome
Surprises
Author: Nate
Pairing: Paris/Jess, Brianna/Doug and couplings with the ancillary characters introduced in later chapters.
Spoilers: How can I spoil anything if the Jess spin-off series is never going to exist? OK, so there's still that Big One spoiler from chapter one, but besides that, I can't spoil something that isn't there anymore (looks disappointedly at the suits at Warner Brothers for canceling the whole idea).
Rating: PG-13 (swearing, sexual innuendo, thoughts and allusions).
Disclaimer: Amy Sherman-Palladino, Hofflund-Pollone and Warner Bros. Television own the Paris and Jess characters, along with the dead spin-off idea. Other trademarks are owned by their respective companies. Contrary to popular belief, I do not own the hair Liza cut off over the summer to create that cute new short 'do she's sporting in the new WB teaser promos (Turns into a puddle of mush imagining Paris hugging me tight instead of Rory in the promo).
Archiving: Usual suspects; FF.net and LWL. Make sure to ask if you want to archive it yourself.
Summary: Paris and Brianna spend time talking out their feelings about their beaus, then Paris makes a new friend in her photographer at the UCLA volleyball match she's covering against her will. Meanwhile, Brianna gets to know Doug a little more, and there's surprises in store at the end of the evening.
Author's Notes: I apologize for the long wait between chapters five and six, but I felt the summer blahs hard this year, thus I didn't feel like writing all that much despite the plot forming in my head (I'm also putting blame on Ellen Muth from Dead Like Me for the way she looks in tight jeans and tiny shirts, she was such a distraction over the summer. Is she allowed to look that freakin' hot playing a dead girl?!). It was only through divine intervention (OK, Liza's appearance on the West Wing showing on Bravo Labor Day and Mila on The Michael Essany Show last night for some guidance) that I was able to get this chapter out. I also had to clear up the plot a few times since I took the storyline in some different directions than I intended earlier in the chapter.
The usual thanks to my betas (Ash and Jamie) for being patient and putting up with the length of my stories, they're nuts for reading them and making sure everything makes sense. For those who reviewed chapter five and have stuck around after all these months, thanks so much. And thanks to the Whipper Dippers on-thread (Jamie, Reeka, Susie, Kelly, Priya) for keeping my love for Paris and Jess strong. If Milo's coming back, Jess is going to get an education from Paris about S&M darn it ;)!
[blatant plug]Speaking of Dipper fic, coming soon check out the username DipperRoundRobin for great contributions from all of us at the Whipper Dipper thread we all did together in order to keep the Dipper flame strong. You'll love them all, I promise.[/blatant plug]
On with the show without further adieu, party people in the place to be!
"Come on you stupid little man, volley the damned ball, your arms are right under it!" Paris was learning all about volleyball just fine from Brianna, but at the same time getting drubbed in the school of hard knocks by her brunette partner-in-crime. In the fourth hour of gaming after an exhaustive history of the game, overviews of strategies and a quick quiz by Brianna, Paris felt ready to take on the former All East Bay star for JV Antioch in a few matches of World Team Volleyball. After a few training matches, Paris won the first two sets by a small margin. But since then, she had been defeated in four matches in a row, with three shutout sets during the matches. It was eleven at night though, and even if Brianna was a seasoned gamer who was taking on an admitted novice, the strain of staring at the same screen for three hours was starting to make Brianna a little light-headed. Paris' advantage of having a longer class schedule at Chilton and staring at teachers as they lectured for ninety straight minutes was starting to become apparent. Her French team was starting to rally from a two set deficit against the Daugherty Americans, and in the last set of the night Paris was up 29-26, with Brianna trying to make a last ditch comeback.
"Par, you're up by three, can't we call it a night and head to bed, we'll continue the game tomorrow morning. My thumbs are numb and my hand hurts like hell," Brianna was whining, wishing she could just end the game and put drops in her eyes. She had taken her contacts out after the second match and wearing the eyeglasses she rarely wore after she got contacts when she was twelve.
"I'm going to beat this game, and I'm going to beat you Bree, even if it takes me all night." Paris was being very stubborn and held onto the controller for dear life, extra calluses forming on her thumb from one too many mashes of the X and O buttons on her controller. She had to admit that bonding with another girl over the cool glow of a TV screen was unorthodox, yet fun. During the game they both talked about the latest happenings with Jess and Doug, and Paris wasn't surprised to hear about Brianna going to Doug's dorm to play games with him Friday night while she was up in Northridge. She was smart and noticed the slight disappointment Doug showed when he stopped by the last three days and found Brianna already gone. Something happened between them, but it's not my place to pry in and play yenta. They'll figure things out soon enough, she thought as her roommate kept denying she was thinking of Doug in an attractive way.
"Oh fine, but if you lose this point I'm calling this game a draw and you are getting to bed young lady. Don't forget you have that book report on The Greatest Generation you have to final draft before you head off into dreamland."
"I'm just going to add a couple sentences and correct some errors, no need to puff up a piece further where I call Tom Brokaw a panderer for writing a book glorifying the AARP generation to no end. If it wasn't for those GI's and the creators of Levittown America would still be a mainly urban society, the outskirts of town would still be the playgrounds of the kids instead of the rich, and racial integration would've been a breeze, along with traffic."
"So in theory, it's all their fault that your parent's childhood sucked beyond belief and in turn yours?" Brianna was puzzled, yet interested in Paris' theory.
"Exactly my friend, exactly. I'm lucky though, the Manor is in an older section of Hartford so I don't have any of that disillusioned suburban kid bullshit to deal with." Paris served the ball and awaited Brianna to return it with her six little guys. It sailed towards the back of the screen, and one of the pixilated players in blue bounced it towards the front line, where #8 was waiting to set it for #10 for a hard spike onto the French side, and hopefully Brianna's 27th point of the set. #8 set the ball in the air, and #10 approached the ball with fury, bashing the ball over the net and towards Paris' middle line, unprotected since Paris was relying on a 4-2 defense.
"Crap!" Paris found she had to think fast in order to save the ball and the match for herself. Her red #5 player deep in the back towards the serving line ran left and up for dear life in order to bounce the ball inches off the ground back into the air. She smashed in the face of her triangle button and held her left analog stick hard in the left-and-up axis position, tuning out Brianna's call for the ball to 'hit the floor, hit the floor', along with what might have been music once upon a time in the background, but was now grating notes coming out of the TV's tinny speakers.
She held her breath and it seemed like slow motion as the computerized player made a desperate slide onto the hardwood below. The only thing she could do for the next few milliseconds was wait and hope #5 got the ball in the air high enough so #2 could spike it in-between Brianna's strong 3-3 line. She closed her eyes, feeling just as nervous as when she found out her SAT scores. The moment seemed to last forever, and her fingers were crossed within her.
Moments later, Paris felt the satisfying tactile response of her controller shaking and vibrating roughly and heard the sound of a hard hollow thump, meaning #5's mission to keep the ball in the air had been successful, and in the ensuing shock, Brianna's focused player was at the net in victory dance position, far away from where #2 would be targeting his hit towards. Brianna's thumb tried guiding the little guy towards the middle in a last act of desperation to save the game, but was unsuccessful as French jersey #2 gave the ball a hard kill over the net at about 75 mph, and with a high bounce, it bounced right in the middle of Brianna's playing field and out of sight as the shiny font came onscreen and a disembodied computer voice announced the final score. "Game, set and match to France, score 30-26. France wins three sets to two."
Brianna looked at her roommate nervously, Paris looking as if she was going to break out with the bad 'Bears Super Bowl Shuffle'-like dance moves any second and going all Deion Sanders on her for her first ever video game win.
Instead, Paris just pumped her first in the air and squeaked, then said "I win", smiling at herself. She then turned to face Brianna.
"You've been a fine opponent Brianna, and a great mentor, thank you." Paris turned off the PS2 and started wrapping up her controller, leaving Brianna confused. She stood up and started wrapping her own controller.
"What, no victory dance or rubbing the loss in my face Par? This isn't fencing where you shake hands at the end babe, you have to make sure I'll never forget this loss and that I'll have a little resentment built up the next time we take each other on," Brianna said with a hint of cockiness in her voice. Paris looked at her and scrunched her eyebrows in annoyance.
"Hey, it's my first win, I'm still learning how to navigate the post-game afterglow." She huffed, and made a promise to Brianna. "Next time I win I promise I'll be in your face telling you how much you suck, and that this is called kicking your ass, etcetera, etcetera. But I'm not doing any dances because I have a ballet teacher from my early years I still look up to."
"Fine, fine, I'll let you be a winner with good sportsmanship, but just this once." Paris headed over to her iBook to finish her drafting as Brianna lay down on the couch watching the late night weather on Eyewitness News. "So, you seemed a little down when you got home from renting the game, what happened?"
The blonde turned around in her computer chair. "Jess called to invite me to dinner with him and his father Friday night, and I had to reject him. We almost fought over the phone and I felt like such a horrible friend for telling him I couldn't see him this week. I mean sure I have his number, but it just isn't the same talking to him personally. I look forward to meeting him, yet I do look forward to his calls, don't get me wrong. It's just that, God, Jess is just--"
"The One in your life right now," Brianna completed. "And you felt like by putting the Bruin first over him, you were a bad girlfriend."
"That's girl-friend Bree, we're not that close yet," Paris said, separating the dreaded word into two as clearly as possible.
"Yeah, yeah, blah-blah-blah-denialcakes, when you took your bath last night I heard a lot of splashing and a strong smell of rosemary and lavender bubble bath. Unless you reverted back to being age two and were playing with your rubber duckie and boat, you were in there having a fantasy about Jess."
"Oh come on, every time I go in the bathroom to bathe or shower now according to you I'm having erotic thoughts about him! May I ask how long I was in there and what proof you have about me having said thoughts, humor me please."
"You were in there a finger-wrinkling two hours and I ended up running downstairs to the commons to use the restroom because you wouldn't respond to my hard knocks on the door to get the hell out. All I heard in response is 'Five more minutes, I'm in the middle of something' as if you were an actress in a Herbal Essences commercial. It didn't take a scientist at the JPL in Pasadena to figure out you were in the middle of something alright."
"What did I tell you about entendres Brianna?" Paris said, blushing and facing up to the truth. "So I took an extra long bath and napped a little thinking of Jess, a normal girl would do that."
"Yes, but you came out and went immediately to bed, wrapped up in the flannel Jess left behind Friday night." Brianna looked straight at Paris, who was wearing Jess' flannel, buttoned down three places, horribly matched up with a pair of blue UConn sweatpants. "You haven't worn any pajamas from your drawer since Saturday night; every night you go in the bathroom and change into Jess' shirt. Wouldn't he want that back by now?"
"Finders keepers," she asserted. "It's not like he misses it anyways, and I'll give it back one of these days. It's a nice shirt, very comfy, large thread count--"
"And it smells of one Jess Mariano's cologne. You have to wash it one of these days Par, it's going to start having your essence on it soon enough, and you'll lose the scent."
"Maybe that's what I want Brianna, maybe I want him to walk around in this shirt when I give it back to him and be reminded of me each and every time he puts it on. After seven days, he leaves it here, it smells of him, and seven days later, it has my fragrance. It's like joint custody, only without the messy divorce and child support thing going on. I plan to give it back to him when I come over to his house next Friday night."
"Paris," Brianna demanded. "Go in the bathroom right now and change into a regular nightshirt, Jess' flannel needs a break."
"I won't do it, you can't force me." Paris pouted and wrapped her arms around her midsection, cuddling the plaid flannel as close as she could to her body.
"Why not?" Instead of seeming predatory however, Brianna had that look that said she was going to get some kind of confession out of her friend.
Paris hesitated, got up from the computer chair, then sat down next to Brianna. "Because, it's a comfort knowing that even though Jess is in Venice and 150-some blocks away from here, I'm wearing something of his. It just makes me feel so safe and comforting. When he held my hand on Friday night, it just felt...I don't know, so right, and by the time bedtime rolled around, I was already missing him, but not in the freaky stalkerish pining way. Then when I came upon the shirt when I cleaned the dorm on Saturday, my first reaction was to run down to Venice and drop the shirt off at his house. But then I decided to try it on, and when I saw myself in the mirror wearing it, it reminded me of the handhold. Each time I got a whiff of the shirt, it was like Jess' arms were around me and..." She huffed, some hair going astray as the breath drifted up her face. "God, I must sound like a lovesick puppy, or a pathetic piner."
"No, you sound like a girl in love, but not ready to face up to it quite yet." Brianna edged closer to her friend on the couch, and took Paris' hand. "Look, you're in the beginning stages of a relationship that's confusing the hell out of you, and adding the stress that's being caused by starting UCLA, you're feeling vulnerable Par. But it's OK, completely, and the only reason I asked you to change the shirt was to help you get those worries and concerns out. You have a pretty good head on your shoulders, and you'll figure everything out soon."
"I know I will, but Rory won't," Paris shot back. "If I tell her that 'oh, by the way I met your ex-boyfriend at a fast food joint two weeks ago and I think I'm falling in love with him', she's going to feel so betrayed at my hands. I kept her companionship at bay for so long because I needed to maintain my rep at Chilton, when really I had a best friend in her all along. I've put her through needless crap the last three years, and she wanted to befriend me despite all of it. And through it all, I kept my mouth shut about my feelings for Jess all through their relationship. The delayed study sessions, him picking her up from school in his ugly brown gas guzzler, the Franklin articles a day late because she was going out with him that night. I never admitted this to anyone but myself, I wanted to be Rory. But I don't want to ruin my friendship with her."
"Don't feel like you have to choose between Rory and Jess." The serious and caring tone Brianna was taking was comforting to Paris, and she listened to each of her words raptly. "If you don't want to tell her right away about seeing Jess and befriending him, I'll keep it secret from her if she calls, you have my word. You two are best friends, but you each have different lives. She has the relative comfort and closeness of being only so far from her family and mother in New Haven, while you decided to uproot yourself from the safe and sheltered life you lived for eighteen years and made a big cross-country move to a town that's about as familiar to you as the surface composition of Pluto. Now I may not know Jess, but I'm sure he's sitting on his bed in Venice, fretting over the same concerns you are, but with the extra challenge of choosing between someone he loved in the past and trying to spark a fire with you. I hope to never have that experience myself when it comes to Leonard, but even with your higher IQ, his thoughts are just as clouded as yours."
"And that's what frustrates me Bree, I'm scared of what's going to happen once I decide that Rory and Hartford be damned, I want this. Is he going to feel the same about me, and am I showing enough interest to keep the spark lit up in the first place? Here two weeks ago I thought the biggest strain I'd have to deal with in college would involve time management, and suddenly here I am, telling a girl I only knew from a stray appearance on a TV game show two years ago about my romantic trials and tribulations as if was the next important plot on One Life to Live in-between wanting someone to wring that annoying little banshee Star's neck for being such a pint-sized bitch!"
"We're making progress then, As the World Turns should be ancient history in your life within weeks." Brianna laughed and rubbed Paris' arm. "But seriously, this is the first time you have a guy who you're just about crazy in love with, and you're afraid of what everyone else thinks. There was Jamie, but he was safe, predictable, rote, and the wildest thing he probably ever did was look at the answers in the back of the textbook."
"Or the teacher's edition, he was never very adventurous at all."
"You mean he never made you scream?" Brianna questioned with a mischievous glint in her eye.
"Unless you count my high-pitched utterance of 'My Jamie, you're so...modest down there', I'm afraid that no, he never had that effect on me." Paris' smirk was almost too much for both to bear, and her and Brianna had an out-of-body experience, giggling like Madeline and Louise used to do whenever Paris had them over at the Manor to study with her.
"You meant to say small but--"
"I memorized that part of the thesaurus, so I had plenty of other words I could use to make it easy on him. Let's just say he tried to overcompensate his endowment by mangling the metric system for his own twisted needs."
"Ouch, that small?"
"He didn't top the 15cm line, even erect." Paris felt a pang of guilt maligning her first love so badly, but what she was telling Brianna was true and hilarious at the same time. If this were the 60s and she was a flower child in Berkeley, he would've been one of those lame singers you found on The Lawrence Welk Show, the epitome of lameness no matter what generation you're in. Romance via the Zagat survey turned out to be a very bad idea, but Paris was getting over it. She decided to turn the tide of conversation towards Brianna's avoidance of Doug. "But enough about Jamie, he's an idiot, all in the past, bygones and so on, it's my turn to have you confide in me. What's going on between you and Doug?"
Brianna turned white the moment the question was asked, and tried a pre-emptive move. "Nothing," she blurted abruptly, rubbing the left stem of her glasses and tucking some hair behind it. She looked away from Paris, trying to hide the effect that just hearing her crush's name was having.
"So you mean nothing as in you and Doug just pass each other in the halls and don't acknowledge or look at each other, or nothing as in you want something but you're both too stubborn to admit it?"
"Nothing as in there's nothing between us at all," Brianna said defensively. "He's a guy on my floor and he happened to talk to me on Friday night and had a PS2 handy. Nothing odd or having sexual connotations between us, I assure you."
"Well," Paris' lips curled into a conspirital grin. "Ronnie in 318 would beg to differ, he's been noticing Doug's been faraway and distant since Saturday morning."
"What?!" Brianna's eyes popped out, as if she was being found out. "Nothing has happened between us, honest to God."
"Bree, I talked to Ronnie because he asked me for some notes in Jiminez's class yesterday, and he wondered as I made copies on the commons machine if I had done something to get revenge on Doug for the handshake incident. I denied it immediately, and he was wondering why Doug was being distant. He said tried to set Doug up on a date Saturday night with some sophomore girl in the DeNeves, but Doug turned the girl down sight unseen and he hadn't been saying things like 'check out that chick's rack' since he first saw him Saturday morning."
"So, he's not himself lately, big deal." Brianna scoffed and got up from the couch, trying to make a beeline for her bed. Paris grabbed her arm and plopped her right back down.
"Ronnie also told me that he heard a certain girl from the East Bay Area complain to herself that she wasn't a siren and didn't have much to offer from behind a dorm door around one in the morning Friday evening. She also called herself a prude and a said to herself that a guy wouldn't want her."
Brianna held her tongue, afraid to confirm the fact that Ronnie's words were her own muttering. "So, that could be anyone, there's lots of girls from San Francisco and Oakland who go to UCLA."
"Brianna, when you came back in after getting the money from Doug you just said goodnight and went right to bed, you didn't say anything else to me. And on Saturday morning when you woke up and I asked how Doug was doing you said he was just fine and changed the subject within moments to schoolwork. What I also don't get is the last three days you've avoided him, but you jumped at the chance to ask for his Playstation and to have a gaming night on Friday night with him." Paris stayed persistent, regarding her roommate just like she would Louise and Madeline. "Don't lie to me, you've been distant towards Doug, and I've noticed it myself, because when I try to call him a jerk or something of that sort, you get this look in your eyes, they slit and you give me this stare saying 'How dare you.'"
"I'm going to bed," Brianna responded coolly, making a move to get up from the couch. "Me and Doug have nothing going on, and we're like you and Jess, just friends. Ronnie is just manipulating and trying to start a rumor his ass can't cash."
"So that wasn't you on Friday night who said those things, because Ronnie also mentioned that Doug took a shower just around the time you came for the money."
"How was I supposed to know Doug was gonna only be wearing a tow--" She screamed and stopped before she could cause more damage to the story, but it was too late. Brianna blanched and tried to string together an excuse that would get Paris off her case.
"That is to say that wasn't me, I mean I..." Brianna trailed off, noticing Paris give her the patented look of doom with the small addition of a smirk.
"So it was you, I knew it!"
"I'm not talking about this anymore tonight, there is going to be no us and there will never be an us." Brianna loosened Paris' grip on her hand and headed over to her bed. "Yes I saw him in just a towel, big deal. Doesn't mean I'm in love with the boy at all."
"But you're at lust with him at least," Paris deduced. "Something that can blossom into love after awhile."
She crawled beneath the covers, hiding her face beneath them. "No one is forcing me to fall in love with Doug, so I just won't do it. We're totally wrong for each other anyways, he's social, I'm introverted, never going to work." Paris tried to speak, but was stopped. "And don't try to tell me you and Jess have a similar thing going, you're both introverted."
"I was going to say opposites attract actually, only it was going to be better phrased than that and less cliché." At the foot of Brianna's bed, Paris sat down, trying to calm her friend while at the same time trying to keep the wounds of Leonard closed. "Apparently he's crazy enough for you if he turns down a tempting chance at scoring some older and more mature flesh and decides to cut the chauvinist act completely off suddenly. Don't you dare tell me that nothing sexual ran through your mind as you saw him in that towel either, you're a red-blooded female."
Brianna brought her bedcovers down, and let down her defenses a little bit. "Fine, I did have thoughts about Doug that would get me forty whacks in a Catholic school back in the 30s, but just thoughts, that's it, I can put them aside."
"Hmm, I'll have to tell him you have a little Catholic schoolgirl fantasy lurking within you." Paris smiled mischievously and started turning out lights throughout the dorm room.
"You tell him and I'll look up Jess' number in the white pages and tell him about your sleep talking dream where you wanted to seduce him in your high school uniform!"
"Oh God, when did I dream that?!" Paris flushed beet red as she flicked the last light in the dorm room not next to her bed off.
"Tuesday morning around four, and from the sounds of it you were trying to warm DreamJess to the idea of skinny dipping in the Chilton pool." Brianna's smile was wide, and Paris rolled her eyes as she crawled into her bed, annoyed.
"Well this is just great, for years and years my sleep talking is harmless, debates with Einstein about why E=MC², editorial discussions with Hearst and Pulitzer and how I think even though they epitomized yellow journalism they're geniuses, and how the chief of ConnDot could've constructed the Hartford expressway system better, completely harmless discussions with famous intellectuals. Then I meet Jess once again out here, and within days I've become his dream slut! Next thing you know my dream self is going to pull a Sandra Dee and go all out with the spandex and leather and take up smoking."
"And that would be bad why?"
"Because my hair doesn't curl as well as Olivia Newton-John's," Paris joked sarcastically. "Someday I'm going to have gotten three hours of sleep, and I'm going to accidentally nap in class. And that's when it's going to hit the fan that the #3 student in Hartford has a subconscious that dreams up situations that would make even the girls of Vivid Video cry uncle."
Brianna thought for a moment, and came up with a way for Paris' sleep talking to become less heated. "My suggestion would to read a very boring book before bed instead of a romance, that's how the seed gets planted in the first place. You read a book about journalism, you'll have a dull foreign policy discussion with Margaret Carlson. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, you'll just be 12 year-old Becky in the 1840's, where an unholy thought of Tom Sawyer gets you a painful whacking. Heck, read one of those really bad 7th Heaven novelizations, and you'll have a ball being like Joan of Arc, the only hope to restore sanity to the community of Glenoak because of the Camdens' wacky interpretation of the Bible."
Paris laughed at the image of herself trying to inspire Ruthie to be her own girl and telling matriarch of the Camden clan Annie to cork it, then giving Lucy a piece of her mind because she was a whiny twit with nothing better to do than take her mother's lead. Brianna's idea sounded inspired, and although she'd miss drifting into a world of men and women with high libidos, she wouldn't miss having to fess up to her newest unbelievable fantasy situation with Jess revealed aloud at three in the morning. Instead of taking a Harlequin off the bottom bookshelf of her nightstand, she reached into the back and took out her new copy of Scientific American and started to read about really exciting advances in technology, at least if you were into life-size holograms and ways to improve the human circulation system.
"Hopefully your idea works Bree, otherwise I may have to see a shrink and have him or her psychobabble the hell out of me," Paris said as she took her book light and bent it so the angle of the light off the page of the magazine would have maximum readability in her eyes.
"Me too, as much as Jess sounds like a dreamy guy, he should remain just that, a dream guy." Brianna laughed and took off her glasses, setting them aside on her night table. "Well, I'm out for the night, don't forget to review those notes I gave you about rally scoring and kills tomorrow during lunch, there will be a test on them later tomorrow Par."
"Yes, Miss Daugherty," she deadpanned as she took out her nose ring. "Will it be on a Scantron, multiple choice or an essay?"
"A little from column B, some from C. Couldn't get the Scantron though, sorry."
"Lovely, some good has to come out of this whole volleyball debacle besides the fact Mrs. Broughton wants me to be smoking and drinking like a true reporter by age 21 from being so bitter over my assignments."
"Don't forget the fedora with the press slip in the band."
"Wouldn't want to, it screams journalist all the way to the brim." After some more idle talking and wishing each other goodnight, Paris and Brianna fell sound asleep, both not having any dreams interrupting their beauty rest since they'd mostly talked things out with each other. Rory's reaction to the news of her and Jess meeting still troubled Paris though, and she knew that there was going to be no way to sugarcoat Gilmore's reaction. She put her mind to it and decided that if things were still developing after next Friday between her and Jess that it would be time to let Rory know about them, no matter the response. She treasured Rory's friendship, but Rory's call that she should build her own destiny included her love life, even if that portion included Rory's ex-boyfriend.
Besides, what girl would want to give this up? she thought as she fell asleep, Jess' cologne from the flannel drifting up her nose and inspiring a restful sleep.
Friday Evening
"OK, #2.5 Dixon Ticonderoga medium weight pencil, sharpened to a fine point?"
"Check."
"Ampad Gregg-ruled reporting notebook, 70 pages?"
"Check."
"Tasco binoculars, in case you and Mai Lin are seated towards the back of the Matadome?"
"Check."
"'UCLA rules, CS-N drools' sweatshirt?"
"Funny Brianna, a barrel of laughs." Paris rolled her eyes as Brianna finished going over her reporting checklist, something that had been Francisca's responsibility since she was a cub reporter at the Franklin. The first time she wrote a story about a classroom remodel, she had misquoted Charleston when she tried to remember the story from her memory, and gotten into trouble over it. Since then it was paramount to Paris that she had every tool a reporter would need to get the story, and get it right, thus the purpose of someone else helping with the checklist.
Paris heard a knock on the front door as she put all she needed for her assignment into her messenger bag, still in heavy use even after her Chilton years. She walked over and opened it up, finding Mai Lin on the other side, nervously biting her fingertips and playing with her Canon EOS Rebel camera, trying to get the focus just right.
"Hi, you told me to meet you here Miss Gellar, right?" she asked nervously.
Paris smiled at her. "Yes, and you can call me Paris if you'd like, I'm not Mrs. Broughton and we're outside of school."
"Oh, sorry," the girl apologized, a little hint of foreignness in her accent. Mai Lin stood in the hall, wondering when Paris was going to start guiding her to the Jag.
"Mai Lin, you can come in if you'd like, you're a little early." Paris stretched her arm out as to invite her photographer into the dorm.
"No, it's OK, I don't want to impose--"
"Impose on me and Brianna during Jeopardy! time, please, three's a crowd."
"But I want to get there early and take pictures of the Bruins during practice, Mrs. Broughton wants me to prove myself."
"I highly doubt Mrs. Broughton wants us to cover the pre-game warm-ups with the same fervor as the game itself Mai Lin, she wants action pictures, remember?" The Asian girl seemed a little tense and Paris was trying to keep her calm for her first big college newspaper assignment.
"I know, but I don't want to disappoint her or bring shame upon you for photographing badly," she said, fumbling with her fingernails.
"You're going to be fine, I assure you, but if it makes you feel more comfortable we can take the long way up to Northridge so you get some air to settle down." Paris grabbed her car keys off a hanging rack and then secured the buttons on her messenger bag.
"Alright." Mai Lin was a very shy girl, not prone to saying all that much. Like Paris she was an outsider to the world of Los Angeles, but unlike her she had been stuck within the constricting confines of her family where she used to live. She was a star photographer for her high school newspaper, yet had to use a ghost name of Bernadette Smith for her photos to be published, lest her two younger brothers and older sister in school find out she wasn't actually doing chores at her uncle's house, but using him as a cover.
"We'll be back by 10:30 Bree, try to keep your hormones under control," Paris joked as she waved goodbye to her friend and walked out the door.
"You mean my sexual hormones or those that I use to frag Doug back into the stone age?"
"Um, the other one, I think, bye!" Paris and Mai Lin left the dorm together, leaving Brianna to prepare her PC for the LAN party her, Doug, Ronnie and a couple other guys and girls on the third floor were participating in the game using each of their room machines. They wouldn't see each other playing Battlefield 1942, so it would be fun trying to capture the flags of both sides and use teamwork to strategize the best plan of attack.
"Bring it on Meriwether and Schultz!" she shouted into her headset, calling for Doug and Ronnie to start the battle and their combined defense of the Axis flag. However, she wasn't expecting another opponent to join in, one which would be much tougher to deal with than Benito Mussolini.
"Hi Brianna, Doug, Ronald, prepare to have those nice little butts of yours get kicked, you're going down!"
"Oh fuck guys, why does she have to represent the Allies?" Brianna frowned as she prepared for Lt. Col. RA 1st Class Piper Shawmut to guide the Allies to victory, and the girl's voice to drive them to poke their eardrums out. Not even Patton would've been able to defeat this terror, and the two boys and girl knew they had a long night ahead of them.
"Piper plays computer games?!" Doug transmitted, almost stunned silent.
"I guess it doesn't take much IQ to walk into Gateway and get yourself a computer," Brianna mused as the three tried to figure out how to ward off this surprise attack at the hands of evil. The old saying 'war is pain' was going to be used a lot that evening.
"So, what's your story?" Paris and Mai Lin had found themselves some good net-line seats towards the middle sections of the Matadome, and were trying their best to settle in and not arouse the suspicions of the Northridge fans and students seated around them.
"My story?" Mai Lin responded, confused as she set up her camera's lenses.
"You know, your story. Where you came from, how you were like in high school, your honors. You know, your life story." Paris smiled at the girl, and was making a concerted effort to befriend the shy Asian in her own unique way. Compared to the petite Paris, Mai Lin was almost like a child, at least physically. She barely topped 5' and weighed a relatively light 92 lbs. Where Paris could sit in her seat snugly, the photographer had plenty of wiggling room in her chair. Mai Lin finished taking a couple of test shots, then turned to talk to her co-worker.
"Well, I was born in Laos in 1985, but then only six months into my life my father who had emigrated to the United States sent enough money so that me, my mother and my siblings could take the long bus ride down to Bangkok then the flight from Thailand to America. At first we lived in Portland, and just about every year up until I was nine we made our way east until my family and me settled in a nice Hmong neighborhood in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. From there I went through the ESL program and started learning things like a sponge, I always got the top grade in my family and made them proud."
"Interesting," Paris said. "How did you get into photography?"
Mai Lin recalled the first time she had shown an interest in the subject. "When I was twelve we went down to Disney World and my mother gave me one of those disposable FunSaver cameras so I could take pictures of my two brothers and sister waiting in line for that haunted hotel ride. You know how photogenic ugly tourists are, right?"
"Only Americans can embarrass themselves so badly anywhere they travel," she mused, multi-tasking as she watched the Bruins practice on the court below while listening to Mai Lin.
"I decided that I'm going to take three pictures to satisfy my parents then use the other 21 exposures to find parts of the park which haven't been photographed 27,000 times a day. So I just wandered around taking pictures of flowers in planters, the shoreline of the lake in front of EPCOT that doesn't face that ugly building or a hotel, the back of Cinderella's castle, wherever I could find someplace to take a picture away from my parents. I even had one where I caught the girl in the Donald Duck costume with her head off, I treasure that photo as the best of the trip and the one I always put in the front of my resume."
"In 21 pictures you basically uncovered the seedy side of Lake Buena Vista?"
"I had it published in the school newspaper, thinking my family was going to be proud of my photo essay." Mai Lin frowned as she recalled the dark side of her life. "But they weren't. The Hmong culture is a relatively new way of living to the American experience, and because it came here so abruptly after those that could flee from Laos and Vietnam came here at the end of the Vietnam War, a Hmong girl's role is still confined to being a lover and housewife for her husband. My mother confided in me once that had she come over here earlier, I would've been her last child instead of her third out of five."
"So instead of taking pride, they thought of your photo essay as shameful?"
"I was told I could never photograph again, even though my teacher said I had a natural gift at setting up a shot perfectly. So my younger brothers and older sister became sort of my watchers at school, preventing me from joining any clubs that would clash with the ideal of perfect doting daughter with a future as only being a housewife. Thankfully my sister graduated two years ago and my brothers discovered the opposite sex and was easily distracted, so I was able to join the Memorial Purple Wings school paper as staff photographer without any distraction. I had a ghost byline though so that my parents wouldn't discover that I wasn't at my uncle's after school."
"Well how did you get to UCLA then?" Paris wondered. "Photography doesn't seem to scream UCLA major out at me all that much."
Mai Lin laughed and patted Paris on the back. "I kind of have an interest in life sciences and molecular biology, so the plan for a year and a half is to fake my mother out by making that my major so she won't be suspicious, however what I didn't tell her is that I dropped all but three of the classes once I got here and replaced them with classes driven towards journalism. Next January, I'll slip by that I changed my major to journalism, and she'll think that I'm the next Dear Abby and will bring prestige to the Vang clan. Then she'll find out my true journalistic intentions, and hopefully it'll all go well without a whole 'I have no daughter' scene going on."
"I like you already Mai, I'm not fond of my own mother either." Paris smiled at her and they both stood at attention as the PA announcer informed the crowd they needed to rise for the national anthem. "I think you and me are somehow going to make a great team, I can see it now. Paris and Mai, partners in crime."
"Cool, sounds like a great gig Par." Their eyes drifted towards the Old Glory hanging on the far end of the arena, and both Paris and Mai Lin awaited their trial by fire as the Lady Bruins and Lady Matadors took to the floor.
"God, this must be the 20th time me and you have had to respawn tonight Doug," Brianna grumbled as once again Piper and her forces cornered their Axis team and blew the heck out of the soldiers. There was no way to salvage the night for them, and they hoped to come out of Battlefield 1942 with at least a shred of dignity intact.
"I'm going to continue, continue, continue to beat you until you cry uncle!" Piper piped in, letting her charges knew that she meant business in the virtual and real arenas. Piper had lured them to flag points, then abandoned them for a bit to try to lure the Axis soldiers into a false sense of security. Brianna's character would take the flag, while Doug acted as a human shield and Ron played lookout. It would be no more than a minute though until they found their unit surrounded by the Allies, and Piper's cronies shooting the three characters until they died. This circle of futility would continue unabated for two hours, until Brianna finally had enough. She struck her F10 key hard in frustration, threw her headset onto the desk, and exited back onto her desktop abruptly, leaving Doug and Ronnie all alone in the game.
Two minutes later, Brianna heard a hard rap on her door, and she got up to investigate.
"Who's there?" She got up and opened the door, discovering a fuming Doug behind it. His eyes were red and seemed almost glassy, and he was holding his hand in pain from some temporary carpal tunnel syndrome that Piper had doled out towards him the last couple hours in the virtual world.
"Hey," he mumbled, casting his eyes towards the floor trying to avoid her questioning gaze.
"Doug, are you OK?" Brianna asked, her eyes wide with concern. She invited him into the dorm and had him sit on the couch while she got some ice out from the freezer shelf of the mini-fridge. As she chipped the tray apart with a fork and shoveled the cubes into a zipper bag, she wished that the night could've gone a lot better than it had. She was thankful for the private messaging feature the game had so she could talk to only Doug between games, but it just wasn't the same as him being in the room with him. She would try to talk to him about other things besides game strategies, but would be quickly interrupted when Doug would receive a message from Ronnie about something else.
The worse thing was she felt like a third wheel all night trying to help them out, and was very pissed when Ronnie had invited Doug into Piper's LAN party, even after Doug had told him he was spending the night playing games on a console with Brianna. Doug had made a valiant effort to try to get out of it, but he had to give in to Ronnie after a while, lest his friend find out he held more than friendly feelings for the feisty brunette.
"I think so. I'm sorry Bree, I didn't know that Ron was going to invite Piper and her cronies into the gaming session, he assured me that it was just going to be me, you and him!" Doug said, desperate to stay in Brianna's good graces. "If it would've been up to me he would've been at an off-campus party, but when I told him he was like 'Dude we have to get her in on a gaming session, she'd kick ass.'"
She sat down next to him, handing Doug the ice pack and forcing him to make eye contact with her. "Look, it's fine Doug, I had a fun time, a ball was had by all and such." Her tone betrayed her mood though, and to Doug it sounded like she wasn't having a fun time after they learned Piper was in the game, because he was feeling the same way all the way through the gaming session.
"You're not fine, you look like you're about to mope over a half-pint of cookie dough," he told her as he wrapped a towel around the ice pack. "Ronnie started to curse me out when you F10'ed it out of the game for you not being into it, and it was like what else was I supposed to do? This was supposed to be our night and he went and ruined it. God that guy can be frustrating sometimes, you know?" He formed his hands into a hand-wringing gesture, and for the first time that night Brianna cracked a smile.
"I think he's just cranky because he hasn't gotten any or had the opportunity to have you come with," Brianna mused. "He probably felt like you weren't giving him enough friendish time lately because you've been buried in schoolwork and trying to mend the wounds between you and Paris."
More like I've been buried in thoughts of you Daugherty, he thought as he pressed the ice close to his hand. It hurt a little, but the numbing from the compress was starting the cool the heat down. He coughed and thought about his next move. He was there all alone with Brianna, with no indication Paris was about to walk in on them and ruin the moment.
"I knew it was a bad idea for Ronnie to force you into a LAN party, I'm sorry." Doug was truly apologetic, and rubbed his hand on Brianna's thigh in an attempt to comfort her. She smiled back and started to come out of her full-blown mope, reduced to just a pout.
"I think that calls for a make-up game of Tekken 4 and you buying me a pizza, doesn't it?" She asked with a smirk.
Doug returned the look, smiling evilly. "As long as the pizza has anchovies and jalapenos on it."
"Doug, you get that and you're going back to San Diego in a coffin," Brianna joked, slugging him lightly on his arm. "Sausage and mushroom fine?"
"Sausage and mushroom," he agreed. He got up and went over to the phone, and picking it up with his free hand, dialing the number for Giorgio's Pizza in the LaBrea section of LA. He threw the icepack in the sink, his hand now numb and pain-free. "You want garlic bread with it?"
"Actually if they have breadsticks and spaghetti sauce I'd prefer that," she answered, as a troubling image came to her mind just then of Doug dipping a breadstick into her sauce, but more in the euphemistic inappropriate manner than the way she usually thought of the food items. Don't even start with me conscience or I'll whip your ass into next Tuesday. It was meant as innocent dammit! she thought as she watched Doug take the order, and noticed his defined biceps contracting back and forth as he adjusted the angle of the phone against his ear. She tried to avert her eyes but found herself unsuccessful despite herself. Brianna was now cursing herself that she didn't take the opportunity of Paris picking up supplies from the Bruin offices earlier in the afternoon to release any sexual tension she might have had around Doug.
She ran a finger against the rim of her ear in order to put a few stray strands of her hair back in place, and another impure thought of Doug doing that for her flashed through her mind. She squinted her eyes, trying to will the betraying images from the recesses of her mind. I'm above crushing, I don't want Doug! she cried out in her inner monologue, but knowing that it was too late to uninvite Doug from playing video games with her. Brianna's concentration was broken as Doug called for her attention.
"About a half hour, $13.67," Doug told her, relaying the time and cost of the pizza order. "I'll get the game and be right back Bree, I hope you can beat me."
"Oh, its on Doug, it's on." She had her game face on as she started to unwrap the PS2's controllers. "You won't be able to walk upright when I'm finished with you."
It took awhile, but Doug's libido finally increased from Brianna's statement. "Err, I hope that's just a threat."
Brianna smiled at him, and with just the slightest hint of lust in her voice, responded. "No Doug, it's a promise." Stop it, stop it! Her conscience warned, but the inner pervert in her wasn't about to stop anytime soon. Doug left the room with a look as if he really needed to get in his room and take care of something besides retrieving the video game. Brianna reclined in the futon and huffed a breath of relief that Doug was out of the room.
"It's going to be a long night," she told herself. "Better just grin and bear it." She got up and decided to change out of her regular clothes and into her pajamas. Unlike Paris though, she was going to make sure the emphasis on her body around Doug was muted, which meant she was wearing the biggest t-shirt and baggiest sweatpants she could scrounge up.
She had to, due to the ill-timed fact her entire undergarment collection was on spin cycle in the community laundry room due to her on-off laundry schedule. The last thing she needed was for Doug to notice not only she was pulling a Sharon Stone beneath her PJs, but that her girls were roaming free beneath her shirt.
Next time I keep an emergency bag of lingerie around for occasions like this, she thought as she gathered up her sleepwear and walked into the bathroom to change.
2½ hours later...
"Hey," Mai Lin wondered, prodding Paris with her finger as she merged her car onto the 405. "You look down Paris, what's the matter?" Despite the fact that UCLA had won the volleyball match against Cal State-Northridge in straight sets as Mrs. Broughton predicted, Paris had kept thinking about Jess during rotation times and about how lonely he must feel in Venice right about then, sitting in his house with just his father, the two eating their dinner alone and Jess moping and wallowing with a copy of Lord of the Files in his possession. Even though there was no ill will between them, Paris felt like she had let her Rebel Boy down. The one time he gets the wherewithal to just about ask a girl out without the threat of a pummeling from an ex, and she had to spurn him. However, she couldn't show her true emotions off to anyone she knew. Gellars don't feel pain dear, Sharon Gellar's declaration said in her mind, they let it roll off and move on. Still, Paris wasn't feeling like her usual ferocious journalistic self that evening, and felt plenty of pain despite her mother's advice.
After the game her and Mai Lin headed down from the bleachers towards the floor of the Matadome, where the Lady Bruins were celebrating their easy victory. Paris interviewed the team captain and the player who scored the most points and asked the usual hard questions about their strategies and athletic regimens, easily getting the quotables that seemed to be the status quo of a sports story that could be highlighted in the middle of a column. She went over her notes with an assistant coach to make sure that she scored the match well so the box score wasn't erroneous. The coach nodded and told her she did a wonderful job, and Mai Lin ended up with some great shots of the action during the game and the aftermath in the locker room. Mai Lin knew that only two pictures would run in the sports section, but it wouldn't hurt to give those shots Diane didn't want to the athletic department for use on their website. She made a deal with the team's manager to burn all the shots she took to CD-R so that they could pick and choose, her fingers were crossed that when her over 120 shots were developed they'd turn out excellent.
Mai Lin was a little worried about Paris though. The blonde was talkative and helpful at first when the match had started, but once the second set began around 8:15 she started to become withdrawn and mumbled only the occasional 'OK' or 'mm-hmm' when she'd try to ask Paris a question. And even though the game was totally one-sided with the Matadors sweeping through their roster in a desperate bid to win a set, there was still some excitement to be had during the match with one of the Lady Bruins having some kind of 10 kills per game streak she was trying to extend. Paris wasn't mustering up any of the enthusiasm for writing the story she had as they drove into Northridge since then, and she was kind of worried.
"I'm fine Mai, it's nothing." Paris smiled at her partner-in-crime to try to convince Mai Lin she was fine, but somehow the Laotian knew that look. It was on her sister's face whenever she had a date with a white boy, but couldn't go through with it due to Mr. And Mrs. Vang's conservative values. The Vang children were expected to marry their own kind, no matter what kind of connection they might have with any other boy or girl in Eau Claire not of the Hmong persuasion.
"Come on Paris, there's something wrong with you, like you really didn't want to do this story."
"Mm-hmm, because volleyball's still such a new game to me. Oh geez, that guy's going at least 80, can he do that?" she observed as a Porsche Boxter sped down the left carpool lane to try and merge onto the eastbound Ventura from the 405.
"That wasn't what I was thinking. You look troubled tonight, like you left someone in the lurch. Someone like a boy, that you wanted to be somewhere else. I'm not sure if I'm right or not, but I just wanted to fathom a guess at the reason for your mood."
"You're thinking wrong Mai, I'm just fine," Paris said, trying to mask a distracting thought of her and Jess watching a movie, his arm over her shoulder as they sat on him couch. "We have a great story and I'm just thinking of what details I can use in order to draw the reader in, there's so many angles I can use to write it."
"You must share the same train of thought that my best friend Andrea is on sometimes."
"What's that?"
"Using big words and long-winded explanations to avoid the subject at hand as much as possible. You can use your bookishness all you want to avoid the topic Paris, but I'm eventually going to find out." She played with the toggle for the power seats as Paris huffed.
"I thought I was supposed to be the strong one in all of this." Paris took a glance in her rear-view mirror to see if any cars were behind. "I just don't get it though, why do girls who don't seem to know all that much about love give advice better than the Carrie Bradshaw clones I had for friends back in Hartford? I've had more insight about the ways of love talking to Brianna over the last few weeks than I did in six years with Louise. Can I ask if you've had a boyfriend Mai?"
"Once for two months, but that was set up by my mother and closely chaperoned. If I was a normal kid the boy wouldn't have gotten the time of day with me, we had all the chemistry of wood being glued to ice. But now tell me about your guy, I'm curious." She had a cute bucktoothed smile and pleady eyes. "Please?"
Paris could never resist 'that look' when it came to spilling something, because it was the same way Madeline would try to wear her down and get details from her back in the days of her crush on Tristan. And she'd never been successful in resisting. She sighed and merged the car into a reversible express lane on the freeway which had little traffic going back into the city.
"Fine Mai, I'll tell you. But please, the only other person who knows about this is my roommate. If you tell Mrs. Broughton that I wasn't into the match because of this, I'll pull a Christian Slater and rip the film out of your camera."
"I'd love to see you try, this is a digital," Mai Lyn said, laughing.
"I'll find a way," Paris held out her index finger and pointed at Mai Lin, smiling as she watched the traffic pass her by. "OK, if it wasn't for having to go out to Northridge tonight for the paper, I'd be down in Venice right now with a guy from Connecticut named Jess I'm starting to befriend again, watching It Happened One Night as we bantered on through it about the social and moral implications of Clark Gable going without an undershirt and exposing his chest, a first in film."
"Oooh, sounds juicy," Mai Lin gushed. "So he's an old boyfriend?"
"No!" Paris denied it loudly and explicitly. "He was a troublemaker from Brooklyn who came to the town where my friend and former classmate Rory lived. Sparks flew between them, they were together for about seven months, then he moved out here to reunite with the father that left him behind when he was really young. I harbored an unsaid crush which I couldn't mention since I was going out with a guy I met, Jamie, during a conference in Washington last summer and who I kept trying to convince myself that I loved because he said he loved me."
"Did you?"
"I did, at first," she admitted. "I mean he was such a charmer and had such a nice face and dark caring eyes, and I could hold a debate with him about some political topic all through a dinner. I could even see my boring political potboiler films in the theater with him without having to be afraid that he'd be bored to death with them or use the content as an excuse to slide a hand behind my shirt and undress me from beneath."
"What happened that you decided to break it off with him?"
"One phrase, three words; Sex changes everything. Do I even have to say anymore Mai?"
"Not really, no." Mai Lin laughed and curled up in her seat. "So this Jess boy, what is he like? Is he handsome, sexy, someone you could see as your soulmate?"
"All of those and more," she told Mai Lin, sighing in contentment as she recalled the image of her and Jess at the chuppa. "He also has this rebellious and dangerous thing going that draws me to him so much, if I were back in Hartford my mother would vehemently prevent me from dating him just on that alone. The way he carries himself, his attitude and the way he talks, damn." She stretched out the last word. "He's a heavy recreational reader like I am, so I'm sure he could take something mundane like the Polk city directory and read it aloud as if it was a dog-eared copy of Pride and Prejudice, he can make anything sound so good. I mean he was reading On the Road, a book I was trained by my teachers and my mother to hate since it was 'new reading'. But in his hands, with his voice conveying everything, I was taken into that world so effortlessly, and I loved it, the way he read and drove my imagination towards those thoughts." Paris sighed as she felt a recalling smile inch onto her lips. She would've said more to Mai Lin, but if she did she might end up in an accident due to Jess filling her thoughts.
"You must really love him Paris," Mai Lin deduced. "Do you have any competition with any other girl to get him though?"
Reality came crashing into the path of Paris' freeway of love, and she tried to take back her platitudes for Jess. "That's the problem Mai, I can't have him. He's Rory's ex-boyfriend, and if I decided to go out with him I'd basically be telling her with that move 'Thanks for letting me be your friend, but since your ex is closer to me I think I'll swipe in and take him so it looks like I'm trying to screw you over again like I did the first year and a half you went to school with me.' Let's just say I was playing Big Girl on Campus with her and shutting out her friendship at first until I relented later, it's an uneasy friendship. No matter what I think of Jess, Rory comes first--" She seemed to be starting on a tangent, and Mai Lin had to stop the academic beauty from winding herself into a tizzy before it was too late.
"Paris, you come first." Strangely, Mai Lin had somehow morphed her voice to resemble that of the ever-strict Mrs. Kim, which had always demanded authority and obedience. Even though Paris had only heard Mrs. Kim talk once, when she was using her as a source for her Stars Hollow underground story, the telltale and strict tone froze her solid, in a way that not even her own mother's strictest tone could never do to her. They must have a special school where they teach these girls how to make their voices scare the living shit out of someone else, she thought to herself.
"But Mai, I can't, I--" Paris tried to explain herself out of the situation, but her smaller compatriot wasn't going to let her.
"Paris, you have to go for it, no matter what it does to your friendship with Rory. I had so many boys in Eau Claire who wanted me for who I was, but I had to settle for whom my family wanted me to date. You know how horrible it feels to have a boy on your arm and asking timidly for permission to kiss you when the point guard for the basketball team is giving you loving eyes, but can't do anything with those feelings because you're stuck in some lame tradition of dating a dull Hmong boy who doesn't want to drag you out of the batter's box at all? I know how it feels, and it sucks!"
She looked out the window towards the San Fernando Valley under the first quarter phase moonlight, as she recounted her luck with men, or lack thereof back in western Wisconsin. "I'd see all these other girls in my classes wearing belly shirts, looking downright alluring with layers of makeup and the tightest jeans money could buy, and there was little virgin me, sitting right in the middle in a simple sundress that wasn't flattering, wearing absolutely no makeup at all and open-toed sandals from Payless. Yet I got as much sexual attention as all those girls from the guys in my class, including invitations to go out with them! But I couldn't do anything to respond to them at all, nothing! At least one of my relatives was in every one of my classes, along with my 'boyfriend' in a few, so there was no way to sneak off to a cloakroom or closet and let them know I shared an interest in them."
"You had the set-up suitors too?" Paris said, nodding and understanding where Mai Lin was coming from. "In my rung of society it was just to maintain my wealth though. If it wasn't for me being so stubborn and headstrong I might be a trophy wife as we speak to one of the young hunks of central Connecticut. Thank God I didn't score points with Hartford society when I ditched my debutante ball for an evening with my nanny and her kids among the shelves of the New York Public Library, my mother wouldn't speak to me until a month after the event, but it was all worth it in order to ditch a lousy event involving fan dances and ten other girls, each more brainless than the last."
"Sounds like me during Hmong New Year when my brother tries to set me up with a very boring guy," Mai Lin commented as she laughed, feeling comfortable enough around Paris to come out of the shell she usually confined herself to. "Are you scared that he might not show an interest in you?"
"A little, but it isn't a large fear since he seems to be returning fire with sexual-tinged comebacks when we get into a discussion or I silence him for some reason or another. I just don't feel I have enough to offer though, I was the wallflower of my peer group, and to have Jess comment about the way I look in my new wardrobe and about how attractive I am, it's disconcerting that some punk kid from Brooklyn feels this way about me, but not one guy in the twelve years I attended Chilton had given me even the slightest interest." She took a look at the dash clock, reading 10:30, and sighed. "God, sometimes I feel like I'm taking all my romantic cues from Ally McBeal, I'm as insecure about my love life as she was."
"Well as long as you don't hallucinate a dancing baby or do the deed in a car wash, you should be fine Paris. Jess sounds like a great guy behind that tough and bookish façade." Mai Lin smiled at her as Paris laughed, then read through Paris' notes in order to try to setup her photographic storyline before she and Paris got back onto campus.
Paris couldn't say all that much to Mai Lin anymore, especially when the image of her and Jess reenacting the same car wash scene that opened Ally McBeal's fourth season flashed through her mind and sent arousal all throughout her body. So much for that show being just a distraction from schoolwork, she thought to herself as she tried to keep her concentration on the road and away from Mai Lin bopping carelessly along to a Phil Collins song playing on Lite FM.
Brianna and Doug settled onto the futon after talking for awhile about themselves without trying to reveal a lot about each other. Brianna tried to keep herself focused on her home and school life back in Antioch, switching the track once she got near the beginning of 2000 and the teen tournament, along with everything about Leonard. She listened intently to Doug describe his life back in San Diego County, hopeful she'd hear something she'd like.
The first thing she was glad not to hear was that he was a brainless San Diegan high school jock who got into UCLA on something as frivolous as a track and field scholarship. He wasn't far from his home in Coronado north of San Diego, yet was feeling homesick for the home cooking of his mother, who had raised him alone as a single mother after his father passed away from a scuba diving-induced blood clot when he was around five, along with his nine year-old kid sister Ellen, who just about looked up to her brother as her father figure. When he wasn't playing video games in his room or studying his schoolwork, Doug was active in his student government and out and about in the community, ready to lend a helping hand to any charity organization which desired his services. As for her question about why he was acting like such a jerk the first week and a half before they decided to head down the friends path, Doug clearly explained that he thought that was the way he was supposed to behave at college, but Paris' little reality checks had shaken that behavior right out of him.
As they played the video game with each other, a different competition was secretly being played by the girl and the boy throughout the night, that of a contest to see who could flirt the best and not have the other catch on. It started with innocent glances when the other was distracted, with Doug imagining what it would feel like to run his fingers through Brianna's charcoal mane, as Brianna considered the consequences of 'accidentally' running her hand against Doug's biceps for longer than what a brush-up against someone would be considered accidental.
The night went on, along with the gaming, both of them becoming zombies to the boob tube as the polygons and many colors on-screen became more furious as the two continued their fighting in the video game world. There they were complete enemies, doling out various amounts of pain in order to make the other annoyed and hitting all the button combinations possible in order to kick their competitor's ass back into the stone age. Doug and Brianna mentally were completely focused on the game.
However their physical and emotional selves were completely detached from the violence created by the Namco Corporation. Sometime around 9:30 and 9:45, Brianna had shifted from her far right position on the futon couch and her rear was scooching closer and closer to where Doug was sitting. She wasn't aware of her conscience giving her the usual 'shields up' command she heard spinning through her brain whenever she had gotten nine inches into the space around a man she showed interest in since the whole messy incident in Philadelphia. She didn't know what was causing it, but it might have had something to do with Doug's mixed bouquet of a discount imitation fragrance she couldn't quite place her nose on and Lava soap intoxicating the sensual stimuli within her nose. Her nerves, frazzled from her itchy gaming muscle and split-second reactions to the action on the screen, didn't even register that around 9:47pm her arm was rubbing comfortably against Doug's side, and that Doug was just as clueless about the subtle move. They talked trash to each other about who was about to get their hides beaten not even knowing that they were so close that throwing their controllers towards the TV and kissing each other senseless might be the next obvious move if someone was about to walk in.
During a spare moment during a game loading time, Doug drew his glance downwards towards his controller, but suddenly found it disrupted by the closeness of Brianna to him. Without control, he found his gaze moving towards her bust, which in a perfect and non-sexual world would've been completely and utterly without definition from the teal 2X San Jose Sharks t-shirt she was wearing in a very desperate attempt to cry out "I'm not sexy, don't look at me that way."
Just like Paris' wardrobe choice of a week earlier, Brianna's strategy failed miserably. She had forgotten one of the things she had learned in her LAN parties and partaking in Halo matches on X-Box Live. When she was really worked up and really into the game, her nipples would harden through the ensuing adrenaline rush, and if she was at an internet café, she'd have to wear a sports bra with a layer of padding beneath for the sole reason of making sure her breasts didn't become weapons of mass destruction to the competitors surrounding her and end up as a distraction to those boys.
Combine the factor of competition with the arousal of being so near to a man she was having a budding crush on, and the two factors made sure that even through the deep folds of her unflattering t-shirt, Brianna's intentions for wanting Doug were quite clear, two times over, even if she wasn't aware of the fact. Even with a small two-second glance at her aroused breasts beneath the shirt, Doug was able to memorize the image, and spent the rest of the night with his control pad far away from his lap so that the stimuli from the vibration pads would go to his hands, and his hands only.
Unaware of their closeness, they kept both their focuses on the game, neither the wiser. There was the occasional brush of thighs and hands between Brianna and Doug when they blew on their hands to cool their hands off, but otherwise there were no signs that their silent flirting was going to be taken out of the separate arenas of their minds and combined in one big Staples Center-sized tease fest. Brianna continued to deny herself the pleasure of being next to Doug, and planned to do nothing with her positioning at all, despite the intoxication of being so near to him.
However, around ten o'clock, the silence of the room with the exception of the game's sound effects started driving Brianna stir-crazy, and her bladder was filling up with the contents of two cans of 7Up she'd drank during the LAN party. She hit the pause button and got up from her seat, aware of her closeness to Doug. She cursed silently her earlier thirst for ruining the closeness of the moment.
"Er, I have to go...you know," she said, a violent purple blush creeping up her cheeks. "I'll be back in a bit."
"OK," he said, relaxing and taking the sports section from Paris' copy of the Times out to read. "By the way, Bree?"
"Yeah?"
"You look very nice tonight." He spoke nervously, not wanting to highlight the fact he knew she wasn't wearing a bra. "I don't know how you do it, but whatever you wear makes you look very alluring, and even in something as uh, casual as that, you make it look pretty great."
She smiled and tried to play a homely card. "These old rags, I just got them out of my drawer since I don't have much else to wear. Most of my...stuff is downstairs in the dryer so I didn't have much of a pajama choice this evening." Phew, that was close, she thought, relieved she hadn't said that all her underwear was downstairs.
"Really? So you don't wear just sweats to bed?" His voiced lowered just a hint, not too much to appraise Brianna to the fact he was trying to flirt with her.
"I have nightgowns, yeah. But I don't wear them often anymore cause I share a room and what I used to wear when I had my own bedroom would probably make Paris put on her sleep mask earlier than bedtime, so going with the jerseys and stirrup pants is more often than not a safer bet."
"Paris isn't here tonight, why don't you wear one?" he asked, unaware of exactly what Brianna was describing when it came to her sleepwear choices.
"Doug," she said to him, her flirtish tone in full force. "I said I can't wear them in front of a girl. If the other person is a man, I'm sure that he wouldn't mind." She uttered the last two words in a hushed tone, the words being formed by only a whisper. "He really wouldn't mind, if you figure out my hint." Brianna turned around and walked to the bathroom, leaving her co-gamer to gape at her, and his imagination to muster up images of Brianna in really thin and short-cut sleepwear.
Damn it, quit thinking about her that way. She's only talking that way to speak at your level Merriwether, she's showing no interest at all, he tried to convince himself. He lay back on the couch and read the paper, trying to will the images filling up out of his mind.
After finishing and washing her hands, Brianna sat down on the ledge of the vanity, trying to sort out the exact reason she was starting to flirt with Doug when she felt she wasn't ready to fall into a relationship again. She took a look over herself in the mirror, mumbling to herself about what she felt were imperfections that Doug should've been cutting down left and right.
"God, the boy should be making fun of my nose." She always thought her nose was her worse feature because it didn't fill out her face like her mother's, she had inherited her hair color, nose, lips and her free earlobe from her father's side of the family, while her eye color and chin formation were from the maternal side of the coin. Her reading glasses had to be custom made because her temples were so far from the nose rests, and she could never copy her roommate and get it pierced since the pole of the earring would block most of her nostril. She wrinkled it as she lifted her t-shirt up to just above her midriff, her navel piercing exposed. Brianna had a small frame, thus she received nicknames like 'shrimp', 'small fry' and 'tiny B' from her friends and family back in Antioch, she was at least six inches below the crown of Doug's head, and he would have to bend down to kiss her rather uncomfortably.
"I need to put on some more weight, all this fast food doesn't seem to help me at all," she told herself rubbing her tummy, wishing she could fill out her figure a little more and stop being a slim upside-down pear shaped girl. She had plenty on top along her bust, but not nearly enough in her midsection to grab onto in the love handles. She would give anything to have a nice full figure, but had figured long ago she was cursed with this body she had, she had to grin and bear it. Brianna was just glad that Doug hadn't noticed anything odd happening with herself that night.
That is, until she ran the back of her hand against one of her breasts, and felt the pebble-hard peak of a nipple along the cotton of her shirt. She gasped, and reeled it back in shock.
"Shit, how the fuck could I forget that!! Stupid, stupid Brianna," she cursed to herself as she tried to dig around in her mind for arousal killer, which involved her older relatives kissing the it guys of the moment. Aunt Cara making out with Colin Farrell should make feel as sexual as a nun in a convent staring at an old priest in the buff, she told herself as she wished the image further and further. Within a period of 75 seconds, Brianna's breasts were back to normal and desensitized, her plan had surprisingly worked well. Too bad it took an image which was sure to haunt her nightmares in slumber that evening to ruin it.
"Hey Bree," Doug asked through the door. Startled from her reverie, she almost fell of the vanity and onto the tile floor below her. Her hand grasped the towel rack on the door just in time and she steadied herself onto her two feet.
"Yes Doug?" Her face was flustered, and she sighed, happy that the wooden door was hiding the look of shock evident on her face.
"You've been in there about five minutes, you OK?" He leaned back against a drawer along the wall, doing his best to keep the reasons for Brianna's long bathroom trip innocuous.
" I'm fine, just feeling a little hot." She turned on the cold tap and filled the bottom of the vanity bowl with cold water, splashing it onto her face to cool herself off. Despite the desexualized images she forced, Brianna's body temperature was betraying her.
"Alright, I'm going to start disconnecting the console from the TV, do you and Paris need it any longer?" He munched on a piece of cheesy bread as Brianna came out of the bathroom, her face still wet in order to use the air conditioning to cool herself off.
"No, but I really have to figure out how to get my own console here, the gaming bug has bit me again and it hurts like heck." She bent down and reached into the mini-fridge to take out another can of 7Up. "Ahh, that feels a little better," she sighed as her thumb landed on the cool aluminum. "Any boy who gives me a nice and sore gaming thumb definitely deserves the time of day from me."
"You're a much better opponent than Ronnie," Doug complimented her as they made their way back to the couch. "He's the sorest loser you can ever find, I've replaced more controllers because he'd throw them in frustration after he lost. And when he played football, get your earplugs out. He hasn't figured out quite yet that shouting at the screen and mashing all the buttons in will not reverse a referee's call no matter what."
"Hey, I do that." she admitted.
"You do? You were silent tonight all through the game."
"Yeah, so?" Brianna brought her defenses up to avoid Doug's queries.
"All I heard from you is the occasional grunt and maybe some trash talking at the beginning, but nothing after that. You had a five match streak going and didn't make a wisecrack about putting me in my place." His reasoning was an attempt to bring down the barriers Brianna was putting in front of herself in order to keep Doug at bay.
"It's a quiet night without Paris," she said, fibbing as she tried to avoid Doug's persistence. "It's the first night I haven't seen her in the dorms 'till late, and even though she's a wonderful roommate and I wouldn't give her up at all, I'm just glad she isn't here tonight. I needed a night alone--"
Doug cut her off harshly. "Brianna, you're not alone tonight, stop lying. What's wrong, you were Miss Conversation a couple days ago, and now you're all clammed up, this has nothing to do with Eiffel Girl, does it?"
She stomped over to the couch and sat down with a huff, Doug following her as their first argument started. "Don't talk about Paris like that, she told you she doesn't want you to use that nickname!"
"Don't avoid the question Bree!"
"I'm not avoiding anything." She raised her voice up at him, taking on an authoritative tone. "Look, I just have nothing to say to you, that's all. What am I going to ask you, 'Gee golly Doug, how about those Chargers, think Drew Brees is going to get them to the playoffs this year?'"
"Damn it Daugherty, don't avoid the question, what's with you tonight?" He wrung his hands together and sat down on Paris' bed.
"You want to know what's the matter? Your friend invited me to play a game I didn't want to play tonight, and I so wanted to turn down his invitation because I don't like him, however because you were involved I played anyway, all two stupid hours of it when all I wanted from this night was some good company and conversation while my new friend was gone. Instead I was stuck to my PC bailing Ronnie's ass out because he knows jack shit about combat strategy when I could've had you sitting in here and we'd be getting to know each other more over pizza or fried chicken." Her emotions starting to come out, her voice wavered and her tear ducts were on the edge of being stirred into action. "My idea of a fun night out usually doesn't involve a group of people, I'm very introverted and it always took a lot for me to go beyond the comfort zone of Antioch and into Oakland or San Francisco with my friends for a night out--" She lost her place with her point and backtracked away, laying on the couch.
"I understand that, believe me." Doug looked down at his lap, trying to avoid eye contact with Brianna. "I didn't want to play with Ronnie tonight either, but after a minute of trying to avoid the reason, he...he told me he knew about me and you last Friday night and that he saw you walking out of my room. Then he said if I didn't play the game with him and invite you in, he'd spread a rumor that we were together through the building, starting with Piper and making his way down the chain." His formed his hands into fists and gritted his teeth, mad that his best friend was trying to keep his love life hostage.
Brianna's eyes were wide in shock. Not only had he eavesdropped on her own muttering that night, but he was spying on her and Doug while she was giving him the doughnut money. That son of a bitch! Brianna was downright livid, and though her anger for Doug had totally cooled down and her longing returned, she was furious at Ronnie for his attempt at blackmail. She fisted material along the side of her shirt and scrunched her eyebrows, trying to keep the building anger controlled. Remembering the treatment the snotty dark blonde had given her and Paris wasn't all that much to ire her up. But once he got Doug involved with his plans, Brianna was pissed beyond belief.
Calmly, she slipped her Isotoners on and with Doug following her every step, threw on her bathrobe. No way that jerk's going to get a free show when I'm angry, she thought as she tied it on around her waist as tight as possible.
"Bree, where are you going?" Doug asked, if only to confirm the inevitable. He certainly wasn't going to stop this woman scorned since he still had a lot of living to do. He also felt that it was time for Ronnie to get a taste of the medicine Paris had not-so-nicely dealt to him a couple weeks earlier.
"Oh, I'm just going to kick Ronnie's ass, you don't mind right?" Her voice had taken on an authoritative tone, with her eyes taking on a darker green shade.
He nodded mutely, allowing Brianna to go forward with her wishes. She stormed out of the dorm, nearly slamming the door right into Doug's nose. He was thankful for the pneumatic closing device on top of the door that slowed down the door before it hit him.
He had always been the one who dished out punishment for his friend whenever he was lame-brained, so Doug was going to enjoy seeing a female dole out the pain for once.
Not two minutes later, Brianna was in front of 318, rapping on the door hard with Doug right behind her, just in case she decided fists would work better than words and she wanted to bead Ronnie to a bloody pulp. Sure he was mad at him, but not mad enough to have someone else cause him physical pain.
In the room, Ronnie was laying on his bed snoozing, a copy of Maxim open in his face, some hot movie starlet wearing a scant bikini pictured in minute thirteen of her fame and being used for sexual fantasy material. He barely could hear Brianna's knocking over the blare of KROQ, and somehow made it out between the strains of Linkin Park blasting from his stereo.
"Hold on, keep your pants on!" he shouted as he threw on some jeans out of his dirty clothes pile. The knocking continued despite the answer. "I'm coming!" He narrowly avoided tripping over a hamper and one of Jake's free weights in the path to the door. Still tired and dazed he opened the door, not knowing whether to expect an accidental pizza delivery, booty call or an invitation to an off-campus party.
Instead he got a nice big peek at anger flaring within Brianna's eyes, her teeth bared out from beneath her puckered mouth.
"Hey Brianna, what's up--" Before he could say anything else, the shorter girl interrupted him.
"You, outside now!" Brianna brought her hand up and yanked him by the shirt out into the hallway, shocking the boy with her actions.
"Geeze, what the fuck Daugherty!" he gasped out as his back hit the wall.
"What the fuck indeed Ronnie!" she hissed out, gripping his side tightly in her hand. "Which is exactly what Doug and I are not doing, we aren't together! Last Friday we just talked, that's it, I didn't sleep with Doug since I was in his room a grand total of five minutes! How dare you take something as innocent as that and turn it into blackmail material so I was forced to play a game with you."
"It's all your fault that I had to miss out on grade A DeNeves ass!" Ronnie accused. "They wanted Doug at that party and without him I couldn't get any action!" He looked towards his buddy, smiling and watching the scene transpire. "C'mon Dougie, get her off me, I didn't mean anything by it!"
All he got in turn was a shake of Doug's head and a little laugh. "Dude you're on your own, I really didn't want to play with Piper and her cronies myself. And believe me if you ask me to do this again, the answer will be no. I had everything planned out for a night of gaming with Bree and I ended up with some truncated fun, I could've used that two hours to get to know her more."
"Hey, you're the one who started the 'I hate Paris' campaign when she first walked into the dorm!"
"That's before I knew she was a blue-blood with venom in her words, she has sharper horns than the bulls of Pamplona!"
"And before you knew her roommate was the finest piece of ass east of Oakland--" his words were cut off by Brianna tightening her grip on Ronnie's side and bashing him against the wall.
"I'm right here Ronnie!" Brianna growled out the words and lowered her eyelashes. "Now I think you owe Doug and I an apology for jumping to conclusions and for your attitude towards women. So Doug didn't want to go to a party with you and have a one night stand, big deal. That doesn't mean you take the first girl you see with him at school and fabricate some story about them being lovers just because you didn't get to go to a lame beer bash."
"I'll never apologize to you braniac!" he sneered out, keeping his composure despite Brianna lining up her knee to his midsection. Her eyes burned with anger and she was doing her damndest to be provoked by Ronnie.
"You apologize to Brianna right now or I'm pulling out the connection and canceling the magazine subscriptions." Ronnie turned to see Doug pointing up towards the ceiling between 318 and 319, where false tiles obscured the fact Ronnie was on Doug's cable connection, and his roommate's only link to the finest soft-core pornography Cinemax and Playboy could offer would be cut without a second thought by his best friend.
But to lose his shared subscriptions to those lad magazines, Playboy and Perfect Ten? That would be too much to bear, how else would him and Jake subsist in the world without photographs of prone women. He closed his eyes, trying to take his focus off Brianna's grip on him enough that he could come up with a convincing apology.
"Oh, and Ron, try to be truly sorry. I'm not going to take an apology just so you can continue to get your rocks off gratis." Brianna smiled at him snidely, and it was then he knew the game was over.
"Fine, I'm sorry Brianna, and I'm sorry Dougie, I didn't mean to plan to spread that rumor all over the place!" He begged, asking for forgiveness. "Geeze, if I would've known you were going to get this mad about all this I wouldn't have even tried inviting you both on this gaming night."
Brianna released her grip on Ronnie and moved back towards the other end of the hallway. "I accept your apology, and you're right, you shouldn't have interfered."
"I'm going to go disconnect the console Bree, you two look like you need to talk," Doug said, noticing that the two were trying to arrange a truce between them.
"Sure," Brianna responded, a little distracted as Doug waved to her and walked back towards 343. She then turned her focus back towards Ronnie, settling down. "Look Ronnie, I'm sorry I reacted the way I did, but the last thing I want here is to have a reputation I don't have." Brianna looked down towards the ground. "I know Doug is your best friend and you're sort of feeling a little peeved at him since he didn't go with you Saturday night."
He sighed and rubbed his chin with his hand. "It wasn't just about Saturday Brianna, it was all this week. He's been acting weird and distant every time I try to ask him if he wants to hang with the chicks I've been meeting on-campus."
"What do you mean distant?"
"As if you didn't know, he's been hanging his head each morning after breakfast because you weren't around to meet him. But you should've seen Dougie on Labor Day, he came back so let down because you went to that Angels game without letting him know."
Brianna was trying to defend herself from Ronnie's probe of her flirtations with Doug. "I didn't even know he came by that day--"
"You knew there was a chance he was coming by in the beginning of the week, don't try to tell me otherwise!" He opened up his door and invited Brianna in, who tried to keep her distance from him. He can't know that I want Doug, she thought to herself as she sat down in a rumpled old chair, keeping the bathrobe close to herself.
"I honestly had plans to go see the A's Ronnie, how was I supposed to know that Doug came by the dorm?"
"You knew Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday mornings that he was supposed to pick up the doughnuts after Paris got them. He left my dorm bright-eyed and ready to take on the day after we talked over the 6 o'clock Sportscenter, he was looking forward to getting his breakfast from you." He frowned at her. "Then when he came back he had a sulk on his face and was dragging himself around class. After asking why his mood had soured, he brushed off the question, told me to meet him for lunch and went on his way."
"I had to study early--" Brianna tried to lie her way out of this conversation, but it was all for naught. Ronnie leaned his computer chair back, surveying the girl in front of him.
"You were avoiding him after Friday, weren't you?" he questioned. "You wanted to shove what you felt for him into the back and not worry about it again." He lowered his gaze and made direct eye contact with the girl, clasping his hands together. "I've known Dougie since I was six and he helped me through the wild world of kindergarten, and I know when my best friend is having a case of being whipped by a chick." He started to explain the warning signs Doug exhibited when he crushed on someone of the opposite sex. "When he was twelve and in seventh grade, a new girl who had moved west to San Diego from a small town near the Salton Sea caught his eye, and suddenly pranking the teachers in our classes seemed to be the last thing on his mind. He wanted to do nothing but follow this girl around, she was his first real love and man, he fell hard for her. Me and the other guys in our group would try to keep the 'girls are gross' gears spinning in his mind, but the only thing he wanted all that school year was to have one date with Darlene Whitman. He never got it because she moved again before the end of the school year, but it started him down the same cycle of puppy love. See girl, fall for girl and ignore friends, date girl for awhile until the friends get involved and either dump or get dumped by the girl."
"Look," she started, after she took Ronnie's explanation in, "I don't have an interest in him Ronnie, honestly, I'm not trying to play around with him."
"You want him, he wants you." Ronnie laid it all out on the table. "Have you ever had your heart broken so much that it takes a lot to let someone back in?"
"No." Brianna said the word with no emotion, trying to keep Ronnie away from her inner and soul circles. Only Paris, Lara and the Daugherty parents knew that Brianna's heart had been crushed to a million pieces by Leonard on that convention center stage, and letting Ronnie know about that secret was something that unnerved her. She never expected Ronnie's next words to come out of his mouth, and what was behind them all.
"Doug's had his heart broken this year hard, and it's been a tough summer trying to keep his spirits up." He looked down at his hands, trying to keep his promise to Doug that he wouldn't divulge anything about Claudia and the way she had forced him to keep love at arm's length. "Look, I don't know what the heck it is about you that's changing him from number one player to a guy who's a lovesick puppy over you, but you're doing something right."
"Huh, he can't be--" Brianna tried speaking but was stopped by Ronnie, trying to defend his friend.
"He is Brianna, and from the way you came down here ready to break my neck you're trying to keep any rumors of you and him together. I just want you to know that I'm not going to interfere between you two anymore, and if you ever get together I'm fully in support of you two."
The brunette got up from the chair, ending the conversation abruptly. "There's nothing to interfere with Ronnie, now if you'll excuse me I have to see Doug out of my dorm. I'll talk to you Monday morning when you pick up the doughnuts." She collected her bearings and walked out of the dorm, Ronnie staying in his chair and wondering what it would take to get those enigmatic personalities together. He looked towards a poster of Anna Kournikova for advice on what to do with those stubborn beings.
"What can I do? Both of them just seem set in their ways," he told himself as he grabbed his remote and turned it on one of those gross SpikeTV cartoons. "I just hope she doesn't hurt Doug unknowingly. One more heartbreak and the guy's gonna turn either asexual or into a chainsaw killer." He chuckled at his really lame joke and laid down on the couch. He was going to milk this drama for all it was worth, hopefully ending in some kind of resolution for their feelings towards each other.
Doug came out of 343 holding the bulky console of his PS2 and his game in one hand, while his other gripped the audio, video and electrical cables for dear life. The game controllers were shoved sloppily into his pockets as he attempted to make it back to his room with everything that he needed. He knew he'd pass Brianna one more time as he went down the hall, so he tried to make it only one trip back down to 319. If I'm in here when she comes back something's going to give and I'm going to take myself off the 'just friends' track, was his way of trying to cut out all the thoughts he was having for the brunette. The added fact she was going without a bra and he could see that clearly had caused him throughout the night to drive his pleasure lobe's thoughts towards very unsexual situations, something towards the lines of any episode of Jerry Springer where the words 'large woman' and 'stripping' were involved. Which was pretty much every episode of the talk show ever.
All he knew was that when he got back into his dorm room, the door was going to be locked and he'd be in the shower for about an hour with the water temperature below 65°.
He opened up the door and started the short walk down the hall to his room, hopeful that he'd be able to wish his love goodnight and that her temper had been turned down after reaming Ronnie a new orifice. He thought of how feisty the girl had been as she denied that her and Doug had sex in front of Ronnie, and imagined that energy transformed to the actual act. Combining the effect of the way she had been looking at him in the towel, and there was no doubt in Doug Merriwether's mind that there was something going on with Brianna that she was avoiding what was there and very apparent in front of her.
He wouldn't say it to anybody else, especially Brianna, but she had to be in the first stages of lust. Doug just knew it.
The trouble was, why was she holding out on him and not letting him in too close to her? She had been made nervous after the dorm encounter the week before, and had immediately reined herself in order to protect from being hurt in any way. That protection had a side effect however, as it sealed Doug off from finding out anymore about Brianna and her past. He wasn't about to ask Brianna about why she was so closed in to everyone else, and his kinship with Paris was still fractured after the handshake incident.
She's the only one with any insight on Bree, he thought to himself, pausing in the hall to brainstorm. Paris had to have had some kind of introduction to her life and past, and they've been out together on girl outings, I remember stopping to spar with Paris after they had gone tanning a couple weeks ago. He struggled to remember those few kind moments him and Paris had shared in the last few weeks, and had to come to the conclusion that in order to make Brianna his girlfriend, he had to stop avoiding the blonde heiress in the halls and around campus, suck up his male pride and make friends with Paris. He wasn't going to avoid her forever if he wanted to see Brianna, and there was the small feeling in his mind that Paris knew something about their budding chemistry. He needed an ally, and Paris had to be in his corner for everything to work out with Brianna.
Speaking of whom, was coming around the corner as Doug walked towards his room, lost in her thoughts about Doug. He nearly averted a crash by shouting her name and getting her attention. She slowed down, and waited for him to get near her before they said goodnight to each other.
"Ronnie give you any lip back Miss Feisty?" he asked as he propped his game unit back up into his arms.
She smirked. "Nah, I think we came to a good understanding of what he can and can't do anymore, he's receptive to us now. We talked."
"Did you exchange best friends forever ankle bracelets yet?" he joked, making Brianna giggle.
"Who knows, we'll see. But he's not going to interfere with our friendship anymore." She settled the f-word on her tongue to make sure it didn't accidentally turn into relationship, because she didn't feel ready for that next step quite yet, despite her burgeoning feelings.
"Well good, I'm glad you two are getting along," Doug said. He thought of asking her on a another gaming date, but decided to give Brianna an open invitation instead. "I had lots of fun tonight, we should do it again in a few days Bree."
"I did too, well after we got away from Piper throwing grenades at us relentlessly." She nervously chuckled, and found her hands interesting. "I'll take you up on that one of these days Doug, I owe you for saving me from having to teach an intellectual like Paris volleyball in a real forum, I may not have survived her whining and the pain she probably would've suffered several times when she spiked the ball."
"Hey, si dormitorio es su dormitorio senorita," he said to her in Spanish kindly. Even with her 160 IQ Brianna was confused by the little smirk on Doug's face when he said that. Thinking he had probably learned that line from a bad pick-up line article in Esquire, Brianna decided to challenge him before she left his sight for the night.
"Usted tiene muchos de las bolas Doug. Tengo gusto de eso." She responded back, a little flair and spice tacked onto her Espanol. She then started walking away from him.
"You don't know how much I have, I'll have to show you someday." Brianna turned back around to face a smiling Doug, understading every word she said. "I kind of forgot to tell you I have a few friends south of the border, I'm very fluent in Spanish."
"I'm sure those 'friends' appreciate that each time you pay $10 for 15 minutes." She rolled her eyes at him and turned back around to head back to her dorm. "Goodnight Doug, see you later."
"Same to you Brianna." He turned around with a nice smirk on his face, caused from the enjoyable evening he had spent with his current infatuation. He had a feeling they were going to repeat these nights all through the school year.
"She'll crack someday, I know it," he commented to himself, lovesick and hoping for more to come from Brianna. He headed back into his dorm to savor the memories he had of the evening.
Brianna cleaned up 343 a little bit before Paris came home, retrieving her laundry from downstairs and folding and sorting it so that Paris didn't have to complain about tripping over her shirts when she came back from class. Fussy about her bed, the rest of Brianna's space was usually messy and was haphazardly organized, a trait she had caught from her father, who would keep his desk in the den clean and immaculate, while the couch and bookshelves surrounding it had things haphazardly thrown all over them.
She talked to Lara in Atlanta on the phone for about a half-hour, telling her best friend about the feelings she was harboring for Doug without going into too much detail. As Paris did, Lara also deduced that it was only a matter of time before Brianna decided to sate her urges and try to start a relationship with Doug, despite the girl's stubbornness.
Brianna was about to head off for an early bedtime and was reading some political coursework when she heard some knocking at the door. She checked the clock on Paris' iBook, and wondered who would be coming to the door at eleven at night. Can't be Doug, she thought, he was planning to study then get some rest.
"Who is it?" she called out from the couch, a hand near the self-defense bat.
"Is Paris in?" a male voice called out in the hallway. Brianna approached the door slowly and cautiously.
"She's in Northridge, are you a TA for one of her classes?" She perched herself on the tips of her toes to peep through the privacy hole, finding out who it was.
"I'm not that smart," he said. "I'm Jess Mariano from Venice, she might've told you about me. I came by to see if she was home and to retrieve my shirt."
She peeked through, and even through the warped convex view of the cylindrical lens, figured out why Paris had become a self-described 'horny Helga' within the space of eight days. Geeze he's hot. Not as hot in my world as Doug is, but I can see why this boy makes her dreams X-rated. Even without a picture of him Brianna trusted Jess enough to open the door and invite him in.
"Come on in Jess, I think she has it hanging in the bathroom somewhere," Brianna told Jess as she opened up the door and gestured him to sit on the futon couch. "She ran out of pajamas to wear a few nights ago, so she's been using it for bed wear since you didn't come back and claim it beforehand, I hope you don't mind." She shook his hand and introduced herself. "By the way, I'm Brianna."
"Nice to meet you, and no, I don't," he said distractedly, as the image of Paris wearing his flannel came to his mind for a few moments, and he imagined her tuckered out in bed, playing with the buttons as she read a nice fat book on the Crusades. Whoa buddy, hang on there, it isn't that sexy of an image! He thought to himself, trying to keep the purpose of the visit in mind. He took an extra shift at Target that night so he wouldn't have to deal with a night alone with his father. Both had been looking forward to inviting Paris to the Casa Mariano and had tried to make a night out of it, but with Paris at work Jimmy felt that quarterly inventory at the hot dog stand would be a better use of his time rather than spending a night with his son. The two were still uneasy three months living with each other, and despite their blood bond they seemed more Oscar and Felix living together than father and son. Slowly they were getting to know each other, but they both still needed their space.
Brianna dug through the towels hanging in the bathroom until she located the blue and red flannel, lurking like a hidden object in the Finders Keepers first round game inside of a dark blue towel hanging from the top sill of the sliding shower door. Flannel in hand she walked back into the main room and called for Jess' attention.
"Catch!" Brianna tossed the shirt in his direction, but he didn't have enough notice to turn around on the couch, so it ended up bonking him on his head and hanging off his shoulder.
"Hey!" he cried out, shaking his head as he put the shirt in his duffel bag along with the other things he had brought to work. "You have to warn me about that, I'm a book guy!"
Brianna laughed and sat down on the other end of the couch. "You're just as bad a catcher as Paris, I toss her a paperback and her hands become webbed paddles or something, it's comedic relief to see her catch one of those things."
"Good to know she has the same genes as Marcia Brady," he joked. He took a pencil out of his pants packet. "Do you have any looseleaf, I need to leave Paris a couple things, and a note telling her that I stopped by."
"Sure, there's a pad over by the phone, I can go get it for you," Brianna responded. She was feeling a little curious about what Jess was leaving her roommate and pried in. "Care to clue in a neutral third party on what fine parting gifts your lucky contestant will receive when she comes home?"
Jess opened up his army surplus bag, and dug through the books and notebooks lurking beneath until he found the two packages he had wrapped in brown paper during his break at Target earlier in the day. The only embellishment on the gifts was a red tape-on bow on each of the parcels, and some to-from writing on the upper end. He held the parcels in his hands, looking for a place to put them down. He signaled Brianna to help him out, and as she grabbed the pad, she pointed at Paris' bed.
"Thanks, and no you can not be clued in, I want this to be a surprise to Paris, she must've had a tough week getting into the college newspaper business." He placed the gifts down on her pillow, then sat down at her area of the desk to compose his letter.
"She's going to be, seeing as her birthday isn't until December and you stole 'her' shirt." Brianna laughed and sat down in her chair watching Jess write and frown.
"Her shirt? It's mine, I just left it behind!" Jess looked up at Paris' roommate, surprised.
"Jess, you know what happens when you leave behind a shirt in the apartment of a girl you're flirting with, she takes custody of it until you tear it out of her hands. Ten bucks that Paris gets ready for bed later, looks for her shirt and ends up waking you from a deep sleep at 2am crying into the phone 'how could you cad, that flannel and I were starting to bond like an old comfy quilt from my crib'."
"She is not going to, Paris isn't a lovesick fool into those kinds of things," Jess insisted. "Back when we talked in Hartford, you mentioned the word love to her and she'd start on a tirade that Romeo and Juliet deserved what they got and she hoped that if Shakespeare arose from the dead and wrote a sequel he would keep the Montagues and Capulets fighting as much as the Hatfields and McCoys!"
"I'll let you in on a little secret;" Brianna shuffled over to Jess' side and whispered into his ear. "She's a hopeless romantic. I can't tell you much more, but she's going to relish your gifts, despite how anachronistic the practice might be. She also partakes in 'recreational reading' that involves romance novels and pulpy drama. Don't tell her I said that though, otherwise I'll be scared for my life when she comes after me with some kind of medieval weapon."
"Really?" Jess curled his lips into a smile. "I can't see her reading those kinds of stories." He brought his concentration back onto his note and finished out what he had to say.
"Believe it or not Jess, she does, and I do too. I remember after we finished unpacking and I started to shelve my books, I noticed one of my big fat Harlequins with plenty of intrigue and the literary equivalent of smut was gone. I looked in my bags and all over the room, but couldn't seem to find it at all, even though I'd been reading it on the plane ride down here from San Francisco." Brianna smiled as she recalled the hunt for her book. "I called Paris to see if she knew where it was, but she denied even knowing about the book, so I assumed that she didn't have it. That is, until I cracked open a Roughneck tote she brought up last which had the words 'DO NOT TOUCH!!' in big black marker. Being a sneak, I took off the mailing tape that was sealing the top to the bottom, and discovered about 250 novels of various plots of all types, and she even had the complimentary champagne flute you get from the Harlequin club when you join. It was then I had a feeling of why she really snuck off to the library."
"She had it, didn't she?"
"The moment she walked back into the dorm holding that book in her hand, and saw me standing against the counter tapping my foot, she knew the charade was over. She admitted to swiping the book, and although she was a little perturbed to hear I broke into her stash, that anger was quickly replaced with relief that she'd be able to share her hidden habit with me." Brianna headed over to her bed and started straightening the sheets. "Can I ask you something Jess, other girl to boy?"
Jess folded his note to Paris and placed it atop the parcels. "I guess," he said to her, sighing.
"It may not be my business, and if you don't want to answer the question go ahead and avoid it, I just want to make sure of something. Paris' friend, your ex-girlfriend, do you still have any feelings for her?"
And here it is, the probe by the new best friend of your past, Jess thought to himself. He was actually hoping that someone would eventually ask him that question in order to release a burden off his shoulders from carrying Rory's torch, long fizzled out months ago.
"I don't have any feelings for Rory anymore except friendship," he answered honestly. "It was a good relationship when it lasted, but in all honesty it arose more out of expectations than true love. The whole town had come to the conclusion that eventually Rory and I would be dating despite my past, and I guess I felt I had to follow through on it."
"But there were other things, right? Like the fact that your uncle and her mother are now together."
"Hate to admit it, but I think those two starting to date helped me and Rory's breakup more than it hurt. They were avoiding feelings for ten years; my year of pining for Gilmore paled in comparison. They're much better in the long run than if things had gone the other way. Also, Rory never really wanted to get her hands dirty about my past and avoided bringing it up as much as she could, and that was something that just made me so mad at her at times. I'd go into a story about an old friend from Brooklyn and she'd interrupt it in a moment with either a rant about Paris or her college plans." He placed a hand in his jean pocket and laughed. "At least her annoyance with Paris was good for entertainment."
"Or your imagination," Brianna observed. "You're glad you bumped into her that night two weeks, aren't you?"
"I'm very thankful for that," he said. "She's so encouraging, a great conversationalist, great at debating someone like me into a deep hole--"
Brianna interrupted Jess. "And she doesn't look too bad either."
"I'd use different words than that, but yes, Paris doesn't look too bad at all." He crookedly smiled. "She dressed like a total dowdy wallflower back in Hartford, and let me say I'm thankful that the climate here changed her wardrobe drastically."
"OK, I refuse to go further with that because I don't think of my friend that way!" She held up her hand and drove thoughts of Paris undressed out of her mind.
"Come on, I'm sure your envious of her," he teased.
"Shut up you before I start throwing things," Brianna pouted, getting a hold of a throw pillow. "I have quite enough breastage, thank you very much. Geeze, you guys with your obsessions with all things Hooters. You realize that human females are the only living thing that use their breasts to attract the attentions of a male. In the animal kingdom it's all about the rear end when it comes to attraction."
"Human females also use their asses to attract things, i.e. Jennifer Lopez," he countered.
"Yes, but all the ass shots in the world couldn't stop Gigli from dying in the theaters." Brianna rolled her eyes and wondered why she even got into this conversation with an almost total stranger. "You should have this conversation with Paris, not me, I don't really look at butts that often. It fulfills its purpose of sitting, and that's all it is to me, a filled cushion of flesh. Without it we'd all be sitting on our pelvic bones in those lifesaver-like hemorrhoid pillows or perhaps a very horizontal society, sleeping against the wall."
"You never think about asses at all?"
"Not very often, if I do it's usually because it's too big or small and whoever has it needs to change it." Brianna failed to tell Jess that the conversation had her thinking about Doug's derriere behind the towel a week ago all over again, and her mind kept that picture frozen throughout the conversation. "Why, do you think of the backside a lot Mariano?"
"I won't say anything about that because I'm sure it would come back to haunt me if I ever became famous." Jess took one last look at the pillow where Paris' gifts were residing for now, and prepared to leave. "I should get going before Paris comes home and the surprise is ruined."
"Yeah, I need to take a shower and finish up some schoolwork." Brianna got up and guided Jess to the door. "It was nice finally seeing you mystery man."
"What?" Jess looked at Brianna with confusion in his eyes.
"My name for you for the last couple weeks since we haven't met, and now I see why." She played with her hair as she saw him out. "I hope we get to see more of each other Jess, I can see why you and Paris match up with each other so well." After the question about his status with Rory, Brianna tried to keep the line of questioning neutral just in case Jess wasn't feeling the same way about Paris.
"Nice to meet you too Brianna, I can see now why you two got along so fast. You must've done something to get into her good graces quickly, it takes a long time for most people to even be spoken to by her."
"I could say the same about you," she told him with a smile. "I just don't know what she'll do without the shirt though, she is going to be pissed about that I'm sure."
The boy looked down at the flannel he was wearing, an almost totally blue checkered shirt over a dark blue tee. A small sacrifice to the cause, he thought to himself as he decided to replace the shirt he was taking home with him. He took off the flannel, and with Brianna trying her best to avert her eyes and keep un-friendish thoughts out of her brains as she noticed Jess' physique, handed it to her.
"Now she has nothing to be pissed about," he said simply as he slipped the rope strap of his army bag over his shoulder. "Tell her I'll call on Monday night to make the plans for Friday night dinner at my house."
"OK, see you later." Brianna balled up the flannel and tossed it towards Paris' bed, where it landed in the middle of the mattress. Jess waved at her goodbye, and she shut the door on him and proceeded to head over to her PC to proofread a book review for one of her classes.
Paris was exhausted and about to fall asleep as she walked into the front lobby of the Saxons, her shoulder hurting from the pressure of the strap of her messenger bag. Although the 'night from hell' had turned out to be much better than she had thought and she had a new friendship thanks to Mai Lin, other parts at the night had grated her mind, like during a short-lived rally by the Toreadors in the second set where everyone in the student section was up from their seats trying to encourage Cal State-Northridge to win the set, cheering loudly and doing the wave until UCLA responded by taking back possession and sweeping the rest of the set. The crowd noise had made Paris' head pound through the rest of the night, and when her and Mai Lin had stopped in at a diner for a bite to eat she had the waitress bring her a single-pack of Anacin to take with her water.
She really liked Mai Lin, and hoped that her and the Laotian girl would have many more assignments together, since she wanted to know more about the girl from Eau Claire. Back at the Franklin, photographers were assigned on a per-story basis due to a rule not instituted by Paris that she couldn't change, thus making the reporting and photography seem like two separate views instead of one united perspective. Paris would be more than happy to share the spotlight with Mai Lin and hoped they would stay together as they moved up the ranks.
Before she headed back to her dorm, Paris stopped by the front desk to pick up her mail, but she hadn't found anything from Rory in the package at all. She attributed it to her being too busy in New Haven to get a few moments in for a letter to Paris. But she did get a postcard from Coral Gables courtesy of Louise, which instead of having a picture of Miami's skyline, had a play on words of a tourist slogan.
"Virginia is for lovers, and in Wisconsin, you're among friends. But Miami Beach is for one-night stands," she read, giggling at the words. "Only you Louise, only you." She went into the elevator and read the postcard as the elevator made its climb up to the third floor.
Dear Paris,
Whoever in 1896 decided it was a good idea to set up a city in the South Florida swamp was really onto something, because I think I've finally found my place in life. Miami and South Florida are beautiful, and it definitely shows in the male population down here, I just wanna eat 'em all up ;). I'm a nice coppery shade of brown thanks to the beach, yet despite all the, er, distractions, I haven't disappointed you yet girl. UM's a wonderful school and the faculty has managed to make me give a damn about my schooling, a nice bonus in addition to the weather. Running out of room, so I gotta go. Hope LA's treating you good, send me back a dispatch from Hollywood doll!
Your friend,
Louise
P.S. - Seriously? I have a crush on a guy in sociology, and for more than what's in his shorts, honest. I'll email you the 411 one of these days.
Paris cracked a smile as the elevator doors opened after reading the card. That girl just may be ready to settle down soon, she thought as made a mental note to pick up a few postcards the next time she stopped at the campus bookstore. It perked up her mood to hear from Louise, though not spending the night with Jess weighed slightly on her mind. Despite the fun she had with Mai Lin at the volleyball game and learning on-the-job about how to report a sporting event, she felt guilty for not calling him at the bare minimum so that he would know that her interest in him was still piqued.
I have to call him tomorrow at least, try to remind him that I'm still out there, she nagged at herself as she walked down the hallway towards her room. There was hardly any hustle and bustle in the halls so it wasn't long before she was back in front of 343, hoping to hear if Brianna had decided to take a chance with Doug. She opened up the door and threw her messenger bag on one of the stools against the kitchenette counter.
"Bree, I'm home!" she called out as she watched her roommate turn around in her chair.
"Hey Par, how did everything go?" Brianna asked out of curiosity. She tried creating a distraction so that Paris wouldn't notice her bed right away. If she could keep Paris talking until she was ready to ask where Jess' red/blue flannel disappeared off to, that would be a small victory in her mind.
"We won, I was sane throughout despite my deep hatred of anything sport, Mai Lin took great photographs and I think I have a basic first draft of the story that won't need much modification at all. All in all, this night didn't turn out all so bad at all." She placed her reporter's notebook down on the counter and walked towards her dresser, oblivious to the gifts sitting on the pillow. "Everything go fine with you and Doug?"
"Almost," Brianna admitted. "We got our asses kicked in the online game, but after I pulled the plug we salvaged the night, and I got a chance to get some revenge on Ronnie while I was at it."
"What'd he do, interrupt you during a deep conversation."
"Worse, he set up a LAN party on purpose with Piper and it was up to me and Doug to salvage our unit. Doug knew but he couldn't say anything, I'm not mad at him though."
"Of course you aren't, he's your One right now. He could hack into the school network and change low grades and you'd swoon like he just saved you from the dragon."
"Doug a hacker? HA! The boy needed my help setting up his IP and patching into the EA servers, I'm the computer whiz kid." Brianna just shrugged at Paris' other comments. "And he's not the One just quite yet, this was our first night together and he still has plenty of time to fubar around me, I'm not exactly in love with him yet at all."
"Mm-hmm Bree, you just keep saying that. I don't believe you for a moment, you're so in lust with him." Paris found a spare undershirt she could wear beneath the flannel, and headed into the bathroom to change. "You just need to get into a date-like situation and find out if those feelings you have for him are real, get them out of your system. That's what happened with me and Tristan back in sophomore year when Rory set me up with him. Yes it was amazing, and yes I had the most amazing kiss ever thanks to him, but he was attracted to Rory, no doubt, the confirmation that he was set up was just the icing on the cake to make sure that Tristan was roped into it. It was a tough pill to swallow and it took me quite awhile to get over him, but I did it because I knew we had no chance at a future together."
"I know, but at least you've dated Paris, albeit with few men. I was the girl in the corner asking everyone to keep their mouths shut, and one night at a dance was one night wasted away from honing my vocabulary. I have zero dating experience at all--"
"So do I," Paris called out. "And when it comes down to it, except for anyone who goes on a TV dating show, has an arranged date or has a yenta in their corner most everything is spur of the moment. Remember when you told me last Friday was a bona-fide date despite my denials to the contrary?"
"You've changed your mind."
"I have, and I'll be counting it as a date. Jess may not, but I will. I didn't even have to be ten feet away from my bed and I still managed to have a ball with him." Paris unbuttoned her shirt and searched beneath the towel she hid the flannel in, futile in the search for 'her' shirt now back on Thornton Court in Venice. "Speaking of Jess, have you seen my shirt Brianna?"
"Not at all Ris," Brianna called back innocently. "I haven't been in the bathroom all that much today."
"Please say you didn't throw it in with the wash because I know how much you either wanted me to bring it back to him personally or dispose of it in the incinerator." She started to search each of the six towels hanging from the rods around the room, trying to find it, but coming up empty. By about towel number four, she was fuming.
"Damn it, where did it go?" she uttered in a voice tinged with panic. "Brianna, you mixed it in with your laundry, didn't you?" Paris rebuttoned her blouse and flew out of the bathroom as Brianna enjoyed the comical scene that was ensuing by withholding certain information.
"Honest Par, I haven't seen it at all. Maybe you threw it in your backseat without noticing."
This was about the time that Brianna learned that teasing Paris was not a particulary good idea. Suddenly her eyes seemed to take on a dark shade of maroon with flecks of fire orange around the irises.
"Brianna, where is it? Stop goading me," she growled out harshly. "You know where it is, don't you?"
I better stop before I become the top story on UPN13, Brianna said to herself as she pointed towards the bed. "The owner decided to claim it back tonight, and might I say you have very nice taste in men Gellar. However, before he left I warned of the consequences of leaving you in the cold, so he left the flannel he was wearing tonight behind on your bed."
"Huh?" Paris turned her gaze towards the bed, and found the blue shirt sitting in the middle, along with the two gifts on the pillow. The butterflies she had been having whenever Jess was mentioned, and seemed to be reined in for the evening were coming back into her stomach. No doubt she was about to become a pile of romantic goo all over again like she did at the end of last week's meeting.
"And he also left a little something to make sure you didn't feel neglected since you had to work tonight." Brianna said the words, but Paris couldn't hear them as she approached the foot of her bed. Sitting down, she grabbed the flannel and put it to her nose. The mix of Brut, sweat, a smidgen of a petroleum product floating around and a few remnants of nicotine hit her senses full-force for the first time since she found the other shirt the week before, and she knew from the aroma that indeed, Jess Mariano had stopped by while she was out. Not even thinking, Paris put the shirt on over her blouse and scooted down the bed to get a closer look at the wrapped gifts.
"This is...really nice," she stumbled out as she ran a finger down the rough the seam of medium-sized flat package. "You're sure it was Jess? Black hair, brown eyes, the classic look of James Dean? It might've been someone else and I might be holding some kind of secret videotape the government wants and they dumped the responsibility off on me."
"I didn't ask for ID and a blood sample, but I'm pretty sure it is," Brianna said back.
"It isn't though, Jess isn't the gift-giving type." Paris shook her head and compared the to Paris from Jess handwriting on the smaller parcel to that of the letter from a couple weeks ago she had memorized down to his open-looped J in her mind. She found the note Jess had left sandwiched between the gifts and was going to read it, until she was scolded by the paper. Read after you've opened the presents, it told her. She sighed and ran the tip of her index fingernail against the tape holding the paper together. Figuring from the weight, she hypothesized, this is probably going to be a book. She carefully zipped the nail across the middle of the Scotch tape, and found the first signs of the tell-tale look of a thick paperback.
"This is a book," she told herself. "Wonder what it could be?" She opened the top flap, and discovered that the volume was one of two Jess had wrapped into the same package. The slow unwrapper she was, Paris opened up each end of the gift deliberately, not giving in to her urge to just tear the paper limb for limb. It would be good to put it to other use to her, say as extra scratch paper or to use as giftwrapping for a relative she hadn't taken a liking to. She'd find a use for it.
Brianna watched Paris, impatient with how long her roommate was taking with finding out what her gifts were. After a moment, she had finally had enough and walked over to Paris' bed.
"Par? Just open the freakin' present." She rolled her eyes and was on the receiving end of a small girl-punch on her elbow. "Ow!"
"I take my time Brianna," Paris stated matter-of-factly. "It's like a chocolate, you don't know what's in it until you actually get a full taste of the confection."
"So I guess that rules out the gift-wrapped stripper I was planning for your combined Hanukah/birthday bash, by the time you unwrap his package everyone will be fast asleep."
Paris blushed. "Oh geeze, if you get that I'll be hiding in the bathroom the rest of my college days, I wouldn't know what to do with something like that."
"Besides the obvious?"
"No, because nudity unnerves me, even done in jest. Louise gave me a copy of Playgirl as a gag gift for my bat mitzvah, and though I got through the articles fine, the pictoral content...Let's just say that nudity has never inspired me to do anything but blush and feel very unclean for staring at a picture with everything out there to see."
"Uh-huh, and you're so shy about the literary smut dear," Brianna touché'd back. "You couldn't live without it."
"That's different though, I can create my own picture from those words. With Playgirl you have to picture the actual guy, and sometimes they're more like the men of your nightmares than your dreams." Paris puckered her lips in a sour position as she finally got the last of the gift wrap off of the two books.
"True, true. Although tell me something Paris."
"Hmm?"
"If Jess was to pose for a magazine like that, what would you do?" Brianna prepared for the upcoming assault on her ears, but didn't receive a rant as Paris stated her argument simply after a wide look of surprise.
"I'd kick his ass and buy up every copy published I could. Then I'd thank my lucky stars I've been one of the few girls to see him in that way." She then took her position to a realistic conclusion. "Besides, Jess is too shy to have his picture taken, even fully clothed. If he wanted to titillate he'd submit an anonymous essay to LA Weekly about his first time."
"How do you know that, you know him from occasional visits from Rory only and just five hours together and several phone calls over the last few weeks."
"I think we're kindred spirits somehow. We have the horrid parenting in common, along with focusing our energies in one thing, him in troublemaking until he came up to Connecticut, and I with my studying. I can't really explain it, except to say my mother hiring that new age guru for me a couple years ago seems to have warped my romantic side a little." She brought her glance down towards the books she was holding, and read each title to Brianna.
"Jess gave me The Thomas Guide for Los Angeles and Orange County. Hmm," She wrinkled her eyebrows as she glanced at the cover. "Very thoughtful gift, seeing as it took me about twenty minutes tonight to find the right road up to Northridge." Paris was thinking of the atlas she received in more practical terms. However, her roommate saw more than a book of maps in Paris' hands.
"He doesn't want you to get lost," Brianna hypothesized. "It's kind of a vague way of saying that he wants you to stay in Los Angeles for as long as he's here. It's more than the maps Gel, it's what the message is from the intention of the gift itself."
"Really, I didn't even think of that." She paged through the book, watching southern California unfold in a blur. "But it makes sense to me, Jess has always been very vague when it comes to the messages he sends."
"So you understand the intentions?"
"Very clearly Bree," she said, setting aside the atlas and taking a look at the cover of the other book. She sighed and rolled her eyes. "Jess is still trying to get me on the Kerouac kick."
"What title did he buy?"
"Dharma Bums," Paris told Brianna. "That one will have to wait a while however, I'm only on chapter eight of On the Road. He's never going to give up on the guy while I'm around."
"You like it I hope," Brianna queried. "It took him effort to think of the perfect presents for you."
"I love it, don't worry. My period of judging the beat generation by their covers is long finished, I like On the Road. I'm just not ready to tackle two books by the same author at the same time, I'd get confused if I mixed up the chapter of one book with the other."
"That makes complete sense," the brunette said as she handed Paris the other gift, a longish rectangular package. "Here's the other one, and please don't spend ten minutes tearing off the bow, your friend is in suspense here hon."
Paris took the package and tried to make an educated guess about its contents. "OK, guessing from the length and weight of this, it's either some kind of electrical appliance or a can crusher." She smiled and faced Brianna before the surprise was revealed.
"Only one way to find out. Start tearing." Unlike the books, the brown wrapping this time was torn to shreds and the bow fell to the floor as the contained item was revealed to Paris quickly. Still being one for surprise, she shut her eyes as her hands picked and ripped at the Scotch tape to hasten the unwrapping process. Thirty seconds later, she was done and kept her eyes shut, asking Brianna's opinion before she opened them back up.
"It's a strange present, but I think it might mean something to you Par," she said.
"It isn't a sex toy, isn't it?" Paris frowned at the word strange and thought the worst immediately.
Brianna giggled, then composed herself. "Well the toy part is correct, but nothing involving anything adult."
"I don't want to take any chances, open up the box and put whatever's in it back in my hands." She handed the mystery object over to Brianna, who furiously took off all the security and protective ties holding it to the packaging to end the drama. It took a minute, but after testing to make sure that everything was in order, she handed Paris the toy.
Paris ran her hand against it, trying to memorize the texture just by feel alone. It feels so soft, might be a teddy bear, she thought as she squeezed it. Instead of feeling the other side though, she felt something hard in the middle, and heard a click as she pushed in some kind of trigger.
For a couple moments, Paris could swear she was back in 1990, getting ready to watch ABC's Friday night with Francisca and her kids in the great room, curled up in her nightgown and a big afghan. Everything felt so familiar, and as her hands moved up and up, the feeling of the familiar felt body came back to her mind. At the top of the object, she felt what seemed like a hard plastic face.
No way, he didn't...Her mind spun for a moment as she realized the utter familiarity of what she was grasping in her hands. That's it, time to open my eyes, I will not scream or act girly when I open them, I will be calm and collected, she pleaded to herself as her lids opened up to face the world again.
And there, laying in her hands, was something she had kept in her room up until her twelfth birthday and just about dragged around the house numerous times, and was only taken away by her mother because of some lame reasoning about it being a fire hazard that would burn down the Manor, but had probably been fixed by now. Paris was once again the proud owner of a GloWorm doll.
Despite the pleas to herself not to act like a teenager in love, a small involuntary squeak came out of Paris' mouth as she took in the sight of the friendly little green caterpillar-like creature with the nightcap on his head and a face that glows bright when hugged.
"Oh my God," she uttered as she did a double take to make sure she wasn't dreaming. "I didn't think he'd pick up on it at all."
"On what?" Brianna asked, enjoying the fact that Jess' gifts were putting a smile on her friend's face.
"I mentioned in passing last week when he was over that I owned one of these and hadn't seen one out for years. I loved mine when I had it but never scrounged up the courage before I left to get it back from the attic." She laughed and sighed as she squeezed the doll again, letting the soft amber light overwhelm her senses. "Where did he even get this anyways? They don't even sell this model GloWorm in the stores anymore, Hasbro came out with a new version more geared towards preschoolers than regular children, this is in mint condition." Paris grabbed the box from the ground and searched for the copyright date, finding it on the bottom. "Copyright 1989 Playskool, Inc." she read. "He must've had to really dig deep to find this, he certainly wouldn't have found it in the back room at Target."
Brianna pointed down at the floor, where in the flurry of activity minutes before, Jess' note of explanation fell onto the light-blue berber carpet. "There might be the explanation."
"Oh, right." Paris uttered softly as she bent down and grabbed the note. "Even the best of us still have blonde moments I suppose."
"I'm a natural brunette and have them often," Brianna told her, laughing. "That report is calling out for me to finish it, so I'll leave you and the note alone, alright?"
"Thanks Brianna," she smiled and curled up on her bed with the GloWorm and books at her side. "One question though, you think Jess is attractive?"
Brianna pretended to ponder the question for five seconds before laughing aloud. "Paris, trust me. You don't wanna let this boy be the one that got away. And as for me trying to steal him away from you..." she spoke honestly and hoped Paris would let the topic rest after that. "I have other things on my mind already--"
"And that thing would be Doug, wouldn't it?"
Brianna sighed and just walked to her computer seat, leaving her roommate in relative seclusion. "Whatever you say Gellar, I meant my paper." As she sat down, she corrected for her mind. OK, she's right, it's Doug. But it's better to be friends first with him, then lovers. I just want to take this cautiously. I've already got past the dreaded first night, and if it goes well in the next few weeks...she stopped to take a look at the text she was typing onto the OpenOffice screen, and realized that half a page in the book report had nothing to do with literature, but was a sort of 'get-to-know-me' letter to Doug about her life, friends, likes and dislikes. Groaning, she clicked to highlight the text, cut it out of the book report and pasted the letter to a separate document, saving the file as About Me. She went back to her book report, trying to keep her thoughts away from Doug.
Yup, I'm sick for the boy, she confessed to herself. She rolled her eyes and decided to get back to work. I have four years with him, might as well not rush it, Brianna thought as she started on her criticism of the text she was assigned.
Meanwhile Paris had gone back into the bathroom to properly change into the new shirt Jess had given her, taking off the blouse beneath. She didn't even bother with pajama bottoms since the flannel went all the way down to the middle of her thighs and she figured Brianna was comfortable enough with her wearing pajamas in that style. She headed over to her bed, and playing with her hair as she spread out on the mattress, read Jess' note to herself.
Dear Smartie,
Hope things went well with the story up in Northridge, but I'm happy to hear that you're getting back into journalism, you always wrote the best articles in the Franklin. You may ask how I would know that? Well, Rory usually pawned off a copy of the paper to me that I asked for so I could read her prose. That reason ended very quickly when I started reading your opinion pieces, they far outshone Rory's writing so much because they seemed well thought-out and had interesting points and statistics.
So you're probably thinking 'Jess, how on earth did you find the money and inspiration for all these presents?' Target gave me a 75¢/hour raise last week, and instead of using the first check to buy things I'd probably never use, I'd give you a few things since I'm so thankful you're here in LA. I know you haven't finished On the Road quite yet, but damn it I'm going to obliterate Jane Austen from being your favorite author, no matter what it takes.
The atlas...not actually my idea, you can thank Jimmy for that suggestion. He felt it would be some way of saying 'Welcome to the area, hope you don't leave soon' since he's a native Angelino and as sort of an apology for thinking you were a telemarketer, and no matter what I told him about you he thought giving you a book of LA maps would be a gesture of welcome. Looking at it now though, he was sort of right. There's a message in there somewhere, I guess you could talk to Brianna about it, or Jimmy when you stop by next week.
I bet thinking about where I could come up with a mint condition in the box GloWorm, and you've already deduced I didn't pick it up on my way out of work. There was a neighborhood garage sale along the boardwalk last Sunday, and I was over there looking for vintage books and LPs. I was walking along really not finding all that much that interested me, when a elderly woman's little stand off to the side caught my eye. I approached and didn't really know why I was even stopping there, when your comment about owning a GloWorm came back to haunt my mind. And there it was, selling for six dollars, sitting on her table. She told me that it was intended to be a Christmas gift for her grandchild back in 1989, but all the sudden he got into the Ninja Turtles so it was obvious that action figures were in his future. She kept it despite that setback, and sold it to me because I seemed to be a 'pretty good kid'. Her words, not mine. She wondered who I was going to give it to, and not wanting to go into specifics told her 'a girl'. She made me blush when she asked that, but didn't probe further. I thought you'd like this, I really do like listening to you talk Paris. It's just a way to show that you're really important in my life right now, and that I catch every word you speak.
I know I'm saying a little too much, so I'll end the letter here. Before you wonder school is doing fine, and a couple of my teachers are pretty cool. Still need a little help in biology and math is tough, but as you said last week even you weren't a shining star in that class. I hope things are going great for you Paris, and I'll see you around, maybe before next Friday when you have dinner at my house.
Your friend,
Jess
P.S. - Please, don't thank me for the gifts. I just wanted to show you that you're in my thoughts all the time.
As her eyes trailed off the last of Jess' writing, Paris felt like crying in joy that Jess hadn't forgotten her. She had thought all the way home about him sulking at home, when really he was trying to put the last touches on a nice surprise designed to make her feel better. For the first time in a few weeks, since she left Hartford, Paris felt appreciated for what she did for others.
She was still in disbelief at the fact that Jess had bought her a children's toy, and at considerable cost. Paris appreciated the thought, sure, but what was confusing about it was that it was Jess, the epitome of sullen and moody. The image of him approaching an older lady and asking the price of a light-up worm toy was comedic in the stage that was her mind, and as she held the toy, another mirage of him trying to keep it obscured from his father without a weird line of questioning occurring made her giggle.
At that moment, Paris knew all the hard work she and Mai Lin put in on the Bruins wouldn't be remembered months from September 5th, and would be but a footnote when the Daily Bruin came out with a centenary special edition twenty-some years after she graduated from UCLA. It would be a fleeting moment of achievement, just as her work at the Hartford Armory every Thanksgiving morning for the community dinner wasn't remembered all that well in her multi-terabyte gray matter.
But this moment, where she received a gift for just being a friend would be remembered forever, and it was a moment that would be personal to her, and just her. Where everyone else received the same heartbreak as her when they got Harvard thin sheets in the mail, and she had the same moment as every other UCLA attendee where they faced the majesty of Royce Hall and intook a breath that their lives were about to have a major change, receiving the gift of a GloWorm would be her memory forever, and no one else's. And that could never be taken away from her at all.
She still tried to find romantic motives in Jess' giftgiving strategy, but couldn't seem to find them in anywhere except the toy. She assumed that the atlas was sort of a Welcome Wagon-like gesture from the elder Mariano, and Dharma Bums was just Jess giving her a book to read when she finished On the Road and the current romance she read between classes. But the GloWorm...she thought to herself. Not even Jamie gave me something this sweet and special, and thought out. Jamie's idea of a 'straight from the heart' present for Paris on Valentine's Day was an assumption she wanted to watch the Philadelphia Light Opera perform a modern retake on Romeo and Juliet and have dinner in the most expensive restaurant in the city after the show. Judging from her frayed synapses from the end of the night from the poor food and pathetically bad acting and singing in the opera, Jamie annoyed Paris more than showing his love for her.
She looked down at the doll once again, clearing her mind and taking the gift for what it was; just a gift of appreciation for being there when Jess needed help. She squeezed on it to watch it glow, and it warmed her heart just thinking Jess was thinking of her doing that as he drove home to Venice. She took a look at her watch to see how much time there was until he probably got home.
"About 11:45, I have time," she told herself as she reached over to her nightstand to retrieve her cell phone. She flipped the phone open and scrolled her caller ID list until she came upon Jess' entry. After saving him in the #2 position in her speed dial (after Rory, located on the first button), she dialed out, crossing her fingers and hoping there was no one at his house to take her late call. She wouldn't have been surprised if Jimmy was already asleep and Jess was staying out a little late after stopping by the Saxons.
The outside dialing tone rang two or three times, and Paris tried her best to rehearse her message to Jess in a whisper, going over the words in her mind and aloud. After the fourth ring she got the familiar click of an answering machine, and she had to listen to Jimmy try to rattle off personal and business messages in the space of twenty seconds.
"Hello," it said, "you've reached the home of James Mariano, proprietor of Boardwalk Jimmy's Hot Dogs and Pretzels. If you have a business proposition, press one. Personal business involving me or my son, press two. If you're a telemarketer or a lower grade newspaper than the LA Times, press that red button off to your side, prepare for the trap door and kiss yourself goodbye, I don't want your business. Have a nice day or evening, and don't forget, Boardwalk Jimmy's uses only 100% beef in our franks--"
"Gah, shut up Jimmy and let me leave a message!" Paris gritted out as Jimmy gave some free promotion to French's and Hunt's for supplying condiments to him. "That's what the business line is for." Finally, not a second too soon, she remembered she could've just pressed two and avoided it all in the first place. She pushed in the two on her keypad and prepared for more spiel.
Thankfully she just got a robotic 'please leave a message', followed by a long tone. This is it Par, don't screw this up, go girl! the little her dressed up as a cheerleader in her mind prodded, and she started to stumble through her gratitude.
"This message is for Jess, and no Jimmy, I'm not selling anything, so do not delete this or else! Anyways, it's Paris and it's a quarter to midnight Friday evening." She hesitated for a bit, looking at the GloWorm she held. "I didn't expect you to do something like this for me Jess, and I've had gifts given to me before out of pity or obligation. Sometimes heart was put into them, but quite a few items were along the same-old 'rich-girl' present lines. You know, the wine glasses, clothes, some jewelry. The set-up suitors were even worse. I'm staunchly anti-fur and there have been a couple dates where guys thought they could woo me with a mink stole. After giving them a little education about the conditions those things were kept in before they were turned into winter outerwear--"
She stopped for a moment, and realized that she was ranting on about nothing in particular. Jess couldn't even afford fur, so why would he give a damn about her tirade about the men of Hartford society? Take another tact quickly, time's running out, her conscience nagged. Paris started again, trying to keep her words more focused.
"Alright, um, just forget what I said about the furs, who cares. I know that in the note you told me not to thank you for the gifts, but it would just be rude to say nothing about it. I had an OK evening, but I was thinking about you all night and my mood while I worked on the story was reflecting that I'd rather be someplace else, like talking to you and just debating things all night. So when I came home and found what you had given me, I was touched, and not only that, I felt appreciated by someone besides Brianna in this town. Not by only you, but your father, thank him for giving me the atlas of LA for me."
Paris was ad-libbing everything she was saying right off the top of her head, and letting Jess have a peek into her raw emotions. She continued, knowing she didn't have long before the answering machine would stop recording. "So I guess what I'm saying in this call to you," she sighed, smiling. "Is thank you for everything Jess, it's appreciated beyond words. You really know how to make a girl feel welcome in the big city, and I'm counting the hours until we meet for dinner next week. No need to respond to this, I just wanted to get this sort of audio thank you card out before I forgot, I suck at sending out thanks around birthday time to the various businesspeople in Hartford who gave me money."
Paris decided to end the call before she lost her nerve. "OK, well I'm done thanking you, so I should end this before I get cut off. Keep doing well in school, and I'll talk to you soon, call me in a few days. Until then Reb, goodbye." The end tone of the answering machine beeped in her ear, and she was relieved that her whole message got out as she hit the red button on her cell to end the call. She folded it back into it's clamshell shape and set it back down on her nightstand, taking a romance novel as she decided to call it a night and crawl into bed. Even with Brianna's call for her to stop reading romance before bed, Paris felt like she deserved it tonight. I want my dreams to be filled with those images, she thought to herself as she took the bookmark out and resumed from where she left off in the book at lunch.
Deciding to test out a theory, she turned off her nightstand lamp, leaving her bed in a somewhat muted darkness, with some light coming from Brianna's PC and her lamp on her side of the room. She heard the girl's keyboard clacking and tuned it out as she used the pillows she had to create a prop so she could read with her upper body vertical. Then she cuddled up with her GloWorm, squeezing it until it lit up.
"It still works," she said brightly, noticing she could make out all the words on the page fine with the lamp inside of the toy. When she had her other GloWorm when she was six, Paris would use it as a make-do booklight after lights out so she could get reading in before she fell asleep, or Francisca came in to scold her for staying up past her bedtime, saying 'a growing girl should have a voracious appetite for sleep. You may think it's fun to stay up now, but try thinking that's fun when you're eighteen and cramming for the SAT's in one night'. Still, Paris would stay up reading the classics of childhood, the great Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary being her favorites until she discovered Dickens and the rest of the classics lurking in her father's library two years later.
She started reading the book she held, the parallels between her six year-old self reading Bezzus & Ramona and her now at eighteen reading some title she'd forget after the book was finished clear in her mind. She relaxed as she got into a vivid love scene, and immediately replaced the principal characters with herself and a certain Brooklynite living in Venice.
"Thank you very much Jess," she whispered to herself as she cuddled her GloWorm. "For this, and that." The that she spoke about, coming from the book that was sure to inspire some very wicked sleep talking dreams around 4:45 in the morning. One more dream Brianna, I promise I'm done after that, she said to herself with a Mona Lisa-ish smile, settling into her pillows to start the gears in her fantasy center turning for later on.
To be continued…
Author: Nate
Pairing: Paris/Jess, Brianna/Doug and couplings with the ancillary characters introduced in later chapters.
Spoilers: How can I spoil anything if the Jess spin-off series is never going to exist? OK, so there's still that Big One spoiler from chapter one, but besides that, I can't spoil something that isn't there anymore (looks disappointedly at the suits at Warner Brothers for canceling the whole idea).
Rating: PG-13 (swearing, sexual innuendo, thoughts and allusions).
Disclaimer: Amy Sherman-Palladino, Hofflund-Pollone and Warner Bros. Television own the Paris and Jess characters, along with the dead spin-off idea. Other trademarks are owned by their respective companies. Contrary to popular belief, I do not own the hair Liza cut off over the summer to create that cute new short 'do she's sporting in the new WB teaser promos (Turns into a puddle of mush imagining Paris hugging me tight instead of Rory in the promo).
Archiving: Usual suspects; FF.net and LWL. Make sure to ask if you want to archive it yourself.
Summary: Paris and Brianna spend time talking out their feelings about their beaus, then Paris makes a new friend in her photographer at the UCLA volleyball match she's covering against her will. Meanwhile, Brianna gets to know Doug a little more, and there's surprises in store at the end of the evening.
Author's Notes: I apologize for the long wait between chapters five and six, but I felt the summer blahs hard this year, thus I didn't feel like writing all that much despite the plot forming in my head (I'm also putting blame on Ellen Muth from Dead Like Me for the way she looks in tight jeans and tiny shirts, she was such a distraction over the summer. Is she allowed to look that freakin' hot playing a dead girl?!). It was only through divine intervention (OK, Liza's appearance on the West Wing showing on Bravo Labor Day and Mila on The Michael Essany Show last night for some guidance) that I was able to get this chapter out. I also had to clear up the plot a few times since I took the storyline in some different directions than I intended earlier in the chapter.
The usual thanks to my betas (Ash and Jamie) for being patient and putting up with the length of my stories, they're nuts for reading them and making sure everything makes sense. For those who reviewed chapter five and have stuck around after all these months, thanks so much. And thanks to the Whipper Dippers on-thread (Jamie, Reeka, Susie, Kelly, Priya) for keeping my love for Paris and Jess strong. If Milo's coming back, Jess is going to get an education from Paris about S&M darn it ;)!
[blatant plug]Speaking of Dipper fic, coming soon check out the username DipperRoundRobin for great contributions from all of us at the Whipper Dipper thread we all did together in order to keep the Dipper flame strong. You'll love them all, I promise.[/blatant plug]
On with the show without further adieu, party people in the place to be!
"Come on you stupid little man, volley the damned ball, your arms are right under it!" Paris was learning all about volleyball just fine from Brianna, but at the same time getting drubbed in the school of hard knocks by her brunette partner-in-crime. In the fourth hour of gaming after an exhaustive history of the game, overviews of strategies and a quick quiz by Brianna, Paris felt ready to take on the former All East Bay star for JV Antioch in a few matches of World Team Volleyball. After a few training matches, Paris won the first two sets by a small margin. But since then, she had been defeated in four matches in a row, with three shutout sets during the matches. It was eleven at night though, and even if Brianna was a seasoned gamer who was taking on an admitted novice, the strain of staring at the same screen for three hours was starting to make Brianna a little light-headed. Paris' advantage of having a longer class schedule at Chilton and staring at teachers as they lectured for ninety straight minutes was starting to become apparent. Her French team was starting to rally from a two set deficit against the Daugherty Americans, and in the last set of the night Paris was up 29-26, with Brianna trying to make a last ditch comeback.
"Par, you're up by three, can't we call it a night and head to bed, we'll continue the game tomorrow morning. My thumbs are numb and my hand hurts like hell," Brianna was whining, wishing she could just end the game and put drops in her eyes. She had taken her contacts out after the second match and wearing the eyeglasses she rarely wore after she got contacts when she was twelve.
"I'm going to beat this game, and I'm going to beat you Bree, even if it takes me all night." Paris was being very stubborn and held onto the controller for dear life, extra calluses forming on her thumb from one too many mashes of the X and O buttons on her controller. She had to admit that bonding with another girl over the cool glow of a TV screen was unorthodox, yet fun. During the game they both talked about the latest happenings with Jess and Doug, and Paris wasn't surprised to hear about Brianna going to Doug's dorm to play games with him Friday night while she was up in Northridge. She was smart and noticed the slight disappointment Doug showed when he stopped by the last three days and found Brianna already gone. Something happened between them, but it's not my place to pry in and play yenta. They'll figure things out soon enough, she thought as her roommate kept denying she was thinking of Doug in an attractive way.
"Oh fine, but if you lose this point I'm calling this game a draw and you are getting to bed young lady. Don't forget you have that book report on The Greatest Generation you have to final draft before you head off into dreamland."
"I'm just going to add a couple sentences and correct some errors, no need to puff up a piece further where I call Tom Brokaw a panderer for writing a book glorifying the AARP generation to no end. If it wasn't for those GI's and the creators of Levittown America would still be a mainly urban society, the outskirts of town would still be the playgrounds of the kids instead of the rich, and racial integration would've been a breeze, along with traffic."
"So in theory, it's all their fault that your parent's childhood sucked beyond belief and in turn yours?" Brianna was puzzled, yet interested in Paris' theory.
"Exactly my friend, exactly. I'm lucky though, the Manor is in an older section of Hartford so I don't have any of that disillusioned suburban kid bullshit to deal with." Paris served the ball and awaited Brianna to return it with her six little guys. It sailed towards the back of the screen, and one of the pixilated players in blue bounced it towards the front line, where #8 was waiting to set it for #10 for a hard spike onto the French side, and hopefully Brianna's 27th point of the set. #8 set the ball in the air, and #10 approached the ball with fury, bashing the ball over the net and towards Paris' middle line, unprotected since Paris was relying on a 4-2 defense.
"Crap!" Paris found she had to think fast in order to save the ball and the match for herself. Her red #5 player deep in the back towards the serving line ran left and up for dear life in order to bounce the ball inches off the ground back into the air. She smashed in the face of her triangle button and held her left analog stick hard in the left-and-up axis position, tuning out Brianna's call for the ball to 'hit the floor, hit the floor', along with what might have been music once upon a time in the background, but was now grating notes coming out of the TV's tinny speakers.
She held her breath and it seemed like slow motion as the computerized player made a desperate slide onto the hardwood below. The only thing she could do for the next few milliseconds was wait and hope #5 got the ball in the air high enough so #2 could spike it in-between Brianna's strong 3-3 line. She closed her eyes, feeling just as nervous as when she found out her SAT scores. The moment seemed to last forever, and her fingers were crossed within her.
Moments later, Paris felt the satisfying tactile response of her controller shaking and vibrating roughly and heard the sound of a hard hollow thump, meaning #5's mission to keep the ball in the air had been successful, and in the ensuing shock, Brianna's focused player was at the net in victory dance position, far away from where #2 would be targeting his hit towards. Brianna's thumb tried guiding the little guy towards the middle in a last act of desperation to save the game, but was unsuccessful as French jersey #2 gave the ball a hard kill over the net at about 75 mph, and with a high bounce, it bounced right in the middle of Brianna's playing field and out of sight as the shiny font came onscreen and a disembodied computer voice announced the final score. "Game, set and match to France, score 30-26. France wins three sets to two."
Brianna looked at her roommate nervously, Paris looking as if she was going to break out with the bad 'Bears Super Bowl Shuffle'-like dance moves any second and going all Deion Sanders on her for her first ever video game win.
Instead, Paris just pumped her first in the air and squeaked, then said "I win", smiling at herself. She then turned to face Brianna.
"You've been a fine opponent Brianna, and a great mentor, thank you." Paris turned off the PS2 and started wrapping up her controller, leaving Brianna confused. She stood up and started wrapping her own controller.
"What, no victory dance or rubbing the loss in my face Par? This isn't fencing where you shake hands at the end babe, you have to make sure I'll never forget this loss and that I'll have a little resentment built up the next time we take each other on," Brianna said with a hint of cockiness in her voice. Paris looked at her and scrunched her eyebrows in annoyance.
"Hey, it's my first win, I'm still learning how to navigate the post-game afterglow." She huffed, and made a promise to Brianna. "Next time I win I promise I'll be in your face telling you how much you suck, and that this is called kicking your ass, etcetera, etcetera. But I'm not doing any dances because I have a ballet teacher from my early years I still look up to."
"Fine, fine, I'll let you be a winner with good sportsmanship, but just this once." Paris headed over to her iBook to finish her drafting as Brianna lay down on the couch watching the late night weather on Eyewitness News. "So, you seemed a little down when you got home from renting the game, what happened?"
The blonde turned around in her computer chair. "Jess called to invite me to dinner with him and his father Friday night, and I had to reject him. We almost fought over the phone and I felt like such a horrible friend for telling him I couldn't see him this week. I mean sure I have his number, but it just isn't the same talking to him personally. I look forward to meeting him, yet I do look forward to his calls, don't get me wrong. It's just that, God, Jess is just--"
"The One in your life right now," Brianna completed. "And you felt like by putting the Bruin first over him, you were a bad girlfriend."
"That's girl-friend Bree, we're not that close yet," Paris said, separating the dreaded word into two as clearly as possible.
"Yeah, yeah, blah-blah-blah-denialcakes, when you took your bath last night I heard a lot of splashing and a strong smell of rosemary and lavender bubble bath. Unless you reverted back to being age two and were playing with your rubber duckie and boat, you were in there having a fantasy about Jess."
"Oh come on, every time I go in the bathroom to bathe or shower now according to you I'm having erotic thoughts about him! May I ask how long I was in there and what proof you have about me having said thoughts, humor me please."
"You were in there a finger-wrinkling two hours and I ended up running downstairs to the commons to use the restroom because you wouldn't respond to my hard knocks on the door to get the hell out. All I heard in response is 'Five more minutes, I'm in the middle of something' as if you were an actress in a Herbal Essences commercial. It didn't take a scientist at the JPL in Pasadena to figure out you were in the middle of something alright."
"What did I tell you about entendres Brianna?" Paris said, blushing and facing up to the truth. "So I took an extra long bath and napped a little thinking of Jess, a normal girl would do that."
"Yes, but you came out and went immediately to bed, wrapped up in the flannel Jess left behind Friday night." Brianna looked straight at Paris, who was wearing Jess' flannel, buttoned down three places, horribly matched up with a pair of blue UConn sweatpants. "You haven't worn any pajamas from your drawer since Saturday night; every night you go in the bathroom and change into Jess' shirt. Wouldn't he want that back by now?"
"Finders keepers," she asserted. "It's not like he misses it anyways, and I'll give it back one of these days. It's a nice shirt, very comfy, large thread count--"
"And it smells of one Jess Mariano's cologne. You have to wash it one of these days Par, it's going to start having your essence on it soon enough, and you'll lose the scent."
"Maybe that's what I want Brianna, maybe I want him to walk around in this shirt when I give it back to him and be reminded of me each and every time he puts it on. After seven days, he leaves it here, it smells of him, and seven days later, it has my fragrance. It's like joint custody, only without the messy divorce and child support thing going on. I plan to give it back to him when I come over to his house next Friday night."
"Paris," Brianna demanded. "Go in the bathroom right now and change into a regular nightshirt, Jess' flannel needs a break."
"I won't do it, you can't force me." Paris pouted and wrapped her arms around her midsection, cuddling the plaid flannel as close as she could to her body.
"Why not?" Instead of seeming predatory however, Brianna had that look that said she was going to get some kind of confession out of her friend.
Paris hesitated, got up from the computer chair, then sat down next to Brianna. "Because, it's a comfort knowing that even though Jess is in Venice and 150-some blocks away from here, I'm wearing something of his. It just makes me feel so safe and comforting. When he held my hand on Friday night, it just felt...I don't know, so right, and by the time bedtime rolled around, I was already missing him, but not in the freaky stalkerish pining way. Then when I came upon the shirt when I cleaned the dorm on Saturday, my first reaction was to run down to Venice and drop the shirt off at his house. But then I decided to try it on, and when I saw myself in the mirror wearing it, it reminded me of the handhold. Each time I got a whiff of the shirt, it was like Jess' arms were around me and..." She huffed, some hair going astray as the breath drifted up her face. "God, I must sound like a lovesick puppy, or a pathetic piner."
"No, you sound like a girl in love, but not ready to face up to it quite yet." Brianna edged closer to her friend on the couch, and took Paris' hand. "Look, you're in the beginning stages of a relationship that's confusing the hell out of you, and adding the stress that's being caused by starting UCLA, you're feeling vulnerable Par. But it's OK, completely, and the only reason I asked you to change the shirt was to help you get those worries and concerns out. You have a pretty good head on your shoulders, and you'll figure everything out soon."
"I know I will, but Rory won't," Paris shot back. "If I tell her that 'oh, by the way I met your ex-boyfriend at a fast food joint two weeks ago and I think I'm falling in love with him', she's going to feel so betrayed at my hands. I kept her companionship at bay for so long because I needed to maintain my rep at Chilton, when really I had a best friend in her all along. I've put her through needless crap the last three years, and she wanted to befriend me despite all of it. And through it all, I kept my mouth shut about my feelings for Jess all through their relationship. The delayed study sessions, him picking her up from school in his ugly brown gas guzzler, the Franklin articles a day late because she was going out with him that night. I never admitted this to anyone but myself, I wanted to be Rory. But I don't want to ruin my friendship with her."
"Don't feel like you have to choose between Rory and Jess." The serious and caring tone Brianna was taking was comforting to Paris, and she listened to each of her words raptly. "If you don't want to tell her right away about seeing Jess and befriending him, I'll keep it secret from her if she calls, you have my word. You two are best friends, but you each have different lives. She has the relative comfort and closeness of being only so far from her family and mother in New Haven, while you decided to uproot yourself from the safe and sheltered life you lived for eighteen years and made a big cross-country move to a town that's about as familiar to you as the surface composition of Pluto. Now I may not know Jess, but I'm sure he's sitting on his bed in Venice, fretting over the same concerns you are, but with the extra challenge of choosing between someone he loved in the past and trying to spark a fire with you. I hope to never have that experience myself when it comes to Leonard, but even with your higher IQ, his thoughts are just as clouded as yours."
"And that's what frustrates me Bree, I'm scared of what's going to happen once I decide that Rory and Hartford be damned, I want this. Is he going to feel the same about me, and am I showing enough interest to keep the spark lit up in the first place? Here two weeks ago I thought the biggest strain I'd have to deal with in college would involve time management, and suddenly here I am, telling a girl I only knew from a stray appearance on a TV game show two years ago about my romantic trials and tribulations as if was the next important plot on One Life to Live in-between wanting someone to wring that annoying little banshee Star's neck for being such a pint-sized bitch!"
"We're making progress then, As the World Turns should be ancient history in your life within weeks." Brianna laughed and rubbed Paris' arm. "But seriously, this is the first time you have a guy who you're just about crazy in love with, and you're afraid of what everyone else thinks. There was Jamie, but he was safe, predictable, rote, and the wildest thing he probably ever did was look at the answers in the back of the textbook."
"Or the teacher's edition, he was never very adventurous at all."
"You mean he never made you scream?" Brianna questioned with a mischievous glint in her eye.
"Unless you count my high-pitched utterance of 'My Jamie, you're so...modest down there', I'm afraid that no, he never had that effect on me." Paris' smirk was almost too much for both to bear, and her and Brianna had an out-of-body experience, giggling like Madeline and Louise used to do whenever Paris had them over at the Manor to study with her.
"You meant to say small but--"
"I memorized that part of the thesaurus, so I had plenty of other words I could use to make it easy on him. Let's just say he tried to overcompensate his endowment by mangling the metric system for his own twisted needs."
"Ouch, that small?"
"He didn't top the 15cm line, even erect." Paris felt a pang of guilt maligning her first love so badly, but what she was telling Brianna was true and hilarious at the same time. If this were the 60s and she was a flower child in Berkeley, he would've been one of those lame singers you found on The Lawrence Welk Show, the epitome of lameness no matter what generation you're in. Romance via the Zagat survey turned out to be a very bad idea, but Paris was getting over it. She decided to turn the tide of conversation towards Brianna's avoidance of Doug. "But enough about Jamie, he's an idiot, all in the past, bygones and so on, it's my turn to have you confide in me. What's going on between you and Doug?"
Brianna turned white the moment the question was asked, and tried a pre-emptive move. "Nothing," she blurted abruptly, rubbing the left stem of her glasses and tucking some hair behind it. She looked away from Paris, trying to hide the effect that just hearing her crush's name was having.
"So you mean nothing as in you and Doug just pass each other in the halls and don't acknowledge or look at each other, or nothing as in you want something but you're both too stubborn to admit it?"
"Nothing as in there's nothing between us at all," Brianna said defensively. "He's a guy on my floor and he happened to talk to me on Friday night and had a PS2 handy. Nothing odd or having sexual connotations between us, I assure you."
"Well," Paris' lips curled into a conspirital grin. "Ronnie in 318 would beg to differ, he's been noticing Doug's been faraway and distant since Saturday morning."
"What?!" Brianna's eyes popped out, as if she was being found out. "Nothing has happened between us, honest to God."
"Bree, I talked to Ronnie because he asked me for some notes in Jiminez's class yesterday, and he wondered as I made copies on the commons machine if I had done something to get revenge on Doug for the handshake incident. I denied it immediately, and he was wondering why Doug was being distant. He said tried to set Doug up on a date Saturday night with some sophomore girl in the DeNeves, but Doug turned the girl down sight unseen and he hadn't been saying things like 'check out that chick's rack' since he first saw him Saturday morning."
"So, he's not himself lately, big deal." Brianna scoffed and got up from the couch, trying to make a beeline for her bed. Paris grabbed her arm and plopped her right back down.
"Ronnie also told me that he heard a certain girl from the East Bay Area complain to herself that she wasn't a siren and didn't have much to offer from behind a dorm door around one in the morning Friday evening. She also called herself a prude and a said to herself that a guy wouldn't want her."
Brianna held her tongue, afraid to confirm the fact that Ronnie's words were her own muttering. "So, that could be anyone, there's lots of girls from San Francisco and Oakland who go to UCLA."
"Brianna, when you came back in after getting the money from Doug you just said goodnight and went right to bed, you didn't say anything else to me. And on Saturday morning when you woke up and I asked how Doug was doing you said he was just fine and changed the subject within moments to schoolwork. What I also don't get is the last three days you've avoided him, but you jumped at the chance to ask for his Playstation and to have a gaming night on Friday night with him." Paris stayed persistent, regarding her roommate just like she would Louise and Madeline. "Don't lie to me, you've been distant towards Doug, and I've noticed it myself, because when I try to call him a jerk or something of that sort, you get this look in your eyes, they slit and you give me this stare saying 'How dare you.'"
"I'm going to bed," Brianna responded coolly, making a move to get up from the couch. "Me and Doug have nothing going on, and we're like you and Jess, just friends. Ronnie is just manipulating and trying to start a rumor his ass can't cash."
"So that wasn't you on Friday night who said those things, because Ronnie also mentioned that Doug took a shower just around the time you came for the money."
"How was I supposed to know Doug was gonna only be wearing a tow--" She screamed and stopped before she could cause more damage to the story, but it was too late. Brianna blanched and tried to string together an excuse that would get Paris off her case.
"That is to say that wasn't me, I mean I..." Brianna trailed off, noticing Paris give her the patented look of doom with the small addition of a smirk.
"So it was you, I knew it!"
"I'm not talking about this anymore tonight, there is going to be no us and there will never be an us." Brianna loosened Paris' grip on her hand and headed over to her bed. "Yes I saw him in just a towel, big deal. Doesn't mean I'm in love with the boy at all."
"But you're at lust with him at least," Paris deduced. "Something that can blossom into love after awhile."
She crawled beneath the covers, hiding her face beneath them. "No one is forcing me to fall in love with Doug, so I just won't do it. We're totally wrong for each other anyways, he's social, I'm introverted, never going to work." Paris tried to speak, but was stopped. "And don't try to tell me you and Jess have a similar thing going, you're both introverted."
"I was going to say opposites attract actually, only it was going to be better phrased than that and less cliché." At the foot of Brianna's bed, Paris sat down, trying to calm her friend while at the same time trying to keep the wounds of Leonard closed. "Apparently he's crazy enough for you if he turns down a tempting chance at scoring some older and more mature flesh and decides to cut the chauvinist act completely off suddenly. Don't you dare tell me that nothing sexual ran through your mind as you saw him in that towel either, you're a red-blooded female."
Brianna brought her bedcovers down, and let down her defenses a little bit. "Fine, I did have thoughts about Doug that would get me forty whacks in a Catholic school back in the 30s, but just thoughts, that's it, I can put them aside."
"Hmm, I'll have to tell him you have a little Catholic schoolgirl fantasy lurking within you." Paris smiled mischievously and started turning out lights throughout the dorm room.
"You tell him and I'll look up Jess' number in the white pages and tell him about your sleep talking dream where you wanted to seduce him in your high school uniform!"
"Oh God, when did I dream that?!" Paris flushed beet red as she flicked the last light in the dorm room not next to her bed off.
"Tuesday morning around four, and from the sounds of it you were trying to warm DreamJess to the idea of skinny dipping in the Chilton pool." Brianna's smile was wide, and Paris rolled her eyes as she crawled into her bed, annoyed.
"Well this is just great, for years and years my sleep talking is harmless, debates with Einstein about why E=MC², editorial discussions with Hearst and Pulitzer and how I think even though they epitomized yellow journalism they're geniuses, and how the chief of ConnDot could've constructed the Hartford expressway system better, completely harmless discussions with famous intellectuals. Then I meet Jess once again out here, and within days I've become his dream slut! Next thing you know my dream self is going to pull a Sandra Dee and go all out with the spandex and leather and take up smoking."
"And that would be bad why?"
"Because my hair doesn't curl as well as Olivia Newton-John's," Paris joked sarcastically. "Someday I'm going to have gotten three hours of sleep, and I'm going to accidentally nap in class. And that's when it's going to hit the fan that the #3 student in Hartford has a subconscious that dreams up situations that would make even the girls of Vivid Video cry uncle."
Brianna thought for a moment, and came up with a way for Paris' sleep talking to become less heated. "My suggestion would to read a very boring book before bed instead of a romance, that's how the seed gets planted in the first place. You read a book about journalism, you'll have a dull foreign policy discussion with Margaret Carlson. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, you'll just be 12 year-old Becky in the 1840's, where an unholy thought of Tom Sawyer gets you a painful whacking. Heck, read one of those really bad 7th Heaven novelizations, and you'll have a ball being like Joan of Arc, the only hope to restore sanity to the community of Glenoak because of the Camdens' wacky interpretation of the Bible."
Paris laughed at the image of herself trying to inspire Ruthie to be her own girl and telling matriarch of the Camden clan Annie to cork it, then giving Lucy a piece of her mind because she was a whiny twit with nothing better to do than take her mother's lead. Brianna's idea sounded inspired, and although she'd miss drifting into a world of men and women with high libidos, she wouldn't miss having to fess up to her newest unbelievable fantasy situation with Jess revealed aloud at three in the morning. Instead of taking a Harlequin off the bottom bookshelf of her nightstand, she reached into the back and took out her new copy of Scientific American and started to read about really exciting advances in technology, at least if you were into life-size holograms and ways to improve the human circulation system.
"Hopefully your idea works Bree, otherwise I may have to see a shrink and have him or her psychobabble the hell out of me," Paris said as she took her book light and bent it so the angle of the light off the page of the magazine would have maximum readability in her eyes.
"Me too, as much as Jess sounds like a dreamy guy, he should remain just that, a dream guy." Brianna laughed and took off her glasses, setting them aside on her night table. "Well, I'm out for the night, don't forget to review those notes I gave you about rally scoring and kills tomorrow during lunch, there will be a test on them later tomorrow Par."
"Yes, Miss Daugherty," she deadpanned as she took out her nose ring. "Will it be on a Scantron, multiple choice or an essay?"
"A little from column B, some from C. Couldn't get the Scantron though, sorry."
"Lovely, some good has to come out of this whole volleyball debacle besides the fact Mrs. Broughton wants me to be smoking and drinking like a true reporter by age 21 from being so bitter over my assignments."
"Don't forget the fedora with the press slip in the band."
"Wouldn't want to, it screams journalist all the way to the brim." After some more idle talking and wishing each other goodnight, Paris and Brianna fell sound asleep, both not having any dreams interrupting their beauty rest since they'd mostly talked things out with each other. Rory's reaction to the news of her and Jess meeting still troubled Paris though, and she knew that there was going to be no way to sugarcoat Gilmore's reaction. She put her mind to it and decided that if things were still developing after next Friday between her and Jess that it would be time to let Rory know about them, no matter the response. She treasured Rory's friendship, but Rory's call that she should build her own destiny included her love life, even if that portion included Rory's ex-boyfriend.
Besides, what girl would want to give this up? she thought as she fell asleep, Jess' cologne from the flannel drifting up her nose and inspiring a restful sleep.
Friday Evening
"OK, #2.5 Dixon Ticonderoga medium weight pencil, sharpened to a fine point?"
"Check."
"Ampad Gregg-ruled reporting notebook, 70 pages?"
"Check."
"Tasco binoculars, in case you and Mai Lin are seated towards the back of the Matadome?"
"Check."
"'UCLA rules, CS-N drools' sweatshirt?"
"Funny Brianna, a barrel of laughs." Paris rolled her eyes as Brianna finished going over her reporting checklist, something that had been Francisca's responsibility since she was a cub reporter at the Franklin. The first time she wrote a story about a classroom remodel, she had misquoted Charleston when she tried to remember the story from her memory, and gotten into trouble over it. Since then it was paramount to Paris that she had every tool a reporter would need to get the story, and get it right, thus the purpose of someone else helping with the checklist.
Paris heard a knock on the front door as she put all she needed for her assignment into her messenger bag, still in heavy use even after her Chilton years. She walked over and opened it up, finding Mai Lin on the other side, nervously biting her fingertips and playing with her Canon EOS Rebel camera, trying to get the focus just right.
"Hi, you told me to meet you here Miss Gellar, right?" she asked nervously.
Paris smiled at her. "Yes, and you can call me Paris if you'd like, I'm not Mrs. Broughton and we're outside of school."
"Oh, sorry," the girl apologized, a little hint of foreignness in her accent. Mai Lin stood in the hall, wondering when Paris was going to start guiding her to the Jag.
"Mai Lin, you can come in if you'd like, you're a little early." Paris stretched her arm out as to invite her photographer into the dorm.
"No, it's OK, I don't want to impose--"
"Impose on me and Brianna during Jeopardy! time, please, three's a crowd."
"But I want to get there early and take pictures of the Bruins during practice, Mrs. Broughton wants me to prove myself."
"I highly doubt Mrs. Broughton wants us to cover the pre-game warm-ups with the same fervor as the game itself Mai Lin, she wants action pictures, remember?" The Asian girl seemed a little tense and Paris was trying to keep her calm for her first big college newspaper assignment.
"I know, but I don't want to disappoint her or bring shame upon you for photographing badly," she said, fumbling with her fingernails.
"You're going to be fine, I assure you, but if it makes you feel more comfortable we can take the long way up to Northridge so you get some air to settle down." Paris grabbed her car keys off a hanging rack and then secured the buttons on her messenger bag.
"Alright." Mai Lin was a very shy girl, not prone to saying all that much. Like Paris she was an outsider to the world of Los Angeles, but unlike her she had been stuck within the constricting confines of her family where she used to live. She was a star photographer for her high school newspaper, yet had to use a ghost name of Bernadette Smith for her photos to be published, lest her two younger brothers and older sister in school find out she wasn't actually doing chores at her uncle's house, but using him as a cover.
"We'll be back by 10:30 Bree, try to keep your hormones under control," Paris joked as she waved goodbye to her friend and walked out the door.
"You mean my sexual hormones or those that I use to frag Doug back into the stone age?"
"Um, the other one, I think, bye!" Paris and Mai Lin left the dorm together, leaving Brianna to prepare her PC for the LAN party her, Doug, Ronnie and a couple other guys and girls on the third floor were participating in the game using each of their room machines. They wouldn't see each other playing Battlefield 1942, so it would be fun trying to capture the flags of both sides and use teamwork to strategize the best plan of attack.
"Bring it on Meriwether and Schultz!" she shouted into her headset, calling for Doug and Ronnie to start the battle and their combined defense of the Axis flag. However, she wasn't expecting another opponent to join in, one which would be much tougher to deal with than Benito Mussolini.
"Hi Brianna, Doug, Ronald, prepare to have those nice little butts of yours get kicked, you're going down!"
"Oh fuck guys, why does she have to represent the Allies?" Brianna frowned as she prepared for Lt. Col. RA 1st Class Piper Shawmut to guide the Allies to victory, and the girl's voice to drive them to poke their eardrums out. Not even Patton would've been able to defeat this terror, and the two boys and girl knew they had a long night ahead of them.
"Piper plays computer games?!" Doug transmitted, almost stunned silent.
"I guess it doesn't take much IQ to walk into Gateway and get yourself a computer," Brianna mused as the three tried to figure out how to ward off this surprise attack at the hands of evil. The old saying 'war is pain' was going to be used a lot that evening.
"So, what's your story?" Paris and Mai Lin had found themselves some good net-line seats towards the middle sections of the Matadome, and were trying their best to settle in and not arouse the suspicions of the Northridge fans and students seated around them.
"My story?" Mai Lin responded, confused as she set up her camera's lenses.
"You know, your story. Where you came from, how you were like in high school, your honors. You know, your life story." Paris smiled at the girl, and was making a concerted effort to befriend the shy Asian in her own unique way. Compared to the petite Paris, Mai Lin was almost like a child, at least physically. She barely topped 5' and weighed a relatively light 92 lbs. Where Paris could sit in her seat snugly, the photographer had plenty of wiggling room in her chair. Mai Lin finished taking a couple of test shots, then turned to talk to her co-worker.
"Well, I was born in Laos in 1985, but then only six months into my life my father who had emigrated to the United States sent enough money so that me, my mother and my siblings could take the long bus ride down to Bangkok then the flight from Thailand to America. At first we lived in Portland, and just about every year up until I was nine we made our way east until my family and me settled in a nice Hmong neighborhood in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. From there I went through the ESL program and started learning things like a sponge, I always got the top grade in my family and made them proud."
"Interesting," Paris said. "How did you get into photography?"
Mai Lin recalled the first time she had shown an interest in the subject. "When I was twelve we went down to Disney World and my mother gave me one of those disposable FunSaver cameras so I could take pictures of my two brothers and sister waiting in line for that haunted hotel ride. You know how photogenic ugly tourists are, right?"
"Only Americans can embarrass themselves so badly anywhere they travel," she mused, multi-tasking as she watched the Bruins practice on the court below while listening to Mai Lin.
"I decided that I'm going to take three pictures to satisfy my parents then use the other 21 exposures to find parts of the park which haven't been photographed 27,000 times a day. So I just wandered around taking pictures of flowers in planters, the shoreline of the lake in front of EPCOT that doesn't face that ugly building or a hotel, the back of Cinderella's castle, wherever I could find someplace to take a picture away from my parents. I even had one where I caught the girl in the Donald Duck costume with her head off, I treasure that photo as the best of the trip and the one I always put in the front of my resume."
"In 21 pictures you basically uncovered the seedy side of Lake Buena Vista?"
"I had it published in the school newspaper, thinking my family was going to be proud of my photo essay." Mai Lin frowned as she recalled the dark side of her life. "But they weren't. The Hmong culture is a relatively new way of living to the American experience, and because it came here so abruptly after those that could flee from Laos and Vietnam came here at the end of the Vietnam War, a Hmong girl's role is still confined to being a lover and housewife for her husband. My mother confided in me once that had she come over here earlier, I would've been her last child instead of her third out of five."
"So instead of taking pride, they thought of your photo essay as shameful?"
"I was told I could never photograph again, even though my teacher said I had a natural gift at setting up a shot perfectly. So my younger brothers and older sister became sort of my watchers at school, preventing me from joining any clubs that would clash with the ideal of perfect doting daughter with a future as only being a housewife. Thankfully my sister graduated two years ago and my brothers discovered the opposite sex and was easily distracted, so I was able to join the Memorial Purple Wings school paper as staff photographer without any distraction. I had a ghost byline though so that my parents wouldn't discover that I wasn't at my uncle's after school."
"Well how did you get to UCLA then?" Paris wondered. "Photography doesn't seem to scream UCLA major out at me all that much."
Mai Lin laughed and patted Paris on the back. "I kind of have an interest in life sciences and molecular biology, so the plan for a year and a half is to fake my mother out by making that my major so she won't be suspicious, however what I didn't tell her is that I dropped all but three of the classes once I got here and replaced them with classes driven towards journalism. Next January, I'll slip by that I changed my major to journalism, and she'll think that I'm the next Dear Abby and will bring prestige to the Vang clan. Then she'll find out my true journalistic intentions, and hopefully it'll all go well without a whole 'I have no daughter' scene going on."
"I like you already Mai, I'm not fond of my own mother either." Paris smiled at her and they both stood at attention as the PA announcer informed the crowd they needed to rise for the national anthem. "I think you and me are somehow going to make a great team, I can see it now. Paris and Mai, partners in crime."
"Cool, sounds like a great gig Par." Their eyes drifted towards the Old Glory hanging on the far end of the arena, and both Paris and Mai Lin awaited their trial by fire as the Lady Bruins and Lady Matadors took to the floor.
"God, this must be the 20th time me and you have had to respawn tonight Doug," Brianna grumbled as once again Piper and her forces cornered their Axis team and blew the heck out of the soldiers. There was no way to salvage the night for them, and they hoped to come out of Battlefield 1942 with at least a shred of dignity intact.
"I'm going to continue, continue, continue to beat you until you cry uncle!" Piper piped in, letting her charges knew that she meant business in the virtual and real arenas. Piper had lured them to flag points, then abandoned them for a bit to try to lure the Axis soldiers into a false sense of security. Brianna's character would take the flag, while Doug acted as a human shield and Ron played lookout. It would be no more than a minute though until they found their unit surrounded by the Allies, and Piper's cronies shooting the three characters until they died. This circle of futility would continue unabated for two hours, until Brianna finally had enough. She struck her F10 key hard in frustration, threw her headset onto the desk, and exited back onto her desktop abruptly, leaving Doug and Ronnie all alone in the game.
Two minutes later, Brianna heard a hard rap on her door, and she got up to investigate.
"Who's there?" She got up and opened the door, discovering a fuming Doug behind it. His eyes were red and seemed almost glassy, and he was holding his hand in pain from some temporary carpal tunnel syndrome that Piper had doled out towards him the last couple hours in the virtual world.
"Hey," he mumbled, casting his eyes towards the floor trying to avoid her questioning gaze.
"Doug, are you OK?" Brianna asked, her eyes wide with concern. She invited him into the dorm and had him sit on the couch while she got some ice out from the freezer shelf of the mini-fridge. As she chipped the tray apart with a fork and shoveled the cubes into a zipper bag, she wished that the night could've gone a lot better than it had. She was thankful for the private messaging feature the game had so she could talk to only Doug between games, but it just wasn't the same as him being in the room with him. She would try to talk to him about other things besides game strategies, but would be quickly interrupted when Doug would receive a message from Ronnie about something else.
The worse thing was she felt like a third wheel all night trying to help them out, and was very pissed when Ronnie had invited Doug into Piper's LAN party, even after Doug had told him he was spending the night playing games on a console with Brianna. Doug had made a valiant effort to try to get out of it, but he had to give in to Ronnie after a while, lest his friend find out he held more than friendly feelings for the feisty brunette.
"I think so. I'm sorry Bree, I didn't know that Ron was going to invite Piper and her cronies into the gaming session, he assured me that it was just going to be me, you and him!" Doug said, desperate to stay in Brianna's good graces. "If it would've been up to me he would've been at an off-campus party, but when I told him he was like 'Dude we have to get her in on a gaming session, she'd kick ass.'"
She sat down next to him, handing Doug the ice pack and forcing him to make eye contact with her. "Look, it's fine Doug, I had a fun time, a ball was had by all and such." Her tone betrayed her mood though, and to Doug it sounded like she wasn't having a fun time after they learned Piper was in the game, because he was feeling the same way all the way through the gaming session.
"You're not fine, you look like you're about to mope over a half-pint of cookie dough," he told her as he wrapped a towel around the ice pack. "Ronnie started to curse me out when you F10'ed it out of the game for you not being into it, and it was like what else was I supposed to do? This was supposed to be our night and he went and ruined it. God that guy can be frustrating sometimes, you know?" He formed his hands into a hand-wringing gesture, and for the first time that night Brianna cracked a smile.
"I think he's just cranky because he hasn't gotten any or had the opportunity to have you come with," Brianna mused. "He probably felt like you weren't giving him enough friendish time lately because you've been buried in schoolwork and trying to mend the wounds between you and Paris."
More like I've been buried in thoughts of you Daugherty, he thought as he pressed the ice close to his hand. It hurt a little, but the numbing from the compress was starting the cool the heat down. He coughed and thought about his next move. He was there all alone with Brianna, with no indication Paris was about to walk in on them and ruin the moment.
"I knew it was a bad idea for Ronnie to force you into a LAN party, I'm sorry." Doug was truly apologetic, and rubbed his hand on Brianna's thigh in an attempt to comfort her. She smiled back and started to come out of her full-blown mope, reduced to just a pout.
"I think that calls for a make-up game of Tekken 4 and you buying me a pizza, doesn't it?" She asked with a smirk.
Doug returned the look, smiling evilly. "As long as the pizza has anchovies and jalapenos on it."
"Doug, you get that and you're going back to San Diego in a coffin," Brianna joked, slugging him lightly on his arm. "Sausage and mushroom fine?"
"Sausage and mushroom," he agreed. He got up and went over to the phone, and picking it up with his free hand, dialing the number for Giorgio's Pizza in the LaBrea section of LA. He threw the icepack in the sink, his hand now numb and pain-free. "You want garlic bread with it?"
"Actually if they have breadsticks and spaghetti sauce I'd prefer that," she answered, as a troubling image came to her mind just then of Doug dipping a breadstick into her sauce, but more in the euphemistic inappropriate manner than the way she usually thought of the food items. Don't even start with me conscience or I'll whip your ass into next Tuesday. It was meant as innocent dammit! she thought as she watched Doug take the order, and noticed his defined biceps contracting back and forth as he adjusted the angle of the phone against his ear. She tried to avert her eyes but found herself unsuccessful despite herself. Brianna was now cursing herself that she didn't take the opportunity of Paris picking up supplies from the Bruin offices earlier in the afternoon to release any sexual tension she might have had around Doug.
She ran a finger against the rim of her ear in order to put a few stray strands of her hair back in place, and another impure thought of Doug doing that for her flashed through her mind. She squinted her eyes, trying to will the betraying images from the recesses of her mind. I'm above crushing, I don't want Doug! she cried out in her inner monologue, but knowing that it was too late to uninvite Doug from playing video games with her. Brianna's concentration was broken as Doug called for her attention.
"About a half hour, $13.67," Doug told her, relaying the time and cost of the pizza order. "I'll get the game and be right back Bree, I hope you can beat me."
"Oh, its on Doug, it's on." She had her game face on as she started to unwrap the PS2's controllers. "You won't be able to walk upright when I'm finished with you."
It took awhile, but Doug's libido finally increased from Brianna's statement. "Err, I hope that's just a threat."
Brianna smiled at him, and with just the slightest hint of lust in her voice, responded. "No Doug, it's a promise." Stop it, stop it! Her conscience warned, but the inner pervert in her wasn't about to stop anytime soon. Doug left the room with a look as if he really needed to get in his room and take care of something besides retrieving the video game. Brianna reclined in the futon and huffed a breath of relief that Doug was out of the room.
"It's going to be a long night," she told herself. "Better just grin and bear it." She got up and decided to change out of her regular clothes and into her pajamas. Unlike Paris though, she was going to make sure the emphasis on her body around Doug was muted, which meant she was wearing the biggest t-shirt and baggiest sweatpants she could scrounge up.
She had to, due to the ill-timed fact her entire undergarment collection was on spin cycle in the community laundry room due to her on-off laundry schedule. The last thing she needed was for Doug to notice not only she was pulling a Sharon Stone beneath her PJs, but that her girls were roaming free beneath her shirt.
Next time I keep an emergency bag of lingerie around for occasions like this, she thought as she gathered up her sleepwear and walked into the bathroom to change.
2½ hours later...
"Hey," Mai Lin wondered, prodding Paris with her finger as she merged her car onto the 405. "You look down Paris, what's the matter?" Despite the fact that UCLA had won the volleyball match against Cal State-Northridge in straight sets as Mrs. Broughton predicted, Paris had kept thinking about Jess during rotation times and about how lonely he must feel in Venice right about then, sitting in his house with just his father, the two eating their dinner alone and Jess moping and wallowing with a copy of Lord of the Files in his possession. Even though there was no ill will between them, Paris felt like she had let her Rebel Boy down. The one time he gets the wherewithal to just about ask a girl out without the threat of a pummeling from an ex, and she had to spurn him. However, she couldn't show her true emotions off to anyone she knew. Gellars don't feel pain dear, Sharon Gellar's declaration said in her mind, they let it roll off and move on. Still, Paris wasn't feeling like her usual ferocious journalistic self that evening, and felt plenty of pain despite her mother's advice.
After the game her and Mai Lin headed down from the bleachers towards the floor of the Matadome, where the Lady Bruins were celebrating their easy victory. Paris interviewed the team captain and the player who scored the most points and asked the usual hard questions about their strategies and athletic regimens, easily getting the quotables that seemed to be the status quo of a sports story that could be highlighted in the middle of a column. She went over her notes with an assistant coach to make sure that she scored the match well so the box score wasn't erroneous. The coach nodded and told her she did a wonderful job, and Mai Lin ended up with some great shots of the action during the game and the aftermath in the locker room. Mai Lin knew that only two pictures would run in the sports section, but it wouldn't hurt to give those shots Diane didn't want to the athletic department for use on their website. She made a deal with the team's manager to burn all the shots she took to CD-R so that they could pick and choose, her fingers were crossed that when her over 120 shots were developed they'd turn out excellent.
Mai Lin was a little worried about Paris though. The blonde was talkative and helpful at first when the match had started, but once the second set began around 8:15 she started to become withdrawn and mumbled only the occasional 'OK' or 'mm-hmm' when she'd try to ask Paris a question. And even though the game was totally one-sided with the Matadors sweeping through their roster in a desperate bid to win a set, there was still some excitement to be had during the match with one of the Lady Bruins having some kind of 10 kills per game streak she was trying to extend. Paris wasn't mustering up any of the enthusiasm for writing the story she had as they drove into Northridge since then, and she was kind of worried.
"I'm fine Mai, it's nothing." Paris smiled at her partner-in-crime to try to convince Mai Lin she was fine, but somehow the Laotian knew that look. It was on her sister's face whenever she had a date with a white boy, but couldn't go through with it due to Mr. And Mrs. Vang's conservative values. The Vang children were expected to marry their own kind, no matter what kind of connection they might have with any other boy or girl in Eau Claire not of the Hmong persuasion.
"Come on Paris, there's something wrong with you, like you really didn't want to do this story."
"Mm-hmm, because volleyball's still such a new game to me. Oh geez, that guy's going at least 80, can he do that?" she observed as a Porsche Boxter sped down the left carpool lane to try and merge onto the eastbound Ventura from the 405.
"That wasn't what I was thinking. You look troubled tonight, like you left someone in the lurch. Someone like a boy, that you wanted to be somewhere else. I'm not sure if I'm right or not, but I just wanted to fathom a guess at the reason for your mood."
"You're thinking wrong Mai, I'm just fine," Paris said, trying to mask a distracting thought of her and Jess watching a movie, his arm over her shoulder as they sat on him couch. "We have a great story and I'm just thinking of what details I can use in order to draw the reader in, there's so many angles I can use to write it."
"You must share the same train of thought that my best friend Andrea is on sometimes."
"What's that?"
"Using big words and long-winded explanations to avoid the subject at hand as much as possible. You can use your bookishness all you want to avoid the topic Paris, but I'm eventually going to find out." She played with the toggle for the power seats as Paris huffed.
"I thought I was supposed to be the strong one in all of this." Paris took a glance in her rear-view mirror to see if any cars were behind. "I just don't get it though, why do girls who don't seem to know all that much about love give advice better than the Carrie Bradshaw clones I had for friends back in Hartford? I've had more insight about the ways of love talking to Brianna over the last few weeks than I did in six years with Louise. Can I ask if you've had a boyfriend Mai?"
"Once for two months, but that was set up by my mother and closely chaperoned. If I was a normal kid the boy wouldn't have gotten the time of day with me, we had all the chemistry of wood being glued to ice. But now tell me about your guy, I'm curious." She had a cute bucktoothed smile and pleady eyes. "Please?"
Paris could never resist 'that look' when it came to spilling something, because it was the same way Madeline would try to wear her down and get details from her back in the days of her crush on Tristan. And she'd never been successful in resisting. She sighed and merged the car into a reversible express lane on the freeway which had little traffic going back into the city.
"Fine Mai, I'll tell you. But please, the only other person who knows about this is my roommate. If you tell Mrs. Broughton that I wasn't into the match because of this, I'll pull a Christian Slater and rip the film out of your camera."
"I'd love to see you try, this is a digital," Mai Lyn said, laughing.
"I'll find a way," Paris held out her index finger and pointed at Mai Lin, smiling as she watched the traffic pass her by. "OK, if it wasn't for having to go out to Northridge tonight for the paper, I'd be down in Venice right now with a guy from Connecticut named Jess I'm starting to befriend again, watching It Happened One Night as we bantered on through it about the social and moral implications of Clark Gable going without an undershirt and exposing his chest, a first in film."
"Oooh, sounds juicy," Mai Lin gushed. "So he's an old boyfriend?"
"No!" Paris denied it loudly and explicitly. "He was a troublemaker from Brooklyn who came to the town where my friend and former classmate Rory lived. Sparks flew between them, they were together for about seven months, then he moved out here to reunite with the father that left him behind when he was really young. I harbored an unsaid crush which I couldn't mention since I was going out with a guy I met, Jamie, during a conference in Washington last summer and who I kept trying to convince myself that I loved because he said he loved me."
"Did you?"
"I did, at first," she admitted. "I mean he was such a charmer and had such a nice face and dark caring eyes, and I could hold a debate with him about some political topic all through a dinner. I could even see my boring political potboiler films in the theater with him without having to be afraid that he'd be bored to death with them or use the content as an excuse to slide a hand behind my shirt and undress me from beneath."
"What happened that you decided to break it off with him?"
"One phrase, three words; Sex changes everything. Do I even have to say anymore Mai?"
"Not really, no." Mai Lin laughed and curled up in her seat. "So this Jess boy, what is he like? Is he handsome, sexy, someone you could see as your soulmate?"
"All of those and more," she told Mai Lin, sighing in contentment as she recalled the image of her and Jess at the chuppa. "He also has this rebellious and dangerous thing going that draws me to him so much, if I were back in Hartford my mother would vehemently prevent me from dating him just on that alone. The way he carries himself, his attitude and the way he talks, damn." She stretched out the last word. "He's a heavy recreational reader like I am, so I'm sure he could take something mundane like the Polk city directory and read it aloud as if it was a dog-eared copy of Pride and Prejudice, he can make anything sound so good. I mean he was reading On the Road, a book I was trained by my teachers and my mother to hate since it was 'new reading'. But in his hands, with his voice conveying everything, I was taken into that world so effortlessly, and I loved it, the way he read and drove my imagination towards those thoughts." Paris sighed as she felt a recalling smile inch onto her lips. She would've said more to Mai Lin, but if she did she might end up in an accident due to Jess filling her thoughts.
"You must really love him Paris," Mai Lin deduced. "Do you have any competition with any other girl to get him though?"
Reality came crashing into the path of Paris' freeway of love, and she tried to take back her platitudes for Jess. "That's the problem Mai, I can't have him. He's Rory's ex-boyfriend, and if I decided to go out with him I'd basically be telling her with that move 'Thanks for letting me be your friend, but since your ex is closer to me I think I'll swipe in and take him so it looks like I'm trying to screw you over again like I did the first year and a half you went to school with me.' Let's just say I was playing Big Girl on Campus with her and shutting out her friendship at first until I relented later, it's an uneasy friendship. No matter what I think of Jess, Rory comes first--" She seemed to be starting on a tangent, and Mai Lin had to stop the academic beauty from winding herself into a tizzy before it was too late.
"Paris, you come first." Strangely, Mai Lin had somehow morphed her voice to resemble that of the ever-strict Mrs. Kim, which had always demanded authority and obedience. Even though Paris had only heard Mrs. Kim talk once, when she was using her as a source for her Stars Hollow underground story, the telltale and strict tone froze her solid, in a way that not even her own mother's strictest tone could never do to her. They must have a special school where they teach these girls how to make their voices scare the living shit out of someone else, she thought to herself.
"But Mai, I can't, I--" Paris tried to explain herself out of the situation, but her smaller compatriot wasn't going to let her.
"Paris, you have to go for it, no matter what it does to your friendship with Rory. I had so many boys in Eau Claire who wanted me for who I was, but I had to settle for whom my family wanted me to date. You know how horrible it feels to have a boy on your arm and asking timidly for permission to kiss you when the point guard for the basketball team is giving you loving eyes, but can't do anything with those feelings because you're stuck in some lame tradition of dating a dull Hmong boy who doesn't want to drag you out of the batter's box at all? I know how it feels, and it sucks!"
She looked out the window towards the San Fernando Valley under the first quarter phase moonlight, as she recounted her luck with men, or lack thereof back in western Wisconsin. "I'd see all these other girls in my classes wearing belly shirts, looking downright alluring with layers of makeup and the tightest jeans money could buy, and there was little virgin me, sitting right in the middle in a simple sundress that wasn't flattering, wearing absolutely no makeup at all and open-toed sandals from Payless. Yet I got as much sexual attention as all those girls from the guys in my class, including invitations to go out with them! But I couldn't do anything to respond to them at all, nothing! At least one of my relatives was in every one of my classes, along with my 'boyfriend' in a few, so there was no way to sneak off to a cloakroom or closet and let them know I shared an interest in them."
"You had the set-up suitors too?" Paris said, nodding and understanding where Mai Lin was coming from. "In my rung of society it was just to maintain my wealth though. If it wasn't for me being so stubborn and headstrong I might be a trophy wife as we speak to one of the young hunks of central Connecticut. Thank God I didn't score points with Hartford society when I ditched my debutante ball for an evening with my nanny and her kids among the shelves of the New York Public Library, my mother wouldn't speak to me until a month after the event, but it was all worth it in order to ditch a lousy event involving fan dances and ten other girls, each more brainless than the last."
"Sounds like me during Hmong New Year when my brother tries to set me up with a very boring guy," Mai Lin commented as she laughed, feeling comfortable enough around Paris to come out of the shell she usually confined herself to. "Are you scared that he might not show an interest in you?"
"A little, but it isn't a large fear since he seems to be returning fire with sexual-tinged comebacks when we get into a discussion or I silence him for some reason or another. I just don't feel I have enough to offer though, I was the wallflower of my peer group, and to have Jess comment about the way I look in my new wardrobe and about how attractive I am, it's disconcerting that some punk kid from Brooklyn feels this way about me, but not one guy in the twelve years I attended Chilton had given me even the slightest interest." She took a look at the dash clock, reading 10:30, and sighed. "God, sometimes I feel like I'm taking all my romantic cues from Ally McBeal, I'm as insecure about my love life as she was."
"Well as long as you don't hallucinate a dancing baby or do the deed in a car wash, you should be fine Paris. Jess sounds like a great guy behind that tough and bookish façade." Mai Lin smiled at her as Paris laughed, then read through Paris' notes in order to try to setup her photographic storyline before she and Paris got back onto campus.
Paris couldn't say all that much to Mai Lin anymore, especially when the image of her and Jess reenacting the same car wash scene that opened Ally McBeal's fourth season flashed through her mind and sent arousal all throughout her body. So much for that show being just a distraction from schoolwork, she thought to herself as she tried to keep her concentration on the road and away from Mai Lin bopping carelessly along to a Phil Collins song playing on Lite FM.
Brianna and Doug settled onto the futon after talking for awhile about themselves without trying to reveal a lot about each other. Brianna tried to keep herself focused on her home and school life back in Antioch, switching the track once she got near the beginning of 2000 and the teen tournament, along with everything about Leonard. She listened intently to Doug describe his life back in San Diego County, hopeful she'd hear something she'd like.
The first thing she was glad not to hear was that he was a brainless San Diegan high school jock who got into UCLA on something as frivolous as a track and field scholarship. He wasn't far from his home in Coronado north of San Diego, yet was feeling homesick for the home cooking of his mother, who had raised him alone as a single mother after his father passed away from a scuba diving-induced blood clot when he was around five, along with his nine year-old kid sister Ellen, who just about looked up to her brother as her father figure. When he wasn't playing video games in his room or studying his schoolwork, Doug was active in his student government and out and about in the community, ready to lend a helping hand to any charity organization which desired his services. As for her question about why he was acting like such a jerk the first week and a half before they decided to head down the friends path, Doug clearly explained that he thought that was the way he was supposed to behave at college, but Paris' little reality checks had shaken that behavior right out of him.
As they played the video game with each other, a different competition was secretly being played by the girl and the boy throughout the night, that of a contest to see who could flirt the best and not have the other catch on. It started with innocent glances when the other was distracted, with Doug imagining what it would feel like to run his fingers through Brianna's charcoal mane, as Brianna considered the consequences of 'accidentally' running her hand against Doug's biceps for longer than what a brush-up against someone would be considered accidental.
The night went on, along with the gaming, both of them becoming zombies to the boob tube as the polygons and many colors on-screen became more furious as the two continued their fighting in the video game world. There they were complete enemies, doling out various amounts of pain in order to make the other annoyed and hitting all the button combinations possible in order to kick their competitor's ass back into the stone age. Doug and Brianna mentally were completely focused on the game.
However their physical and emotional selves were completely detached from the violence created by the Namco Corporation. Sometime around 9:30 and 9:45, Brianna had shifted from her far right position on the futon couch and her rear was scooching closer and closer to where Doug was sitting. She wasn't aware of her conscience giving her the usual 'shields up' command she heard spinning through her brain whenever she had gotten nine inches into the space around a man she showed interest in since the whole messy incident in Philadelphia. She didn't know what was causing it, but it might have had something to do with Doug's mixed bouquet of a discount imitation fragrance she couldn't quite place her nose on and Lava soap intoxicating the sensual stimuli within her nose. Her nerves, frazzled from her itchy gaming muscle and split-second reactions to the action on the screen, didn't even register that around 9:47pm her arm was rubbing comfortably against Doug's side, and that Doug was just as clueless about the subtle move. They talked trash to each other about who was about to get their hides beaten not even knowing that they were so close that throwing their controllers towards the TV and kissing each other senseless might be the next obvious move if someone was about to walk in.
During a spare moment during a game loading time, Doug drew his glance downwards towards his controller, but suddenly found it disrupted by the closeness of Brianna to him. Without control, he found his gaze moving towards her bust, which in a perfect and non-sexual world would've been completely and utterly without definition from the teal 2X San Jose Sharks t-shirt she was wearing in a very desperate attempt to cry out "I'm not sexy, don't look at me that way."
Just like Paris' wardrobe choice of a week earlier, Brianna's strategy failed miserably. She had forgotten one of the things she had learned in her LAN parties and partaking in Halo matches on X-Box Live. When she was really worked up and really into the game, her nipples would harden through the ensuing adrenaline rush, and if she was at an internet café, she'd have to wear a sports bra with a layer of padding beneath for the sole reason of making sure her breasts didn't become weapons of mass destruction to the competitors surrounding her and end up as a distraction to those boys.
Combine the factor of competition with the arousal of being so near to a man she was having a budding crush on, and the two factors made sure that even through the deep folds of her unflattering t-shirt, Brianna's intentions for wanting Doug were quite clear, two times over, even if she wasn't aware of the fact. Even with a small two-second glance at her aroused breasts beneath the shirt, Doug was able to memorize the image, and spent the rest of the night with his control pad far away from his lap so that the stimuli from the vibration pads would go to his hands, and his hands only.
Unaware of their closeness, they kept both their focuses on the game, neither the wiser. There was the occasional brush of thighs and hands between Brianna and Doug when they blew on their hands to cool their hands off, but otherwise there were no signs that their silent flirting was going to be taken out of the separate arenas of their minds and combined in one big Staples Center-sized tease fest. Brianna continued to deny herself the pleasure of being next to Doug, and planned to do nothing with her positioning at all, despite the intoxication of being so near to him.
However, around ten o'clock, the silence of the room with the exception of the game's sound effects started driving Brianna stir-crazy, and her bladder was filling up with the contents of two cans of 7Up she'd drank during the LAN party. She hit the pause button and got up from her seat, aware of her closeness to Doug. She cursed silently her earlier thirst for ruining the closeness of the moment.
"Er, I have to go...you know," she said, a violent purple blush creeping up her cheeks. "I'll be back in a bit."
"OK," he said, relaxing and taking the sports section from Paris' copy of the Times out to read. "By the way, Bree?"
"Yeah?"
"You look very nice tonight." He spoke nervously, not wanting to highlight the fact he knew she wasn't wearing a bra. "I don't know how you do it, but whatever you wear makes you look very alluring, and even in something as uh, casual as that, you make it look pretty great."
She smiled and tried to play a homely card. "These old rags, I just got them out of my drawer since I don't have much else to wear. Most of my...stuff is downstairs in the dryer so I didn't have much of a pajama choice this evening." Phew, that was close, she thought, relieved she hadn't said that all her underwear was downstairs.
"Really? So you don't wear just sweats to bed?" His voiced lowered just a hint, not too much to appraise Brianna to the fact he was trying to flirt with her.
"I have nightgowns, yeah. But I don't wear them often anymore cause I share a room and what I used to wear when I had my own bedroom would probably make Paris put on her sleep mask earlier than bedtime, so going with the jerseys and stirrup pants is more often than not a safer bet."
"Paris isn't here tonight, why don't you wear one?" he asked, unaware of exactly what Brianna was describing when it came to her sleepwear choices.
"Doug," she said to him, her flirtish tone in full force. "I said I can't wear them in front of a girl. If the other person is a man, I'm sure that he wouldn't mind." She uttered the last two words in a hushed tone, the words being formed by only a whisper. "He really wouldn't mind, if you figure out my hint." Brianna turned around and walked to the bathroom, leaving her co-gamer to gape at her, and his imagination to muster up images of Brianna in really thin and short-cut sleepwear.
Damn it, quit thinking about her that way. She's only talking that way to speak at your level Merriwether, she's showing no interest at all, he tried to convince himself. He lay back on the couch and read the paper, trying to will the images filling up out of his mind.
After finishing and washing her hands, Brianna sat down on the ledge of the vanity, trying to sort out the exact reason she was starting to flirt with Doug when she felt she wasn't ready to fall into a relationship again. She took a look over herself in the mirror, mumbling to herself about what she felt were imperfections that Doug should've been cutting down left and right.
"God, the boy should be making fun of my nose." She always thought her nose was her worse feature because it didn't fill out her face like her mother's, she had inherited her hair color, nose, lips and her free earlobe from her father's side of the family, while her eye color and chin formation were from the maternal side of the coin. Her reading glasses had to be custom made because her temples were so far from the nose rests, and she could never copy her roommate and get it pierced since the pole of the earring would block most of her nostril. She wrinkled it as she lifted her t-shirt up to just above her midriff, her navel piercing exposed. Brianna had a small frame, thus she received nicknames like 'shrimp', 'small fry' and 'tiny B' from her friends and family back in Antioch, she was at least six inches below the crown of Doug's head, and he would have to bend down to kiss her rather uncomfortably.
"I need to put on some more weight, all this fast food doesn't seem to help me at all," she told herself rubbing her tummy, wishing she could fill out her figure a little more and stop being a slim upside-down pear shaped girl. She had plenty on top along her bust, but not nearly enough in her midsection to grab onto in the love handles. She would give anything to have a nice full figure, but had figured long ago she was cursed with this body she had, she had to grin and bear it. Brianna was just glad that Doug hadn't noticed anything odd happening with herself that night.
That is, until she ran the back of her hand against one of her breasts, and felt the pebble-hard peak of a nipple along the cotton of her shirt. She gasped, and reeled it back in shock.
"Shit, how the fuck could I forget that!! Stupid, stupid Brianna," she cursed to herself as she tried to dig around in her mind for arousal killer, which involved her older relatives kissing the it guys of the moment. Aunt Cara making out with Colin Farrell should make feel as sexual as a nun in a convent staring at an old priest in the buff, she told herself as she wished the image further and further. Within a period of 75 seconds, Brianna's breasts were back to normal and desensitized, her plan had surprisingly worked well. Too bad it took an image which was sure to haunt her nightmares in slumber that evening to ruin it.
"Hey Bree," Doug asked through the door. Startled from her reverie, she almost fell of the vanity and onto the tile floor below her. Her hand grasped the towel rack on the door just in time and she steadied herself onto her two feet.
"Yes Doug?" Her face was flustered, and she sighed, happy that the wooden door was hiding the look of shock evident on her face.
"You've been in there about five minutes, you OK?" He leaned back against a drawer along the wall, doing his best to keep the reasons for Brianna's long bathroom trip innocuous.
" I'm fine, just feeling a little hot." She turned on the cold tap and filled the bottom of the vanity bowl with cold water, splashing it onto her face to cool herself off. Despite the desexualized images she forced, Brianna's body temperature was betraying her.
"Alright, I'm going to start disconnecting the console from the TV, do you and Paris need it any longer?" He munched on a piece of cheesy bread as Brianna came out of the bathroom, her face still wet in order to use the air conditioning to cool herself off.
"No, but I really have to figure out how to get my own console here, the gaming bug has bit me again and it hurts like heck." She bent down and reached into the mini-fridge to take out another can of 7Up. "Ahh, that feels a little better," she sighed as her thumb landed on the cool aluminum. "Any boy who gives me a nice and sore gaming thumb definitely deserves the time of day from me."
"You're a much better opponent than Ronnie," Doug complimented her as they made their way back to the couch. "He's the sorest loser you can ever find, I've replaced more controllers because he'd throw them in frustration after he lost. And when he played football, get your earplugs out. He hasn't figured out quite yet that shouting at the screen and mashing all the buttons in will not reverse a referee's call no matter what."
"Hey, I do that." she admitted.
"You do? You were silent tonight all through the game."
"Yeah, so?" Brianna brought her defenses up to avoid Doug's queries.
"All I heard from you is the occasional grunt and maybe some trash talking at the beginning, but nothing after that. You had a five match streak going and didn't make a wisecrack about putting me in my place." His reasoning was an attempt to bring down the barriers Brianna was putting in front of herself in order to keep Doug at bay.
"It's a quiet night without Paris," she said, fibbing as she tried to avoid Doug's persistence. "It's the first night I haven't seen her in the dorms 'till late, and even though she's a wonderful roommate and I wouldn't give her up at all, I'm just glad she isn't here tonight. I needed a night alone--"
Doug cut her off harshly. "Brianna, you're not alone tonight, stop lying. What's wrong, you were Miss Conversation a couple days ago, and now you're all clammed up, this has nothing to do with Eiffel Girl, does it?"
She stomped over to the couch and sat down with a huff, Doug following her as their first argument started. "Don't talk about Paris like that, she told you she doesn't want you to use that nickname!"
"Don't avoid the question Bree!"
"I'm not avoiding anything." She raised her voice up at him, taking on an authoritative tone. "Look, I just have nothing to say to you, that's all. What am I going to ask you, 'Gee golly Doug, how about those Chargers, think Drew Brees is going to get them to the playoffs this year?'"
"Damn it Daugherty, don't avoid the question, what's with you tonight?" He wrung his hands together and sat down on Paris' bed.
"You want to know what's the matter? Your friend invited me to play a game I didn't want to play tonight, and I so wanted to turn down his invitation because I don't like him, however because you were involved I played anyway, all two stupid hours of it when all I wanted from this night was some good company and conversation while my new friend was gone. Instead I was stuck to my PC bailing Ronnie's ass out because he knows jack shit about combat strategy when I could've had you sitting in here and we'd be getting to know each other more over pizza or fried chicken." Her emotions starting to come out, her voice wavered and her tear ducts were on the edge of being stirred into action. "My idea of a fun night out usually doesn't involve a group of people, I'm very introverted and it always took a lot for me to go beyond the comfort zone of Antioch and into Oakland or San Francisco with my friends for a night out--" She lost her place with her point and backtracked away, laying on the couch.
"I understand that, believe me." Doug looked down at his lap, trying to avoid eye contact with Brianna. "I didn't want to play with Ronnie tonight either, but after a minute of trying to avoid the reason, he...he told me he knew about me and you last Friday night and that he saw you walking out of my room. Then he said if I didn't play the game with him and invite you in, he'd spread a rumor that we were together through the building, starting with Piper and making his way down the chain." His formed his hands into fists and gritted his teeth, mad that his best friend was trying to keep his love life hostage.
Brianna's eyes were wide in shock. Not only had he eavesdropped on her own muttering that night, but he was spying on her and Doug while she was giving him the doughnut money. That son of a bitch! Brianna was downright livid, and though her anger for Doug had totally cooled down and her longing returned, she was furious at Ronnie for his attempt at blackmail. She fisted material along the side of her shirt and scrunched her eyebrows, trying to keep the building anger controlled. Remembering the treatment the snotty dark blonde had given her and Paris wasn't all that much to ire her up. But once he got Doug involved with his plans, Brianna was pissed beyond belief.
Calmly, she slipped her Isotoners on and with Doug following her every step, threw on her bathrobe. No way that jerk's going to get a free show when I'm angry, she thought as she tied it on around her waist as tight as possible.
"Bree, where are you going?" Doug asked, if only to confirm the inevitable. He certainly wasn't going to stop this woman scorned since he still had a lot of living to do. He also felt that it was time for Ronnie to get a taste of the medicine Paris had not-so-nicely dealt to him a couple weeks earlier.
"Oh, I'm just going to kick Ronnie's ass, you don't mind right?" Her voice had taken on an authoritative tone, with her eyes taking on a darker green shade.
He nodded mutely, allowing Brianna to go forward with her wishes. She stormed out of the dorm, nearly slamming the door right into Doug's nose. He was thankful for the pneumatic closing device on top of the door that slowed down the door before it hit him.
He had always been the one who dished out punishment for his friend whenever he was lame-brained, so Doug was going to enjoy seeing a female dole out the pain for once.
Not two minutes later, Brianna was in front of 318, rapping on the door hard with Doug right behind her, just in case she decided fists would work better than words and she wanted to bead Ronnie to a bloody pulp. Sure he was mad at him, but not mad enough to have someone else cause him physical pain.
In the room, Ronnie was laying on his bed snoozing, a copy of Maxim open in his face, some hot movie starlet wearing a scant bikini pictured in minute thirteen of her fame and being used for sexual fantasy material. He barely could hear Brianna's knocking over the blare of KROQ, and somehow made it out between the strains of Linkin Park blasting from his stereo.
"Hold on, keep your pants on!" he shouted as he threw on some jeans out of his dirty clothes pile. The knocking continued despite the answer. "I'm coming!" He narrowly avoided tripping over a hamper and one of Jake's free weights in the path to the door. Still tired and dazed he opened the door, not knowing whether to expect an accidental pizza delivery, booty call or an invitation to an off-campus party.
Instead he got a nice big peek at anger flaring within Brianna's eyes, her teeth bared out from beneath her puckered mouth.
"Hey Brianna, what's up--" Before he could say anything else, the shorter girl interrupted him.
"You, outside now!" Brianna brought her hand up and yanked him by the shirt out into the hallway, shocking the boy with her actions.
"Geeze, what the fuck Daugherty!" he gasped out as his back hit the wall.
"What the fuck indeed Ronnie!" she hissed out, gripping his side tightly in her hand. "Which is exactly what Doug and I are not doing, we aren't together! Last Friday we just talked, that's it, I didn't sleep with Doug since I was in his room a grand total of five minutes! How dare you take something as innocent as that and turn it into blackmail material so I was forced to play a game with you."
"It's all your fault that I had to miss out on grade A DeNeves ass!" Ronnie accused. "They wanted Doug at that party and without him I couldn't get any action!" He looked towards his buddy, smiling and watching the scene transpire. "C'mon Dougie, get her off me, I didn't mean anything by it!"
All he got in turn was a shake of Doug's head and a little laugh. "Dude you're on your own, I really didn't want to play with Piper and her cronies myself. And believe me if you ask me to do this again, the answer will be no. I had everything planned out for a night of gaming with Bree and I ended up with some truncated fun, I could've used that two hours to get to know her more."
"Hey, you're the one who started the 'I hate Paris' campaign when she first walked into the dorm!"
"That's before I knew she was a blue-blood with venom in her words, she has sharper horns than the bulls of Pamplona!"
"And before you knew her roommate was the finest piece of ass east of Oakland--" his words were cut off by Brianna tightening her grip on Ronnie's side and bashing him against the wall.
"I'm right here Ronnie!" Brianna growled out the words and lowered her eyelashes. "Now I think you owe Doug and I an apology for jumping to conclusions and for your attitude towards women. So Doug didn't want to go to a party with you and have a one night stand, big deal. That doesn't mean you take the first girl you see with him at school and fabricate some story about them being lovers just because you didn't get to go to a lame beer bash."
"I'll never apologize to you braniac!" he sneered out, keeping his composure despite Brianna lining up her knee to his midsection. Her eyes burned with anger and she was doing her damndest to be provoked by Ronnie.
"You apologize to Brianna right now or I'm pulling out the connection and canceling the magazine subscriptions." Ronnie turned to see Doug pointing up towards the ceiling between 318 and 319, where false tiles obscured the fact Ronnie was on Doug's cable connection, and his roommate's only link to the finest soft-core pornography Cinemax and Playboy could offer would be cut without a second thought by his best friend.
But to lose his shared subscriptions to those lad magazines, Playboy and Perfect Ten? That would be too much to bear, how else would him and Jake subsist in the world without photographs of prone women. He closed his eyes, trying to take his focus off Brianna's grip on him enough that he could come up with a convincing apology.
"Oh, and Ron, try to be truly sorry. I'm not going to take an apology just so you can continue to get your rocks off gratis." Brianna smiled at him snidely, and it was then he knew the game was over.
"Fine, I'm sorry Brianna, and I'm sorry Dougie, I didn't mean to plan to spread that rumor all over the place!" He begged, asking for forgiveness. "Geeze, if I would've known you were going to get this mad about all this I wouldn't have even tried inviting you both on this gaming night."
Brianna released her grip on Ronnie and moved back towards the other end of the hallway. "I accept your apology, and you're right, you shouldn't have interfered."
"I'm going to go disconnect the console Bree, you two look like you need to talk," Doug said, noticing that the two were trying to arrange a truce between them.
"Sure," Brianna responded, a little distracted as Doug waved to her and walked back towards 343. She then turned her focus back towards Ronnie, settling down. "Look Ronnie, I'm sorry I reacted the way I did, but the last thing I want here is to have a reputation I don't have." Brianna looked down towards the ground. "I know Doug is your best friend and you're sort of feeling a little peeved at him since he didn't go with you Saturday night."
He sighed and rubbed his chin with his hand. "It wasn't just about Saturday Brianna, it was all this week. He's been acting weird and distant every time I try to ask him if he wants to hang with the chicks I've been meeting on-campus."
"What do you mean distant?"
"As if you didn't know, he's been hanging his head each morning after breakfast because you weren't around to meet him. But you should've seen Dougie on Labor Day, he came back so let down because you went to that Angels game without letting him know."
Brianna was trying to defend herself from Ronnie's probe of her flirtations with Doug. "I didn't even know he came by that day--"
"You knew there was a chance he was coming by in the beginning of the week, don't try to tell me otherwise!" He opened up his door and invited Brianna in, who tried to keep her distance from him. He can't know that I want Doug, she thought to herself as she sat down in a rumpled old chair, keeping the bathrobe close to herself.
"I honestly had plans to go see the A's Ronnie, how was I supposed to know that Doug came by the dorm?"
"You knew Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday mornings that he was supposed to pick up the doughnuts after Paris got them. He left my dorm bright-eyed and ready to take on the day after we talked over the 6 o'clock Sportscenter, he was looking forward to getting his breakfast from you." He frowned at her. "Then when he came back he had a sulk on his face and was dragging himself around class. After asking why his mood had soured, he brushed off the question, told me to meet him for lunch and went on his way."
"I had to study early--" Brianna tried to lie her way out of this conversation, but it was all for naught. Ronnie leaned his computer chair back, surveying the girl in front of him.
"You were avoiding him after Friday, weren't you?" he questioned. "You wanted to shove what you felt for him into the back and not worry about it again." He lowered his gaze and made direct eye contact with the girl, clasping his hands together. "I've known Dougie since I was six and he helped me through the wild world of kindergarten, and I know when my best friend is having a case of being whipped by a chick." He started to explain the warning signs Doug exhibited when he crushed on someone of the opposite sex. "When he was twelve and in seventh grade, a new girl who had moved west to San Diego from a small town near the Salton Sea caught his eye, and suddenly pranking the teachers in our classes seemed to be the last thing on his mind. He wanted to do nothing but follow this girl around, she was his first real love and man, he fell hard for her. Me and the other guys in our group would try to keep the 'girls are gross' gears spinning in his mind, but the only thing he wanted all that school year was to have one date with Darlene Whitman. He never got it because she moved again before the end of the school year, but it started him down the same cycle of puppy love. See girl, fall for girl and ignore friends, date girl for awhile until the friends get involved and either dump or get dumped by the girl."
"Look," she started, after she took Ronnie's explanation in, "I don't have an interest in him Ronnie, honestly, I'm not trying to play around with him."
"You want him, he wants you." Ronnie laid it all out on the table. "Have you ever had your heart broken so much that it takes a lot to let someone back in?"
"No." Brianna said the word with no emotion, trying to keep Ronnie away from her inner and soul circles. Only Paris, Lara and the Daugherty parents knew that Brianna's heart had been crushed to a million pieces by Leonard on that convention center stage, and letting Ronnie know about that secret was something that unnerved her. She never expected Ronnie's next words to come out of his mouth, and what was behind them all.
"Doug's had his heart broken this year hard, and it's been a tough summer trying to keep his spirits up." He looked down at his hands, trying to keep his promise to Doug that he wouldn't divulge anything about Claudia and the way she had forced him to keep love at arm's length. "Look, I don't know what the heck it is about you that's changing him from number one player to a guy who's a lovesick puppy over you, but you're doing something right."
"Huh, he can't be--" Brianna tried speaking but was stopped by Ronnie, trying to defend his friend.
"He is Brianna, and from the way you came down here ready to break my neck you're trying to keep any rumors of you and him together. I just want you to know that I'm not going to interfere between you two anymore, and if you ever get together I'm fully in support of you two."
The brunette got up from the chair, ending the conversation abruptly. "There's nothing to interfere with Ronnie, now if you'll excuse me I have to see Doug out of my dorm. I'll talk to you Monday morning when you pick up the doughnuts." She collected her bearings and walked out of the dorm, Ronnie staying in his chair and wondering what it would take to get those enigmatic personalities together. He looked towards a poster of Anna Kournikova for advice on what to do with those stubborn beings.
"What can I do? Both of them just seem set in their ways," he told himself as he grabbed his remote and turned it on one of those gross SpikeTV cartoons. "I just hope she doesn't hurt Doug unknowingly. One more heartbreak and the guy's gonna turn either asexual or into a chainsaw killer." He chuckled at his really lame joke and laid down on the couch. He was going to milk this drama for all it was worth, hopefully ending in some kind of resolution for their feelings towards each other.
Doug came out of 343 holding the bulky console of his PS2 and his game in one hand, while his other gripped the audio, video and electrical cables for dear life. The game controllers were shoved sloppily into his pockets as he attempted to make it back to his room with everything that he needed. He knew he'd pass Brianna one more time as he went down the hall, so he tried to make it only one trip back down to 319. If I'm in here when she comes back something's going to give and I'm going to take myself off the 'just friends' track, was his way of trying to cut out all the thoughts he was having for the brunette. The added fact she was going without a bra and he could see that clearly had caused him throughout the night to drive his pleasure lobe's thoughts towards very unsexual situations, something towards the lines of any episode of Jerry Springer where the words 'large woman' and 'stripping' were involved. Which was pretty much every episode of the talk show ever.
All he knew was that when he got back into his dorm room, the door was going to be locked and he'd be in the shower for about an hour with the water temperature below 65°.
He opened up the door and started the short walk down the hall to his room, hopeful that he'd be able to wish his love goodnight and that her temper had been turned down after reaming Ronnie a new orifice. He thought of how feisty the girl had been as she denied that her and Doug had sex in front of Ronnie, and imagined that energy transformed to the actual act. Combining the effect of the way she had been looking at him in the towel, and there was no doubt in Doug Merriwether's mind that there was something going on with Brianna that she was avoiding what was there and very apparent in front of her.
He wouldn't say it to anybody else, especially Brianna, but she had to be in the first stages of lust. Doug just knew it.
The trouble was, why was she holding out on him and not letting him in too close to her? She had been made nervous after the dorm encounter the week before, and had immediately reined herself in order to protect from being hurt in any way. That protection had a side effect however, as it sealed Doug off from finding out anymore about Brianna and her past. He wasn't about to ask Brianna about why she was so closed in to everyone else, and his kinship with Paris was still fractured after the handshake incident.
She's the only one with any insight on Bree, he thought to himself, pausing in the hall to brainstorm. Paris had to have had some kind of introduction to her life and past, and they've been out together on girl outings, I remember stopping to spar with Paris after they had gone tanning a couple weeks ago. He struggled to remember those few kind moments him and Paris had shared in the last few weeks, and had to come to the conclusion that in order to make Brianna his girlfriend, he had to stop avoiding the blonde heiress in the halls and around campus, suck up his male pride and make friends with Paris. He wasn't going to avoid her forever if he wanted to see Brianna, and there was the small feeling in his mind that Paris knew something about their budding chemistry. He needed an ally, and Paris had to be in his corner for everything to work out with Brianna.
Speaking of whom, was coming around the corner as Doug walked towards his room, lost in her thoughts about Doug. He nearly averted a crash by shouting her name and getting her attention. She slowed down, and waited for him to get near her before they said goodnight to each other.
"Ronnie give you any lip back Miss Feisty?" he asked as he propped his game unit back up into his arms.
She smirked. "Nah, I think we came to a good understanding of what he can and can't do anymore, he's receptive to us now. We talked."
"Did you exchange best friends forever ankle bracelets yet?" he joked, making Brianna giggle.
"Who knows, we'll see. But he's not going to interfere with our friendship anymore." She settled the f-word on her tongue to make sure it didn't accidentally turn into relationship, because she didn't feel ready for that next step quite yet, despite her burgeoning feelings.
"Well good, I'm glad you two are getting along," Doug said. He thought of asking her on a another gaming date, but decided to give Brianna an open invitation instead. "I had lots of fun tonight, we should do it again in a few days Bree."
"I did too, well after we got away from Piper throwing grenades at us relentlessly." She nervously chuckled, and found her hands interesting. "I'll take you up on that one of these days Doug, I owe you for saving me from having to teach an intellectual like Paris volleyball in a real forum, I may not have survived her whining and the pain she probably would've suffered several times when she spiked the ball."
"Hey, si dormitorio es su dormitorio senorita," he said to her in Spanish kindly. Even with her 160 IQ Brianna was confused by the little smirk on Doug's face when he said that. Thinking he had probably learned that line from a bad pick-up line article in Esquire, Brianna decided to challenge him before she left his sight for the night.
"Usted tiene muchos de las bolas Doug. Tengo gusto de eso." She responded back, a little flair and spice tacked onto her Espanol. She then started walking away from him.
"You don't know how much I have, I'll have to show you someday." Brianna turned back around to face a smiling Doug, understading every word she said. "I kind of forgot to tell you I have a few friends south of the border, I'm very fluent in Spanish."
"I'm sure those 'friends' appreciate that each time you pay $10 for 15 minutes." She rolled her eyes at him and turned back around to head back to her dorm. "Goodnight Doug, see you later."
"Same to you Brianna." He turned around with a nice smirk on his face, caused from the enjoyable evening he had spent with his current infatuation. He had a feeling they were going to repeat these nights all through the school year.
"She'll crack someday, I know it," he commented to himself, lovesick and hoping for more to come from Brianna. He headed back into his dorm to savor the memories he had of the evening.
Brianna cleaned up 343 a little bit before Paris came home, retrieving her laundry from downstairs and folding and sorting it so that Paris didn't have to complain about tripping over her shirts when she came back from class. Fussy about her bed, the rest of Brianna's space was usually messy and was haphazardly organized, a trait she had caught from her father, who would keep his desk in the den clean and immaculate, while the couch and bookshelves surrounding it had things haphazardly thrown all over them.
She talked to Lara in Atlanta on the phone for about a half-hour, telling her best friend about the feelings she was harboring for Doug without going into too much detail. As Paris did, Lara also deduced that it was only a matter of time before Brianna decided to sate her urges and try to start a relationship with Doug, despite the girl's stubbornness.
Brianna was about to head off for an early bedtime and was reading some political coursework when she heard some knocking at the door. She checked the clock on Paris' iBook, and wondered who would be coming to the door at eleven at night. Can't be Doug, she thought, he was planning to study then get some rest.
"Who is it?" she called out from the couch, a hand near the self-defense bat.
"Is Paris in?" a male voice called out in the hallway. Brianna approached the door slowly and cautiously.
"She's in Northridge, are you a TA for one of her classes?" She perched herself on the tips of her toes to peep through the privacy hole, finding out who it was.
"I'm not that smart," he said. "I'm Jess Mariano from Venice, she might've told you about me. I came by to see if she was home and to retrieve my shirt."
She peeked through, and even through the warped convex view of the cylindrical lens, figured out why Paris had become a self-described 'horny Helga' within the space of eight days. Geeze he's hot. Not as hot in my world as Doug is, but I can see why this boy makes her dreams X-rated. Even without a picture of him Brianna trusted Jess enough to open the door and invite him in.
"Come on in Jess, I think she has it hanging in the bathroom somewhere," Brianna told Jess as she opened up the door and gestured him to sit on the futon couch. "She ran out of pajamas to wear a few nights ago, so she's been using it for bed wear since you didn't come back and claim it beforehand, I hope you don't mind." She shook his hand and introduced herself. "By the way, I'm Brianna."
"Nice to meet you, and no, I don't," he said distractedly, as the image of Paris wearing his flannel came to his mind for a few moments, and he imagined her tuckered out in bed, playing with the buttons as she read a nice fat book on the Crusades. Whoa buddy, hang on there, it isn't that sexy of an image! He thought to himself, trying to keep the purpose of the visit in mind. He took an extra shift at Target that night so he wouldn't have to deal with a night alone with his father. Both had been looking forward to inviting Paris to the Casa Mariano and had tried to make a night out of it, but with Paris at work Jimmy felt that quarterly inventory at the hot dog stand would be a better use of his time rather than spending a night with his son. The two were still uneasy three months living with each other, and despite their blood bond they seemed more Oscar and Felix living together than father and son. Slowly they were getting to know each other, but they both still needed their space.
Brianna dug through the towels hanging in the bathroom until she located the blue and red flannel, lurking like a hidden object in the Finders Keepers first round game inside of a dark blue towel hanging from the top sill of the sliding shower door. Flannel in hand she walked back into the main room and called for Jess' attention.
"Catch!" Brianna tossed the shirt in his direction, but he didn't have enough notice to turn around on the couch, so it ended up bonking him on his head and hanging off his shoulder.
"Hey!" he cried out, shaking his head as he put the shirt in his duffel bag along with the other things he had brought to work. "You have to warn me about that, I'm a book guy!"
Brianna laughed and sat down on the other end of the couch. "You're just as bad a catcher as Paris, I toss her a paperback and her hands become webbed paddles or something, it's comedic relief to see her catch one of those things."
"Good to know she has the same genes as Marcia Brady," he joked. He took a pencil out of his pants packet. "Do you have any looseleaf, I need to leave Paris a couple things, and a note telling her that I stopped by."
"Sure, there's a pad over by the phone, I can go get it for you," Brianna responded. She was feeling a little curious about what Jess was leaving her roommate and pried in. "Care to clue in a neutral third party on what fine parting gifts your lucky contestant will receive when she comes home?"
Jess opened up his army surplus bag, and dug through the books and notebooks lurking beneath until he found the two packages he had wrapped in brown paper during his break at Target earlier in the day. The only embellishment on the gifts was a red tape-on bow on each of the parcels, and some to-from writing on the upper end. He held the parcels in his hands, looking for a place to put them down. He signaled Brianna to help him out, and as she grabbed the pad, she pointed at Paris' bed.
"Thanks, and no you can not be clued in, I want this to be a surprise to Paris, she must've had a tough week getting into the college newspaper business." He placed the gifts down on her pillow, then sat down at her area of the desk to compose his letter.
"She's going to be, seeing as her birthday isn't until December and you stole 'her' shirt." Brianna laughed and sat down in her chair watching Jess write and frown.
"Her shirt? It's mine, I just left it behind!" Jess looked up at Paris' roommate, surprised.
"Jess, you know what happens when you leave behind a shirt in the apartment of a girl you're flirting with, she takes custody of it until you tear it out of her hands. Ten bucks that Paris gets ready for bed later, looks for her shirt and ends up waking you from a deep sleep at 2am crying into the phone 'how could you cad, that flannel and I were starting to bond like an old comfy quilt from my crib'."
"She is not going to, Paris isn't a lovesick fool into those kinds of things," Jess insisted. "Back when we talked in Hartford, you mentioned the word love to her and she'd start on a tirade that Romeo and Juliet deserved what they got and she hoped that if Shakespeare arose from the dead and wrote a sequel he would keep the Montagues and Capulets fighting as much as the Hatfields and McCoys!"
"I'll let you in on a little secret;" Brianna shuffled over to Jess' side and whispered into his ear. "She's a hopeless romantic. I can't tell you much more, but she's going to relish your gifts, despite how anachronistic the practice might be. She also partakes in 'recreational reading' that involves romance novels and pulpy drama. Don't tell her I said that though, otherwise I'll be scared for my life when she comes after me with some kind of medieval weapon."
"Really?" Jess curled his lips into a smile. "I can't see her reading those kinds of stories." He brought his concentration back onto his note and finished out what he had to say.
"Believe it or not Jess, she does, and I do too. I remember after we finished unpacking and I started to shelve my books, I noticed one of my big fat Harlequins with plenty of intrigue and the literary equivalent of smut was gone. I looked in my bags and all over the room, but couldn't seem to find it at all, even though I'd been reading it on the plane ride down here from San Francisco." Brianna smiled as she recalled the hunt for her book. "I called Paris to see if she knew where it was, but she denied even knowing about the book, so I assumed that she didn't have it. That is, until I cracked open a Roughneck tote she brought up last which had the words 'DO NOT TOUCH!!' in big black marker. Being a sneak, I took off the mailing tape that was sealing the top to the bottom, and discovered about 250 novels of various plots of all types, and she even had the complimentary champagne flute you get from the Harlequin club when you join. It was then I had a feeling of why she really snuck off to the library."
"She had it, didn't she?"
"The moment she walked back into the dorm holding that book in her hand, and saw me standing against the counter tapping my foot, she knew the charade was over. She admitted to swiping the book, and although she was a little perturbed to hear I broke into her stash, that anger was quickly replaced with relief that she'd be able to share her hidden habit with me." Brianna headed over to her bed and started straightening the sheets. "Can I ask you something Jess, other girl to boy?"
Jess folded his note to Paris and placed it atop the parcels. "I guess," he said to her, sighing.
"It may not be my business, and if you don't want to answer the question go ahead and avoid it, I just want to make sure of something. Paris' friend, your ex-girlfriend, do you still have any feelings for her?"
And here it is, the probe by the new best friend of your past, Jess thought to himself. He was actually hoping that someone would eventually ask him that question in order to release a burden off his shoulders from carrying Rory's torch, long fizzled out months ago.
"I don't have any feelings for Rory anymore except friendship," he answered honestly. "It was a good relationship when it lasted, but in all honesty it arose more out of expectations than true love. The whole town had come to the conclusion that eventually Rory and I would be dating despite my past, and I guess I felt I had to follow through on it."
"But there were other things, right? Like the fact that your uncle and her mother are now together."
"Hate to admit it, but I think those two starting to date helped me and Rory's breakup more than it hurt. They were avoiding feelings for ten years; my year of pining for Gilmore paled in comparison. They're much better in the long run than if things had gone the other way. Also, Rory never really wanted to get her hands dirty about my past and avoided bringing it up as much as she could, and that was something that just made me so mad at her at times. I'd go into a story about an old friend from Brooklyn and she'd interrupt it in a moment with either a rant about Paris or her college plans." He placed a hand in his jean pocket and laughed. "At least her annoyance with Paris was good for entertainment."
"Or your imagination," Brianna observed. "You're glad you bumped into her that night two weeks, aren't you?"
"I'm very thankful for that," he said. "She's so encouraging, a great conversationalist, great at debating someone like me into a deep hole--"
Brianna interrupted Jess. "And she doesn't look too bad either."
"I'd use different words than that, but yes, Paris doesn't look too bad at all." He crookedly smiled. "She dressed like a total dowdy wallflower back in Hartford, and let me say I'm thankful that the climate here changed her wardrobe drastically."
"OK, I refuse to go further with that because I don't think of my friend that way!" She held up her hand and drove thoughts of Paris undressed out of her mind.
"Come on, I'm sure your envious of her," he teased.
"Shut up you before I start throwing things," Brianna pouted, getting a hold of a throw pillow. "I have quite enough breastage, thank you very much. Geeze, you guys with your obsessions with all things Hooters. You realize that human females are the only living thing that use their breasts to attract the attentions of a male. In the animal kingdom it's all about the rear end when it comes to attraction."
"Human females also use their asses to attract things, i.e. Jennifer Lopez," he countered.
"Yes, but all the ass shots in the world couldn't stop Gigli from dying in the theaters." Brianna rolled her eyes and wondered why she even got into this conversation with an almost total stranger. "You should have this conversation with Paris, not me, I don't really look at butts that often. It fulfills its purpose of sitting, and that's all it is to me, a filled cushion of flesh. Without it we'd all be sitting on our pelvic bones in those lifesaver-like hemorrhoid pillows or perhaps a very horizontal society, sleeping against the wall."
"You never think about asses at all?"
"Not very often, if I do it's usually because it's too big or small and whoever has it needs to change it." Brianna failed to tell Jess that the conversation had her thinking about Doug's derriere behind the towel a week ago all over again, and her mind kept that picture frozen throughout the conversation. "Why, do you think of the backside a lot Mariano?"
"I won't say anything about that because I'm sure it would come back to haunt me if I ever became famous." Jess took one last look at the pillow where Paris' gifts were residing for now, and prepared to leave. "I should get going before Paris comes home and the surprise is ruined."
"Yeah, I need to take a shower and finish up some schoolwork." Brianna got up and guided Jess to the door. "It was nice finally seeing you mystery man."
"What?" Jess looked at Brianna with confusion in his eyes.
"My name for you for the last couple weeks since we haven't met, and now I see why." She played with her hair as she saw him out. "I hope we get to see more of each other Jess, I can see why you and Paris match up with each other so well." After the question about his status with Rory, Brianna tried to keep the line of questioning neutral just in case Jess wasn't feeling the same way about Paris.
"Nice to meet you too Brianna, I can see now why you two got along so fast. You must've done something to get into her good graces quickly, it takes a long time for most people to even be spoken to by her."
"I could say the same about you," she told him with a smile. "I just don't know what she'll do without the shirt though, she is going to be pissed about that I'm sure."
The boy looked down at the flannel he was wearing, an almost totally blue checkered shirt over a dark blue tee. A small sacrifice to the cause, he thought to himself as he decided to replace the shirt he was taking home with him. He took off the flannel, and with Brianna trying her best to avert her eyes and keep un-friendish thoughts out of her brains as she noticed Jess' physique, handed it to her.
"Now she has nothing to be pissed about," he said simply as he slipped the rope strap of his army bag over his shoulder. "Tell her I'll call on Monday night to make the plans for Friday night dinner at my house."
"OK, see you later." Brianna balled up the flannel and tossed it towards Paris' bed, where it landed in the middle of the mattress. Jess waved at her goodbye, and she shut the door on him and proceeded to head over to her PC to proofread a book review for one of her classes.
Paris was exhausted and about to fall asleep as she walked into the front lobby of the Saxons, her shoulder hurting from the pressure of the strap of her messenger bag. Although the 'night from hell' had turned out to be much better than she had thought and she had a new friendship thanks to Mai Lin, other parts at the night had grated her mind, like during a short-lived rally by the Toreadors in the second set where everyone in the student section was up from their seats trying to encourage Cal State-Northridge to win the set, cheering loudly and doing the wave until UCLA responded by taking back possession and sweeping the rest of the set. The crowd noise had made Paris' head pound through the rest of the night, and when her and Mai Lin had stopped in at a diner for a bite to eat she had the waitress bring her a single-pack of Anacin to take with her water.
She really liked Mai Lin, and hoped that her and the Laotian girl would have many more assignments together, since she wanted to know more about the girl from Eau Claire. Back at the Franklin, photographers were assigned on a per-story basis due to a rule not instituted by Paris that she couldn't change, thus making the reporting and photography seem like two separate views instead of one united perspective. Paris would be more than happy to share the spotlight with Mai Lin and hoped they would stay together as they moved up the ranks.
Before she headed back to her dorm, Paris stopped by the front desk to pick up her mail, but she hadn't found anything from Rory in the package at all. She attributed it to her being too busy in New Haven to get a few moments in for a letter to Paris. But she did get a postcard from Coral Gables courtesy of Louise, which instead of having a picture of Miami's skyline, had a play on words of a tourist slogan.
"Virginia is for lovers, and in Wisconsin, you're among friends. But Miami Beach is for one-night stands," she read, giggling at the words. "Only you Louise, only you." She went into the elevator and read the postcard as the elevator made its climb up to the third floor.
Dear Paris,
Whoever in 1896 decided it was a good idea to set up a city in the South Florida swamp was really onto something, because I think I've finally found my place in life. Miami and South Florida are beautiful, and it definitely shows in the male population down here, I just wanna eat 'em all up ;). I'm a nice coppery shade of brown thanks to the beach, yet despite all the, er, distractions, I haven't disappointed you yet girl. UM's a wonderful school and the faculty has managed to make me give a damn about my schooling, a nice bonus in addition to the weather. Running out of room, so I gotta go. Hope LA's treating you good, send me back a dispatch from Hollywood doll!
Your friend,
Louise
P.S. - Seriously? I have a crush on a guy in sociology, and for more than what's in his shorts, honest. I'll email you the 411 one of these days.
Paris cracked a smile as the elevator doors opened after reading the card. That girl just may be ready to settle down soon, she thought as made a mental note to pick up a few postcards the next time she stopped at the campus bookstore. It perked up her mood to hear from Louise, though not spending the night with Jess weighed slightly on her mind. Despite the fun she had with Mai Lin at the volleyball game and learning on-the-job about how to report a sporting event, she felt guilty for not calling him at the bare minimum so that he would know that her interest in him was still piqued.
I have to call him tomorrow at least, try to remind him that I'm still out there, she nagged at herself as she walked down the hallway towards her room. There was hardly any hustle and bustle in the halls so it wasn't long before she was back in front of 343, hoping to hear if Brianna had decided to take a chance with Doug. She opened up the door and threw her messenger bag on one of the stools against the kitchenette counter.
"Bree, I'm home!" she called out as she watched her roommate turn around in her chair.
"Hey Par, how did everything go?" Brianna asked out of curiosity. She tried creating a distraction so that Paris wouldn't notice her bed right away. If she could keep Paris talking until she was ready to ask where Jess' red/blue flannel disappeared off to, that would be a small victory in her mind.
"We won, I was sane throughout despite my deep hatred of anything sport, Mai Lin took great photographs and I think I have a basic first draft of the story that won't need much modification at all. All in all, this night didn't turn out all so bad at all." She placed her reporter's notebook down on the counter and walked towards her dresser, oblivious to the gifts sitting on the pillow. "Everything go fine with you and Doug?"
"Almost," Brianna admitted. "We got our asses kicked in the online game, but after I pulled the plug we salvaged the night, and I got a chance to get some revenge on Ronnie while I was at it."
"What'd he do, interrupt you during a deep conversation."
"Worse, he set up a LAN party on purpose with Piper and it was up to me and Doug to salvage our unit. Doug knew but he couldn't say anything, I'm not mad at him though."
"Of course you aren't, he's your One right now. He could hack into the school network and change low grades and you'd swoon like he just saved you from the dragon."
"Doug a hacker? HA! The boy needed my help setting up his IP and patching into the EA servers, I'm the computer whiz kid." Brianna just shrugged at Paris' other comments. "And he's not the One just quite yet, this was our first night together and he still has plenty of time to fubar around me, I'm not exactly in love with him yet at all."
"Mm-hmm Bree, you just keep saying that. I don't believe you for a moment, you're so in lust with him." Paris found a spare undershirt she could wear beneath the flannel, and headed into the bathroom to change. "You just need to get into a date-like situation and find out if those feelings you have for him are real, get them out of your system. That's what happened with me and Tristan back in sophomore year when Rory set me up with him. Yes it was amazing, and yes I had the most amazing kiss ever thanks to him, but he was attracted to Rory, no doubt, the confirmation that he was set up was just the icing on the cake to make sure that Tristan was roped into it. It was a tough pill to swallow and it took me quite awhile to get over him, but I did it because I knew we had no chance at a future together."
"I know, but at least you've dated Paris, albeit with few men. I was the girl in the corner asking everyone to keep their mouths shut, and one night at a dance was one night wasted away from honing my vocabulary. I have zero dating experience at all--"
"So do I," Paris called out. "And when it comes down to it, except for anyone who goes on a TV dating show, has an arranged date or has a yenta in their corner most everything is spur of the moment. Remember when you told me last Friday was a bona-fide date despite my denials to the contrary?"
"You've changed your mind."
"I have, and I'll be counting it as a date. Jess may not, but I will. I didn't even have to be ten feet away from my bed and I still managed to have a ball with him." Paris unbuttoned her shirt and searched beneath the towel she hid the flannel in, futile in the search for 'her' shirt now back on Thornton Court in Venice. "Speaking of Jess, have you seen my shirt Brianna?"
"Not at all Ris," Brianna called back innocently. "I haven't been in the bathroom all that much today."
"Please say you didn't throw it in with the wash because I know how much you either wanted me to bring it back to him personally or dispose of it in the incinerator." She started to search each of the six towels hanging from the rods around the room, trying to find it, but coming up empty. By about towel number four, she was fuming.
"Damn it, where did it go?" she uttered in a voice tinged with panic. "Brianna, you mixed it in with your laundry, didn't you?" Paris rebuttoned her blouse and flew out of the bathroom as Brianna enjoyed the comical scene that was ensuing by withholding certain information.
"Honest Par, I haven't seen it at all. Maybe you threw it in your backseat without noticing."
This was about the time that Brianna learned that teasing Paris was not a particulary good idea. Suddenly her eyes seemed to take on a dark shade of maroon with flecks of fire orange around the irises.
"Brianna, where is it? Stop goading me," she growled out harshly. "You know where it is, don't you?"
I better stop before I become the top story on UPN13, Brianna said to herself as she pointed towards the bed. "The owner decided to claim it back tonight, and might I say you have very nice taste in men Gellar. However, before he left I warned of the consequences of leaving you in the cold, so he left the flannel he was wearing tonight behind on your bed."
"Huh?" Paris turned her gaze towards the bed, and found the blue shirt sitting in the middle, along with the two gifts on the pillow. The butterflies she had been having whenever Jess was mentioned, and seemed to be reined in for the evening were coming back into her stomach. No doubt she was about to become a pile of romantic goo all over again like she did at the end of last week's meeting.
"And he also left a little something to make sure you didn't feel neglected since you had to work tonight." Brianna said the words, but Paris couldn't hear them as she approached the foot of her bed. Sitting down, she grabbed the flannel and put it to her nose. The mix of Brut, sweat, a smidgen of a petroleum product floating around and a few remnants of nicotine hit her senses full-force for the first time since she found the other shirt the week before, and she knew from the aroma that indeed, Jess Mariano had stopped by while she was out. Not even thinking, Paris put the shirt on over her blouse and scooted down the bed to get a closer look at the wrapped gifts.
"This is...really nice," she stumbled out as she ran a finger down the rough the seam of medium-sized flat package. "You're sure it was Jess? Black hair, brown eyes, the classic look of James Dean? It might've been someone else and I might be holding some kind of secret videotape the government wants and they dumped the responsibility off on me."
"I didn't ask for ID and a blood sample, but I'm pretty sure it is," Brianna said back.
"It isn't though, Jess isn't the gift-giving type." Paris shook her head and compared the to Paris from Jess handwriting on the smaller parcel to that of the letter from a couple weeks ago she had memorized down to his open-looped J in her mind. She found the note Jess had left sandwiched between the gifts and was going to read it, until she was scolded by the paper. Read after you've opened the presents, it told her. She sighed and ran the tip of her index fingernail against the tape holding the paper together. Figuring from the weight, she hypothesized, this is probably going to be a book. She carefully zipped the nail across the middle of the Scotch tape, and found the first signs of the tell-tale look of a thick paperback.
"This is a book," she told herself. "Wonder what it could be?" She opened the top flap, and discovered that the volume was one of two Jess had wrapped into the same package. The slow unwrapper she was, Paris opened up each end of the gift deliberately, not giving in to her urge to just tear the paper limb for limb. It would be good to put it to other use to her, say as extra scratch paper or to use as giftwrapping for a relative she hadn't taken a liking to. She'd find a use for it.
Brianna watched Paris, impatient with how long her roommate was taking with finding out what her gifts were. After a moment, she had finally had enough and walked over to Paris' bed.
"Par? Just open the freakin' present." She rolled her eyes and was on the receiving end of a small girl-punch on her elbow. "Ow!"
"I take my time Brianna," Paris stated matter-of-factly. "It's like a chocolate, you don't know what's in it until you actually get a full taste of the confection."
"So I guess that rules out the gift-wrapped stripper I was planning for your combined Hanukah/birthday bash, by the time you unwrap his package everyone will be fast asleep."
Paris blushed. "Oh geeze, if you get that I'll be hiding in the bathroom the rest of my college days, I wouldn't know what to do with something like that."
"Besides the obvious?"
"No, because nudity unnerves me, even done in jest. Louise gave me a copy of Playgirl as a gag gift for my bat mitzvah, and though I got through the articles fine, the pictoral content...Let's just say that nudity has never inspired me to do anything but blush and feel very unclean for staring at a picture with everything out there to see."
"Uh-huh, and you're so shy about the literary smut dear," Brianna touché'd back. "You couldn't live without it."
"That's different though, I can create my own picture from those words. With Playgirl you have to picture the actual guy, and sometimes they're more like the men of your nightmares than your dreams." Paris puckered her lips in a sour position as she finally got the last of the gift wrap off of the two books.
"True, true. Although tell me something Paris."
"Hmm?"
"If Jess was to pose for a magazine like that, what would you do?" Brianna prepared for the upcoming assault on her ears, but didn't receive a rant as Paris stated her argument simply after a wide look of surprise.
"I'd kick his ass and buy up every copy published I could. Then I'd thank my lucky stars I've been one of the few girls to see him in that way." She then took her position to a realistic conclusion. "Besides, Jess is too shy to have his picture taken, even fully clothed. If he wanted to titillate he'd submit an anonymous essay to LA Weekly about his first time."
"How do you know that, you know him from occasional visits from Rory only and just five hours together and several phone calls over the last few weeks."
"I think we're kindred spirits somehow. We have the horrid parenting in common, along with focusing our energies in one thing, him in troublemaking until he came up to Connecticut, and I with my studying. I can't really explain it, except to say my mother hiring that new age guru for me a couple years ago seems to have warped my romantic side a little." She brought her glance down towards the books she was holding, and read each title to Brianna.
"Jess gave me The Thomas Guide for Los Angeles and Orange County. Hmm," She wrinkled her eyebrows as she glanced at the cover. "Very thoughtful gift, seeing as it took me about twenty minutes tonight to find the right road up to Northridge." Paris was thinking of the atlas she received in more practical terms. However, her roommate saw more than a book of maps in Paris' hands.
"He doesn't want you to get lost," Brianna hypothesized. "It's kind of a vague way of saying that he wants you to stay in Los Angeles for as long as he's here. It's more than the maps Gel, it's what the message is from the intention of the gift itself."
"Really, I didn't even think of that." She paged through the book, watching southern California unfold in a blur. "But it makes sense to me, Jess has always been very vague when it comes to the messages he sends."
"So you understand the intentions?"
"Very clearly Bree," she said, setting aside the atlas and taking a look at the cover of the other book. She sighed and rolled her eyes. "Jess is still trying to get me on the Kerouac kick."
"What title did he buy?"
"Dharma Bums," Paris told Brianna. "That one will have to wait a while however, I'm only on chapter eight of On the Road. He's never going to give up on the guy while I'm around."
"You like it I hope," Brianna queried. "It took him effort to think of the perfect presents for you."
"I love it, don't worry. My period of judging the beat generation by their covers is long finished, I like On the Road. I'm just not ready to tackle two books by the same author at the same time, I'd get confused if I mixed up the chapter of one book with the other."
"That makes complete sense," the brunette said as she handed Paris the other gift, a longish rectangular package. "Here's the other one, and please don't spend ten minutes tearing off the bow, your friend is in suspense here hon."
Paris took the package and tried to make an educated guess about its contents. "OK, guessing from the length and weight of this, it's either some kind of electrical appliance or a can crusher." She smiled and faced Brianna before the surprise was revealed.
"Only one way to find out. Start tearing." Unlike the books, the brown wrapping this time was torn to shreds and the bow fell to the floor as the contained item was revealed to Paris quickly. Still being one for surprise, she shut her eyes as her hands picked and ripped at the Scotch tape to hasten the unwrapping process. Thirty seconds later, she was done and kept her eyes shut, asking Brianna's opinion before she opened them back up.
"It's a strange present, but I think it might mean something to you Par," she said.
"It isn't a sex toy, isn't it?" Paris frowned at the word strange and thought the worst immediately.
Brianna giggled, then composed herself. "Well the toy part is correct, but nothing involving anything adult."
"I don't want to take any chances, open up the box and put whatever's in it back in my hands." She handed the mystery object over to Brianna, who furiously took off all the security and protective ties holding it to the packaging to end the drama. It took a minute, but after testing to make sure that everything was in order, she handed Paris the toy.
Paris ran her hand against it, trying to memorize the texture just by feel alone. It feels so soft, might be a teddy bear, she thought as she squeezed it. Instead of feeling the other side though, she felt something hard in the middle, and heard a click as she pushed in some kind of trigger.
For a couple moments, Paris could swear she was back in 1990, getting ready to watch ABC's Friday night with Francisca and her kids in the great room, curled up in her nightgown and a big afghan. Everything felt so familiar, and as her hands moved up and up, the feeling of the familiar felt body came back to her mind. At the top of the object, she felt what seemed like a hard plastic face.
No way, he didn't...Her mind spun for a moment as she realized the utter familiarity of what she was grasping in her hands. That's it, time to open my eyes, I will not scream or act girly when I open them, I will be calm and collected, she pleaded to herself as her lids opened up to face the world again.
And there, laying in her hands, was something she had kept in her room up until her twelfth birthday and just about dragged around the house numerous times, and was only taken away by her mother because of some lame reasoning about it being a fire hazard that would burn down the Manor, but had probably been fixed by now. Paris was once again the proud owner of a GloWorm doll.
Despite the pleas to herself not to act like a teenager in love, a small involuntary squeak came out of Paris' mouth as she took in the sight of the friendly little green caterpillar-like creature with the nightcap on his head and a face that glows bright when hugged.
"Oh my God," she uttered as she did a double take to make sure she wasn't dreaming. "I didn't think he'd pick up on it at all."
"On what?" Brianna asked, enjoying the fact that Jess' gifts were putting a smile on her friend's face.
"I mentioned in passing last week when he was over that I owned one of these and hadn't seen one out for years. I loved mine when I had it but never scrounged up the courage before I left to get it back from the attic." She laughed and sighed as she squeezed the doll again, letting the soft amber light overwhelm her senses. "Where did he even get this anyways? They don't even sell this model GloWorm in the stores anymore, Hasbro came out with a new version more geared towards preschoolers than regular children, this is in mint condition." Paris grabbed the box from the ground and searched for the copyright date, finding it on the bottom. "Copyright 1989 Playskool, Inc." she read. "He must've had to really dig deep to find this, he certainly wouldn't have found it in the back room at Target."
Brianna pointed down at the floor, where in the flurry of activity minutes before, Jess' note of explanation fell onto the light-blue berber carpet. "There might be the explanation."
"Oh, right." Paris uttered softly as she bent down and grabbed the note. "Even the best of us still have blonde moments I suppose."
"I'm a natural brunette and have them often," Brianna told her, laughing. "That report is calling out for me to finish it, so I'll leave you and the note alone, alright?"
"Thanks Brianna," she smiled and curled up on her bed with the GloWorm and books at her side. "One question though, you think Jess is attractive?"
Brianna pretended to ponder the question for five seconds before laughing aloud. "Paris, trust me. You don't wanna let this boy be the one that got away. And as for me trying to steal him away from you..." she spoke honestly and hoped Paris would let the topic rest after that. "I have other things on my mind already--"
"And that thing would be Doug, wouldn't it?"
Brianna sighed and just walked to her computer seat, leaving her roommate in relative seclusion. "Whatever you say Gellar, I meant my paper." As she sat down, she corrected for her mind. OK, she's right, it's Doug. But it's better to be friends first with him, then lovers. I just want to take this cautiously. I've already got past the dreaded first night, and if it goes well in the next few weeks...she stopped to take a look at the text she was typing onto the OpenOffice screen, and realized that half a page in the book report had nothing to do with literature, but was a sort of 'get-to-know-me' letter to Doug about her life, friends, likes and dislikes. Groaning, she clicked to highlight the text, cut it out of the book report and pasted the letter to a separate document, saving the file as About Me. She went back to her book report, trying to keep her thoughts away from Doug.
Yup, I'm sick for the boy, she confessed to herself. She rolled her eyes and decided to get back to work. I have four years with him, might as well not rush it, Brianna thought as she started on her criticism of the text she was assigned.
Meanwhile Paris had gone back into the bathroom to properly change into the new shirt Jess had given her, taking off the blouse beneath. She didn't even bother with pajama bottoms since the flannel went all the way down to the middle of her thighs and she figured Brianna was comfortable enough with her wearing pajamas in that style. She headed over to her bed, and playing with her hair as she spread out on the mattress, read Jess' note to herself.
Dear Smartie,
Hope things went well with the story up in Northridge, but I'm happy to hear that you're getting back into journalism, you always wrote the best articles in the Franklin. You may ask how I would know that? Well, Rory usually pawned off a copy of the paper to me that I asked for so I could read her prose. That reason ended very quickly when I started reading your opinion pieces, they far outshone Rory's writing so much because they seemed well thought-out and had interesting points and statistics.
So you're probably thinking 'Jess, how on earth did you find the money and inspiration for all these presents?' Target gave me a 75¢/hour raise last week, and instead of using the first check to buy things I'd probably never use, I'd give you a few things since I'm so thankful you're here in LA. I know you haven't finished On the Road quite yet, but damn it I'm going to obliterate Jane Austen from being your favorite author, no matter what it takes.
The atlas...not actually my idea, you can thank Jimmy for that suggestion. He felt it would be some way of saying 'Welcome to the area, hope you don't leave soon' since he's a native Angelino and as sort of an apology for thinking you were a telemarketer, and no matter what I told him about you he thought giving you a book of LA maps would be a gesture of welcome. Looking at it now though, he was sort of right. There's a message in there somewhere, I guess you could talk to Brianna about it, or Jimmy when you stop by next week.
I bet thinking about where I could come up with a mint condition in the box GloWorm, and you've already deduced I didn't pick it up on my way out of work. There was a neighborhood garage sale along the boardwalk last Sunday, and I was over there looking for vintage books and LPs. I was walking along really not finding all that much that interested me, when a elderly woman's little stand off to the side caught my eye. I approached and didn't really know why I was even stopping there, when your comment about owning a GloWorm came back to haunt my mind. And there it was, selling for six dollars, sitting on her table. She told me that it was intended to be a Christmas gift for her grandchild back in 1989, but all the sudden he got into the Ninja Turtles so it was obvious that action figures were in his future. She kept it despite that setback, and sold it to me because I seemed to be a 'pretty good kid'. Her words, not mine. She wondered who I was going to give it to, and not wanting to go into specifics told her 'a girl'. She made me blush when she asked that, but didn't probe further. I thought you'd like this, I really do like listening to you talk Paris. It's just a way to show that you're really important in my life right now, and that I catch every word you speak.
I know I'm saying a little too much, so I'll end the letter here. Before you wonder school is doing fine, and a couple of my teachers are pretty cool. Still need a little help in biology and math is tough, but as you said last week even you weren't a shining star in that class. I hope things are going great for you Paris, and I'll see you around, maybe before next Friday when you have dinner at my house.
Your friend,
Jess
P.S. - Please, don't thank me for the gifts. I just wanted to show you that you're in my thoughts all the time.
As her eyes trailed off the last of Jess' writing, Paris felt like crying in joy that Jess hadn't forgotten her. She had thought all the way home about him sulking at home, when really he was trying to put the last touches on a nice surprise designed to make her feel better. For the first time in a few weeks, since she left Hartford, Paris felt appreciated for what she did for others.
She was still in disbelief at the fact that Jess had bought her a children's toy, and at considerable cost. Paris appreciated the thought, sure, but what was confusing about it was that it was Jess, the epitome of sullen and moody. The image of him approaching an older lady and asking the price of a light-up worm toy was comedic in the stage that was her mind, and as she held the toy, another mirage of him trying to keep it obscured from his father without a weird line of questioning occurring made her giggle.
At that moment, Paris knew all the hard work she and Mai Lin put in on the Bruins wouldn't be remembered months from September 5th, and would be but a footnote when the Daily Bruin came out with a centenary special edition twenty-some years after she graduated from UCLA. It would be a fleeting moment of achievement, just as her work at the Hartford Armory every Thanksgiving morning for the community dinner wasn't remembered all that well in her multi-terabyte gray matter.
But this moment, where she received a gift for just being a friend would be remembered forever, and it was a moment that would be personal to her, and just her. Where everyone else received the same heartbreak as her when they got Harvard thin sheets in the mail, and she had the same moment as every other UCLA attendee where they faced the majesty of Royce Hall and intook a breath that their lives were about to have a major change, receiving the gift of a GloWorm would be her memory forever, and no one else's. And that could never be taken away from her at all.
She still tried to find romantic motives in Jess' giftgiving strategy, but couldn't seem to find them in anywhere except the toy. She assumed that the atlas was sort of a Welcome Wagon-like gesture from the elder Mariano, and Dharma Bums was just Jess giving her a book to read when she finished On the Road and the current romance she read between classes. But the GloWorm...she thought to herself. Not even Jamie gave me something this sweet and special, and thought out. Jamie's idea of a 'straight from the heart' present for Paris on Valentine's Day was an assumption she wanted to watch the Philadelphia Light Opera perform a modern retake on Romeo and Juliet and have dinner in the most expensive restaurant in the city after the show. Judging from her frayed synapses from the end of the night from the poor food and pathetically bad acting and singing in the opera, Jamie annoyed Paris more than showing his love for her.
She looked down at the doll once again, clearing her mind and taking the gift for what it was; just a gift of appreciation for being there when Jess needed help. She squeezed on it to watch it glow, and it warmed her heart just thinking Jess was thinking of her doing that as he drove home to Venice. She took a look at her watch to see how much time there was until he probably got home.
"About 11:45, I have time," she told herself as she reached over to her nightstand to retrieve her cell phone. She flipped the phone open and scrolled her caller ID list until she came upon Jess' entry. After saving him in the #2 position in her speed dial (after Rory, located on the first button), she dialed out, crossing her fingers and hoping there was no one at his house to take her late call. She wouldn't have been surprised if Jimmy was already asleep and Jess was staying out a little late after stopping by the Saxons.
The outside dialing tone rang two or three times, and Paris tried her best to rehearse her message to Jess in a whisper, going over the words in her mind and aloud. After the fourth ring she got the familiar click of an answering machine, and she had to listen to Jimmy try to rattle off personal and business messages in the space of twenty seconds.
"Hello," it said, "you've reached the home of James Mariano, proprietor of Boardwalk Jimmy's Hot Dogs and Pretzels. If you have a business proposition, press one. Personal business involving me or my son, press two. If you're a telemarketer or a lower grade newspaper than the LA Times, press that red button off to your side, prepare for the trap door and kiss yourself goodbye, I don't want your business. Have a nice day or evening, and don't forget, Boardwalk Jimmy's uses only 100% beef in our franks--"
"Gah, shut up Jimmy and let me leave a message!" Paris gritted out as Jimmy gave some free promotion to French's and Hunt's for supplying condiments to him. "That's what the business line is for." Finally, not a second too soon, she remembered she could've just pressed two and avoided it all in the first place. She pushed in the two on her keypad and prepared for more spiel.
Thankfully she just got a robotic 'please leave a message', followed by a long tone. This is it Par, don't screw this up, go girl! the little her dressed up as a cheerleader in her mind prodded, and she started to stumble through her gratitude.
"This message is for Jess, and no Jimmy, I'm not selling anything, so do not delete this or else! Anyways, it's Paris and it's a quarter to midnight Friday evening." She hesitated for a bit, looking at the GloWorm she held. "I didn't expect you to do something like this for me Jess, and I've had gifts given to me before out of pity or obligation. Sometimes heart was put into them, but quite a few items were along the same-old 'rich-girl' present lines. You know, the wine glasses, clothes, some jewelry. The set-up suitors were even worse. I'm staunchly anti-fur and there have been a couple dates where guys thought they could woo me with a mink stole. After giving them a little education about the conditions those things were kept in before they were turned into winter outerwear--"
She stopped for a moment, and realized that she was ranting on about nothing in particular. Jess couldn't even afford fur, so why would he give a damn about her tirade about the men of Hartford society? Take another tact quickly, time's running out, her conscience nagged. Paris started again, trying to keep her words more focused.
"Alright, um, just forget what I said about the furs, who cares. I know that in the note you told me not to thank you for the gifts, but it would just be rude to say nothing about it. I had an OK evening, but I was thinking about you all night and my mood while I worked on the story was reflecting that I'd rather be someplace else, like talking to you and just debating things all night. So when I came home and found what you had given me, I was touched, and not only that, I felt appreciated by someone besides Brianna in this town. Not by only you, but your father, thank him for giving me the atlas of LA for me."
Paris was ad-libbing everything she was saying right off the top of her head, and letting Jess have a peek into her raw emotions. She continued, knowing she didn't have long before the answering machine would stop recording. "So I guess what I'm saying in this call to you," she sighed, smiling. "Is thank you for everything Jess, it's appreciated beyond words. You really know how to make a girl feel welcome in the big city, and I'm counting the hours until we meet for dinner next week. No need to respond to this, I just wanted to get this sort of audio thank you card out before I forgot, I suck at sending out thanks around birthday time to the various businesspeople in Hartford who gave me money."
Paris decided to end the call before she lost her nerve. "OK, well I'm done thanking you, so I should end this before I get cut off. Keep doing well in school, and I'll talk to you soon, call me in a few days. Until then Reb, goodbye." The end tone of the answering machine beeped in her ear, and she was relieved that her whole message got out as she hit the red button on her cell to end the call. She folded it back into it's clamshell shape and set it back down on her nightstand, taking a romance novel as she decided to call it a night and crawl into bed. Even with Brianna's call for her to stop reading romance before bed, Paris felt like she deserved it tonight. I want my dreams to be filled with those images, she thought to herself as she took the bookmark out and resumed from where she left off in the book at lunch.
Deciding to test out a theory, she turned off her nightstand lamp, leaving her bed in a somewhat muted darkness, with some light coming from Brianna's PC and her lamp on her side of the room. She heard the girl's keyboard clacking and tuned it out as she used the pillows she had to create a prop so she could read with her upper body vertical. Then she cuddled up with her GloWorm, squeezing it until it lit up.
"It still works," she said brightly, noticing she could make out all the words on the page fine with the lamp inside of the toy. When she had her other GloWorm when she was six, Paris would use it as a make-do booklight after lights out so she could get reading in before she fell asleep, or Francisca came in to scold her for staying up past her bedtime, saying 'a growing girl should have a voracious appetite for sleep. You may think it's fun to stay up now, but try thinking that's fun when you're eighteen and cramming for the SAT's in one night'. Still, Paris would stay up reading the classics of childhood, the great Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary being her favorites until she discovered Dickens and the rest of the classics lurking in her father's library two years later.
She started reading the book she held, the parallels between her six year-old self reading Bezzus & Ramona and her now at eighteen reading some title she'd forget after the book was finished clear in her mind. She relaxed as she got into a vivid love scene, and immediately replaced the principal characters with herself and a certain Brooklynite living in Venice.
"Thank you very much Jess," she whispered to herself as she cuddled her GloWorm. "For this, and that." The that she spoke about, coming from the book that was sure to inspire some very wicked sleep talking dreams around 4:45 in the morning. One more dream Brianna, I promise I'm done after that, she said to herself with a Mona Lisa-ish smile, settling into her pillows to start the gears in her fantasy center turning for later on.
To be continued…