Chapter 51
Dana’s nails scraped a few coins in the bottom of her bag and she stopped, door held wide, to dig out the money. Hopefully it’d be enough. She didn’t really carry cash—if it wasn’t on the meal plan, she usually didn’t eat it. Peering into the depths of her bag, she counted out a couple of quarters, a dime, a nickle…a few pennies, worthless, but the silver coins, that should do it. Thank God. Mr. Goodbar, here I come.
One of the outside doors opened, sending in a swoosh of damp, chilly air. Dana glanced up, disinterested, then did a double-take to look at the young woman entering the library. She was Dana’s age, a freshman or sophomore at best, and easily the prettiest girl Dana had ever seen.
And Dana knew pretty; she’d been looking at other girls for as long as she could remember, covertly back home in the small town where she’d grown up and now, here at college, more openly in the two years since she’d been on her own. She wasn’t yet comfortable enough to say for certain if she was or wasn’t interested in other women in that way—she hadn’t kissed a girl, hadn’t even touchedone yet, except accidentally in passing—but she knew enough to know she was curious and liked to look.
Suddenly, she couldn’t seem to look away. Dana knew she was staring, but couldn’t help it. Girls like this didn’t exist in real life, did they? At least, not outside of magazine pages or movie screens. Not outside of her dreams.
Careless curls of chestnut hair framed her heart-shaped face, a few strands pulled back from the brow barely held in place with a wooden barrette on top of her head. Her eyes were almond-shaped, almost cat-like, inked with dark eyeliner to accentuate their shape. The irises were a pale, clear green like sea glass; when Dana looked into those eyes, she felt as if she were looking throughthem, instead. And that mouth, the lips too wide for that face, was tied into a little bow of distaste that only tightened as the girl shook the rain from her curls.
After a moment, Dana managed to find her voice. “Hey.”
The girl glanced up at her, almost surprised to find she wasn’t alone. “Hi. Oh! Thanks.” She must’ve thought Dana was holding the door for her, because she breezed on through into the library, trailing behind a sweet, citrusy scent that seemed out of place on such a gloomy day.
Dana found herself turning to follow the fragrance, inhaling it deep, drawing it into her lungs as if she could somehow save it for later. Racking her brains for something to say, something to keep the girl talking to her, she hurriedly called out, “I like your perfume!”
The girl grinned as she flipped her curls over one shoulder to look back at Dana. “Thanks!”
Then she was gone.
* * * *
Dana looked for her all throughout the rest of the day—in the Student Union, in the cafeteria, in the twin dormitory buildings that rose five stories and housed most of the sophomores living on campus. Dana knew it was a long shot, but she took to hanging out in the study lounges on the first floor, hoping against hope she might catch a glimpse of the girl and maybe somehow strike up a conversation. If she ever saw the pretty stranger again, she’d be sure to come up with something much more scintillating to say than, “I like your perfume.”
Maybe the next time she’d add something daring and sexy, along the lines of, “I still smell you when I close my eyes.” Though that needed a bit of work, Dana admitted. When she first thought it up, it sounded promising, but the more she ran her mind over it—and once, when she actually said the words out loud in front of a mirror—she had to admit they sounded a bit stalkerish. Or, worse, like a bad pick-up line. Maybe she should just stick with, “Hey.”
Trouble was, she didn’t see the girl again, not even in passing. The campus wasn’t that big, and she dawdled in the cafeteria during meal times, so surely sooner or later she’d run into the girl. Wasn’t there a law of physics or something about things like that? Dana wouldn’t know; she was an English major and knew jackshit about science or physics or anything that wasn’t Shakespeare or Milton or 19th Century American classics.
Still, hello? She ran into the girl once. Chances were they should run into each other again.