Shoes That Bite

Nolan couldn’t figure out why the Chemistry class heartthrob was avoiding him. College beat the shyness out of most people but apparently not out of Jamie Erikson. It was impossible to approach a guy surrounded by a harem of girls. Only Anna had, and she’d gushed about long lashes and soulful whatever color eyes. Nolan snorted and slumped in his seat. One of the highlights of the lecture hall was the movie-theater style seats. The fabric seats were great to sleep in.

“Thinking about Jamie again?” Next to him, Anna, his best friend, propped her head on her hands. Her teeth dazzled against the backdrop of her dark skin. Curly black hair framed brown eyes full of mischief.

Nolan scowled. “He’s my partner for the semester project, but he won’t talk to me.”

“You are one scary looking dude,” Anna pointed out.

Sure, he was tall and bigboned. He had weird orange streaks in his brown hair from a childhood incident. A gangster would envy his jawline (according to his cousin). And was it his fault that his default expression said, “screw you”?

“He runs away after class,” Nolan grumbled. No matter how he timed it, Jaime slipped away before he could approach. It wasn’t his responsibility if Erikson hadn’t been present when the teacher announced the groups. “Girls are all over him in class. How do I talk to him?”

“Maybe...sit next to him during the lecture?”

Erikson sat in the front row: in spitting distance of the professor. Worse, he was surrounded by his horde of followers.

“And he’s gone…lost in a dream about Jamie Erikson again.” Anna grinned. “I get it. He’s pretty.”

“It’s weird to think about one guy this much,” Nolan admitted. “I just need a way to talk to him without being hated by every girl in this class.”

Anna tugged a stray string from the end of her Capri pant leg and dropped it into his lap. “Hey, I’ll still like you. You have bad luck though. You and Jamie are the only guys in a class of thirty-five.”

“Argh, whatever! He can come crying to me the week before the project is due!” The idea made his blood pressure rise.

“Ooh, you’re into the begging types?”

“I don’t have a type.”

“Figure it out. Be an example for me.” Anna was too in love with her 2-D guys to consider dating real people. But why would she rely on him, the one with a scary face, to fall in love?

“When does class start?” The discussion about his lack of romantic prospects was making him grumpy.

“Right now. Look who it is.” Anna elbowed him.

The rest of the class was trickling in. A familiar blond head in a crowd of giggling females caught Nolan’s attention. Anna gave him an encouraging poke.

“Hey Jamie!” he called out, but that blond head bobbed past twenty rows before sinking into the middle of the first row of seats. The cloud of women followed. “He ignored me again!”

Anna jumped to her feet with a jingle. Before Nolan could ask what the hell she was doing, Anna raced down the aisle to plop into the seat beside Jamie. She grinned at the person who had taken a second too long to sit down.

“I’m saving this seat for Nolan. He lost his contacts.”

Nolan didn’t wear contacts…or glasses, for that matter. Anna’s come-up-here-or-else glare made him slither out of his seat. He straightened his spine and pretended not to notice the whispers. They probably weren’t even talking about him. At the front of the room, Nolan turned to apologize to Samantha, the girl displaced by Anna. Ignoring his attempt, she walked away to squeeze into the second row to sit directly behind Jamie.

“Whoo, I made my parents proud with that sprint.” Anna stood to let him take the seat. To his right, a girl named Lauren looked through her backpack with intense concentration. On the other side, Jamie Erikson was staring straight ahead. Was it a felony to change up the seating?

“Thanks, Anna.” His glower bounced off his accomplice as she walked away. The chair in the front was nowhere near as comfortable as the ones in the backrow. An irrational thought but the hairs standing up at the back of his neck were real. What for? He could finally give this guy a piece of his mind.

“Nice view you got up here.” Nolan then noticed the silver-colored earbuds in the other guy’s ears. He hated it when people made him repeat things.

Jamie removed his earbuds and tilted his head like a confused puppy. “Have we met?”

Classes had been in session for three weeks. Was it that hard to recognize classmates? Especially the only other guy in your class? “I’m Nolan Sonne.”

“James Erikson. I prefer Jamie though.”

Nolan shook the slim, cool hand Jamie offered. “So…I’m your partner for the semester project. I was thinking we should start on it.”

Jamie smiled. His gray eyes were soulful, lashes sinfully long. As Anna had said. But something—maybe an unfriendly edge to that smile—gave Nolan the heebie-jeebies. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

That accused him of not trying hard enough. Maybe he should have set himself on fire and seen if that would catch Blondie’s attention. “I’ve been trying to catch you after class for two weeks!”

Jamie tapped his pen on his notebook in a way that elevated Nolan’s blood pressure by a few millimeters of mercury. “I was absent the day the project was explained…”

“Yes, you were,” Nolan said shortly. “When do you want to meet?”

“I can’t during the week. Would this weekend work?”

So, he was one of those partners that made scheduling group-work difficult. “I’m going home, but I’ll be here Friday night.”

“Friday night is no good.” Jamie flipped his pen and dropped it. Nolan snatched it from the floor, holding the pen out of reach like a hostage. “Or I’ll cancel work that night.”

Jamie’s downturned mouth made it a tragedy.

Nolan held onto the pen. “Well, don’t cancel work. I’ll stay this weekend.”

“If it’s important, you should go home.”

“Nah. Nothing important.”

An expression like a tragedy again. “Are you sure?”

“I already said so!” His voice made the arriving professor raise an eyebrow.

Professor Marco placed his worn briefcase on the black table at the front of the room. The table was dented and scuffed from years of chemistry demos. The built-in sink on one side had an eyewash, for demos gone wrong. “Everything all right, Nolan?”

The university gave professors a class list of student names plus mugshots. Either Marco had memorized his face or (more likely) recognized him by his hair. “Yes, sorry.”

Next to him, Lauren snapped open her laptop like she was offended. Her latte wobbled dangerously on the edge of the small desk. As the overhead projector warmed up and the professor dug through his briefcase, time dragged. Meanwhile, Jamie didn’t seem to know how to ask for the pen back.

Behind them, Samantha leaned forward to ask, “Jamie, what section are we on?”

“Section three in chapter two,” he said with a startled smile.

“Thanks,” she said. Nolan wondered if she was aware of how intensely she was curling and uncurling her hair around a finger. “Jamie, do you need a pen?”

“Thanks, but I have one.” Jamie turned back to his notes, smile gone now.

Samantha quit breathing down their necks and scooted back. A faint thump that jolted Nolan’s lower back told him she had kicked the seat.

He got the message. Nolan dropped the pen onto Jamie’s desk. As Professor Marco started the lecture, Nolan tried to focus. He couldn’t sit still in the front row. His notes would be a mess, as scattered as his brain was right now. Pay attention to molecular structures! Not to how much he was starting to dislike the guy next to him.

The end of class felt like a jailbreak. Nolan scribbled his phone number on a scrap of paper and dropped it into Jamie’s lap. Then he ran to the sanctuary that was Anna. She was shaking her head as he approached. “Smooth,” she said, as he pestered her to hurry up and get the hell out of the lecture hall.

“I’m pretty sure he doesn’t like me,” Nolan concluded on the staircase.

“But you didn’t do anything to make him not like you.” Anna threw up her hands as they came to the atrium of the classroom building. Wimble Hall resembled a movie theatre with its dark-lit halls and red carpets. The double-doors to each classroom were tucked into dim alcoves. Brightly colored signs with room numbers hung from the ceiling. The building even had a café that mimicked concession stands.

Anna suddenly skidded to a stop and began to pat herself down.

“Why are you doing the Macarena?” Nolan asked.

“I’m looking for my phone.” She poked her face into her knapsack and then ran towards the staircase. “Wait for me! I’m going to go get it from upstairs.”

After following a stream of students down a long hallway, Nolan took a seat at one of the café’s metal-wire tables. The smell of the Soup of the Day tickled his nose: Italian wedding. Nearby, a cluster of Jamie fangirls had claimed a table to sip at their iced coffees. The strong aroma gave Nolan a headache. When ten long minutes passed, he began to wonder if Anna had gotten distracted.

He left the tables behind and walked back through the central hallway to the winding staircase. A level above him, Anna was taking one stair at a time with exaggerated slowness. Nolan wondered if it had anything to do with the guy walking behind her. Jamie Erikson looked lost in his thoughts, and for once, he was traveling without his entourage.

Then Jamie’s eyes met his.

Nolan saw him freeze like the proverbial deer in headlights. The moment passed, and Erikson offered him a thin smile. As if she had also felt the atmosphere frost over, Anna hurried down the last of the steps and looped an arm with Nolan’s.

She steered them away until they were lost in the chatter of the café occupants. “For a sec, he looked like he was scared of you,” she said. “I was watching him out of the corner of my eye. Maybe I’m wrong. What did you do, doofus?”

“I don’t know.” Was the guy shaken up by the pen he had stolen for fifteen seconds?

Anna released him. “While you search your memory, I’m going to get some brain food.”

“I’m not waiting. The line’s long!” Nolan called, ignoring her wail of protest as she joined the line of students that curled around the closest tables. If she got her food fast enough, she could catch up with him on the way back to the dorms.

He had already escaped into the brisk autumn air when he heard his name. He kept walking. “You jerk!” He heard her clatter down the concrete steps when a cracking sound made him turn around.

Anna pitched forward, arms flailing. She looked resigned to her fate, but Nolan ran to catch her at the bottom of the staircase. His act of heroism was soon cut short. A few steps behind Anna, Jaime Erikson pulled her against his body. Hands tucked her head down, away from the concrete that would have cracked it open. Then, the bodies dropped together with a thump. Nolan stopped the two people rolling down the stairs with an awkward combination of his hands and knees. If he had been a smaller guy, he would have been knocked over.

As Nolan wondered what to do next, Anna and Jamie peeled away from one another. His now possibly brain-damaged project partner struggled to prop his back against a concrete stair. “Are you okay?” Jamie said.

“I’m great. Except for this.” Anna sat up and brandished a broken plastic heel. “You took most of the impact for me, hero.”

A blush painted more color into Jamie’s face than Nolan would have believed possible. “I was going to catch you anyway,” Nolan said. Pushing a petty feeling aside, he offered a hand. “Can you stand?”

Erikson nodded and then hissed through his teeth. “Maybe. I think I hit my head.”

“You spared her head but sacrificed yours? That was stupid.”

Jamie’s eyes squinted with pain, and Nolan felt almost bad for calling him stupid. Almost.

Anna whipped out her phone. “Time to call 911.”

“No! Don’t call.” The tragic expression struck again. “Just give me a second.” The color faded from his pretty face.

As Jamie fainted, Nolan dropped to his knees to catch that blond head. The bruised knees wouldn’t be worth it, but even a pseudo-Pre-Med major felt an obligation to prevent harm to others. Nolan settled the guy’s head on the ground, ignoring the weird observation of how soft Erikson’s hair had felt between his fingers.

“Infirmary or 911?” Anna looked as serious as he’d ever seen her.

“He said don’t call 911, right? Let’s get the school nurse to look him.” Nolan wrapped an arm around Jamie’s back. He was easy to lift. He also smelled lightly of cologne.

Nolan twitched at the sound of a photo being snapped. “Heh, my new background.”

“Help me carry him!”

“You got it.”

With Jamie Erikson draped between them, Nolan wondered why it felt like this was only the beginning of the trouble with this guy.