The Attraction Read Free Page A

having.
    Olshaker rushed her, grabbing her by the wrists. “Just come back to me. Just tell me.”
    She was shocked to see tears in his eyes. “Let go of me, damn it!”
    His face turned bright red. He was angry. She knew the look—it was half the reason they’d broken up before midterms. He had slapped her a little too hard, and she had seen that red face. He was scary sometimes.
    Her wrists hurt where he gripped her. “Let me go. Please,” she said more calmly, looking down at his hands. “Please. You’re hurting me, David.”
    “I just want you,” he said. His breath was all sour beer. Right then and there, he began blubbering like a baby. He released her wrists. She shoved him backward, and he fell, ass-first, on Griff’s bed. “You don’t know what it’s like. To love someone so much. To love them, to want them, you just don’t know. Honey, honey, I love you. I love you like no man is ever gonna love you.” His tears came in hiccups and heaves. She began to feel bad for him, despite everything. Once she was dressed, she went over to the bed, and sat beside him. She put her arm around his back.
    “Look. You’re a good man,” she said, but felt as if she were telling the biggest lie on the planet. “You’ll find a girl who loves you because you’re wonderful. I’m no good. I really am not right for you. Maybe I’m not right for anyone. But you, you have a lot going for you.”
    “I know,” he said, weeping bitterly. “I know. But I can save you from your sinful life, Tammy. I can make you a good woman.”
    “Poor baby,” Tammy said, hugging him to her. “Poor, poor baby.”
    “I love you,” he said.
    He looked up at her with his tear-stained face. He looked like a puppy dog that had just been hit by a car and lived to whimper about it. He leaned in to kiss her, and she felt badly enough for him that she let him.
    And that’s when he grabbed her and drew her in to him, and thrust his tongue between her lips. She pushed him away, but his grip snaked around her arms and waist like a straitjacket. He maneuvered to the side, and brought her down on the bed, turning her around so that her face pressed into the blanket. “You know I love you,” he said, slobbering. “You know you’re my woman.”
    She tried to cry out, but her mouth was gagged with the blanket.
    She felt him grind against her.
    2
    In what was called the Persian Room, in the basement of the frat house—a small room full of a haze of blue smoke—Ziggy sucked on a bong while clouds of sweet smoke billowed around him. Somebody said, “You look like a fire-breathing dragon, Zigster.”
    Ziggy laughed and felt his face go all red. He wondered whether he’d ever been this high before. He looked at his hands to make sure they weren’t sprouting leaves. For a second, he thought he was turning into a tree.
    “What’s up with that?” he asked his partner-inhigh, Joe Metheny.
    “With what?”
    “My hands? It’s like they’re ripping out of my arms.”
    “Holy shit.”
    Both of them laughed at once. Then stopped. Then laughed again.
    There were others in the haze of smoke, but Ziggy only noticed Joe, who had the most hilarious look on his face—a red smile and a sparkling around his eyes.
    “You know what I like about you?”
    “What’s that?”
    “You’re always happy,” Ziggy said. Then he took another hit from the Monster Bong.
    3
    “Where the hell is Josh?” Bronywn picked her way through the rabble of the party—students passed out on the floor, others leaning into their girlfriend’s face in the corners of rooms, still others managed to keep dancing to music that had stopped ten minutes before. All the while the stench of beer and vomit, up and down the stairs—and just as she got to the top of the stairs, coming out of the bathroom, naked, in full swing, Griff.
    She felt as if she’d been shot with a ray gun and couldn’t move.
    She tried not to look at him. He was a golden Apollo. His hair was slicked back