Tale Teller (West Hampton U Series #1)

Chapter 5 ● Bait

-- Muskaan --

"Hey," Sameer says hesitantly, pulling out his chair to sit down. I smile over as normally as I can before turning back to my task at hand of organizing my notes. He goes through the motions of pulling out his laptop and getting his desk in order before the professor starts the class.

The last week has been awkward to say the least.

After our conversation at the library, we hadn't seen each other until now, in class, when we're forced to sit side by side and listen to our professor explain the intricacies of symbolic interactionism. I was distracted. Any time he shifted his leg or tapped his finger on a keyboard, I felt the muscles in my back stiffen as if he was going to turn around and tell me how much of a bitch I was being for forcing him to do things he didn't want to do. And he'd be right. I had no place to accuse him of siding with Jack without knowing all the facts and all that about him. I may not agree with his actions but that didn't make him a bad person.

After class, he waves goodbye and exits. I shuffle back to my apartment, done for the day and ready to continue my intense investigations of the school newspaper while I nurse my cramps.

Suhana comes home right after 4, waving two pieces of card stock in her hands. "What do I have? Oh nothing, just tickets to the Diwali celebration on campus!" She lets the tickets flutter into my lap as she falls onto the couch beside me. "Don't tell me you're back to being a complete creep, looking through strangers' Instagrams."

"This is impossible to figure out," I grumble, shoving my head deeper into the crevice between the cushions. "I've looked at everyone who works at the newspaper and I don't think any of them could be the writer. Half of them wouldn't have been at that party because their Instagrams show that they didn't get to campus until days later. The others were at other parties that night."

I'd been trying to figure out who this writer could be for days now. Any waking moment I had free, I scoured social media, the internet, old articles but I was no closer to figuring out the writer's identity than when I started. There was a whole Reddit feed on the campus subreddit discussing who the writer could be but all the guesses were unfeasible to me. I wouldn't be able to figure this out by myself anytime soon, it was just too elaborate of an effort by the school paper to uncover on my own.

"You are eerily good at stalking." She looks slightly freaked out. "Aren't you usually in the library studying with Sameer at this time?"

I scowl into the pillow, not wanting to tell her what happened. "We got into a bit of an argument. Since there's no class next week, we weren't going to meet today anyways and probably for the best because I feel bad for being mean." I go on to tell her what happened, and she listens carefully, a thoughtful expression on her face.

"You both will be fine. I think you're making this a bigger deal than it needs to be," she pats my back soothingly and I automatically relax under my best friend's nimble hands.

I turn over, studying her face. That was an unusually mature response from Psycho Suhana, as she was called in high school. "You know something," I muse.

She does that thing she always does when she's lying where she begins to comb through the bangs covering her forehead with her fingers, one hair at a time. "No, I don't."

"Tell me," I sit up straight, pulling her hands down into my lap.

"It's nothing Moose. I think you might have just misunderstood him that's all. But it's not my place to tell you about his personal life. You should just go ask him."

I glare at her, going back to hiding in my cushions. "I think you make up elaborate scenarios about us in your head because you won't find someone for yourself."