Size 12 and Ready to Rock Read Free

caf. Heather, you go down the front stairwell and see if anyone is hiding out in the basement.”
    “You’ve been breathing too many chemicals in the darkroom at your summer film classes,” I say. Sarah’s phone has gone to voice mail again. Frustrated, I hang up without leaving another message. “And anyway, I’m not playing.”
    “Heather, Heather, Heather,” Gavin says, chidingly. “Film is all digital now, no one uses darkrooms or chemicals. And you most certainly are playing. We killed you, so you’re our prisoner. You have to do what we say.”
    “Seriously,” Jamie says. “Didn’t you guys hear that?”
    “If you killed me, that means I’m dead,” I say. “So I shouldn’t have to play.”
    “Those aren’t the rules,” Gavin says. “The way we’ll take them is, we go in through the dining office, then hide behind the salad bar—”
    “McGoren,” a deep, masculine voice says from the darkness of the hallway.
    Gavin looks up.
    “Nobody shoots Heather,” my fiancé, Cooper, emerges from the shadows to say, “and gets away with it.”
    Then he fires.

Chapter 2
Once in a While
Once in a while you regret the road not taken
Start giving up on the plans you made
Once in a while you feel so forsaken
Wondering why so many took, not gave
Once in a while you ask, how could this happen?
How did I end up in these shoes?
But once in a while you meet a special someone
Someone who chose the same path as you
And suddenly it stops feeling so lonely
Out on that road that you just had to choose
And that’s when you know it all was worth it
Because once in a while dreams do come true

“Once in a While”
Written by Heather Wells
    “I told you I heard something,” Jamie says, laughing at Gavin’s stupefied expression as he stares down at the bright green paint splotch on the front of his white coveralls.
    “Uncool, man,” Gavin says forlornly. “You aren’t even on an official team.”
    “Where’d you get that paintball gun?” I ask as Cooper comes over to wrap an arm around my neck.
    “A nice young man at the front desk handed it to me when I asked where you were,” he says. “He told me I was going to need it in order to defend myself.”
    I realize belatedly that Mark, the resident assistant working at the front desk, was calling out to me as I raced up the stairs. I’d been in too much of a hurry to listen.
    “What are you doing here?” I ask Cooper as he kisses the top of my head. “I told you I’d be right back.”
    “Yes, that’s what you say every time you get dragged over here on a weekend,” Cooper says drily. “Then it’s three hours before I see you again. I figured this time I’d hurry things along. You don’t make enough money at this job to be at their beck and call twenty-four hours a day, Heather.”
    “Don’t I know it,” I say. My annual salary as an assistant resident hall director actually puts me at the U.S. poverty level, after the IRS and NYS take their cuts. Fortunately, New York City College’s health care and benefits package is excellent, and I pay zero rent thanks to my second job doing data entry for my landlord, who’s untwined his arm from around my neck and is reloading his paint gun.
    I’m not going to lie: though I disapprove of gunplay in residence halls, the effect is undeniably sexy. Of course, Cooper had to familiarize himself with firearms in order to pass the New York State Private Investigator Exam. He doesn’t actually own a gun, however, and has assured me that in real life being a private detective is nothing like it is on TV shows and movies. When he isn’t home looking stuff up online, he mostly sits around in his car taking photos of people who are cheating on their spouses.
    It’s a relief to know this, since I’d worry if I thought he was out there getting shot at and then returning fire.
    “This time it’s serious,” I tell him. “Campus police got a report of an unauthorized party—”
    “You don’t say,” Cooper