College Ruled

eight

| 08 |
_______________

FOURTEEN NEW emails by Friday afternoon.

Fourteen.

If Theo is one thing — besides the obvious lying, cheating, obsessive dickface — it's relentless.

Painfully so.

"This—" Across Mystic's bartop, Danny slides my phone back to me, the latest email still blown up on the screen. "—is stalker behavior."

"Obviously." I sigh, eyeing him run the palm of his hand over his scruff. There's still nearly three hours to the busy hour of the night, so most of his attention for the past forty-five minutes has been entirely on me and my rapidly filling junk inbox. Which would have been helpful, maybe, if Danny had anything better to offer than a few weak laughs and a not-at-all heartfelt poor bastard. "But what am I supposed to do? Send out a simple 'fuck the fuck off' and hope it does the job?"

"That's a start," Danny snorts. Did I mention he's been so helpful tonight? Jutting my jaw out toward him, I let out a weighted breath that I hope comes off as a very helpless, very exhausted, seriously? He finds it amusing, apparently, because the side of his lips twitch upwards when he leans forward to ruffle the loose hair that has already fallen free from my bun. "My poor little Rem."

"Our poor little Rem what?" Christina butts in, sliding around the bar with a nearly empty tray in her hands. Her eyes, thick lashes perfectly emphasized with heavy liner, bounce between me and my still-lit phone. "Ah, she showed you the emails."

After the eighth new email I finally caved and dumped them all onto her lap. She'd gotten the gist of how, specifically, I knew Theo by the time she reached the third 'It was one time. It meant nothing'.

       I tap my chewed fingernail against my phone. "What. Do. I. Do?"

"Stalk him and then when he least expects it, kick him in the balls?" she says. "If he even has any. 'Cause his emails kinda of make it seem like he doesn't."

Danny chokes out a laugh. "Block him."

Tried that. Dickface has multiple emails, and after blocking four of them I got tired of him not taking the blatant hint. Almost as blatant as the 'fuck off' email I did already send. This morning. An email that was immediately met with more pleas for me to let him explain.

Explain what? I'm not sure exactly. Because I'm not dumb. 'Dude with a girlfriend + girl who is not his girlfriend + sex' is a pretty easy equation to make sense of, even for someone like me who some might say is lacking in mathematics.

Chris purses her lips. "Figure out a way to break his heart back?"

"Poison?" Danny shrugs.

"Murder might be good, actually."

"I know a guy."

She claps her hands together. "Drinks!"

Shaking my head at both of them, I point to Danny. "You better be joking. And you—" I nod toward the alcohol shelf behind Christina. "Get the good stuff."

"Of course." She wiggles her eyebrows and shimmies onto her tiptoes to grab a high end bottle of tequila.

She pours two shots and pushes them both my way.

∿

Four drinks and a couple hours later is when it happens.