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headed to the elevator, trying
to ignore him watching me as he greeted more students and parents. Forget rule
number one, with Carter around rule number two might be the bigger problem.

Chapter Two
    Carter
    You can call me Chazz? What
an idiot . Being a second semester
senior made me a lot more confident than I had a right to be, especially when I
said stupid shit, but something about Kate made me aim to impress her.
    I have a nickname,
impressive.
    Maybe it was because she
seemed like she’d been through a lot more than the average freshman.
    Maybe it was because when we
were alone in the bathroom, I wished she wasn’t in such a rush to leave.
    She also had no idea yet
about what happened to me my freshman year. A blank slate was incredibly attractive
considering I’d spent years wishing I could erase mine.
    My friend Tristan, the RA
for floor ten, came up behind me and slapped me on the back. “He shoots, he
misses,” he said, laughing like only a friend can at your perceived
embarrassment.
    Tristan was a senior too. He’d
been my roommate freshman year. He knew what had happened, but believed I
wasn’t lying about it unlike most everyone else. It had been three years since
then. Long enough that people didn’t talk about it anymore, but that didn’t
mean they didn’t think about it every time they saw me or one of the other guys
who used to be in the since- disbanded TKE fraternity.
    “She’s on my floor,” I said.
“It’s good I missed.”
    It would be hard to avoid
her on my floor or not. I liked her confidence. It was damn sexy and rare. There
was something else, too—the way her brown eyes reminded of a deer’s, the same
hollowness—almost like they’d been through too much to give away anything.
Maybe because of what had happened to her parents. You never fully recovered
from tragedy, from experiencing the worst of human nature.
    I knew.
    Tristan scoffed. “Who
follows that archaic hands-off rule?”
    “I follow every rule.”
    Tristan paused, assessing
me. “Forbidden fruit,” he finally said, “is the sweetest of all.”
    “I’m a semester away from
graduating. I don’t need any fruit, especially not forbidden freshman fruit,” I
reasoned, as much to him as to myself. Part of my atonement for what had
happened my freshman year was working as an RA, giving back to the university
that was nice enough to let me stay. My father’s sizeable endowment hadn’t hurt
either.
    “Then why are you still
staring at her?” He waved his hand in front of my eyes.
    “Shut the hell up,” I said,
smacking it away.
    “Couldn’t have your view
blocked for even a minute?” I heard a chuckle in his voice. “Damn, you’ve got
it bad, Chazzy.”
    I’d received my nickname in
my frat. I still told people to call me that as a reminder. Everyone kept
telling me to forget what happened, to move on, but I couldn’t. I never wanted
to forget the night I discovered I was a coward.
    Kate was clearly the
opposite. Maybe I hoped she could teach me how to be as strong as she seemed.
    “She’s new, isn’t she?” he
asked, rubbing his palm against his buzzed scalp, his own red RA polo pulling
up from his waist to show off his hairless stomach. Tristan was on the diving
team. He was good, Olympic trials good. He became an RA to do his best to avoid
the temptations college had to offer.
    That was probably the real
reason my father made my being an RA a stipulation of his endowment. He was
willing to do anything to make sure I didn’t fuck up again.
    “Yeah, so?” I responded,
even though we both understood what “new” meant. It meant she didn’t know what
Chazz and his frat brothers had been accused of doing to Jeanie Pratt, what
Chazz had actually done, or even worse, not done.
    “So that makes you the
helpful RA, instead of…”
    Just because Tristan
believed me, didn’t mean he could talk to me about it. No one could.
    “I only asked her if she needed
me to carry her bags.”
    “There are lots of