Blackout ✓

02 | hey, floormate

I FORGOT JAMIE EACH TIME the light of the morning-after dawned.

Our couple of interactions weren't anything special to me. I had drunken conversations with strangers all the time, at least once every week. It was my preferred choice for meeting people. Making friends in class pretty much always led to the relationship centering on studying—boring. And I hated talking in yoga class, which interrupted my zen, so that made finding yoga buddies difficult.

Plus, I didn't date. It was a personal rule of mine while I was in college, because it would be a distraction to my studies. Between the stress of Pre-Med, the routine of WISA meetings, the meditative trance of yoga and the anxieties of being twenty and uncertain, I needed something else to let the steam off. I was only going to be young once, and I couldn't spend all of that time taking everything seriously. Hence, my continuing tryst with alcohol and faceless one-night-stands.

After the Halloween party, Thanksgiving, the winter holidays and the new year came and went before that boy even popped into my head again. Even that was sooner than I expected; never would have been my best bet.

The student roll at Halston University grew in the last five years. Not noticeably enough for my classes to appear any larger, but significantly enough to warrant the construction of a bunch of new accommodation buildings. There was one that had been completed over the winter holidays, ready for a new intake of residents for the second semester of the year.

In freshman, sophomore and the half of junior year that just went by, my two closest friends had been bounced around to the exact halls of residence where I was not. None of us could seem to make our applications sync up, and we'd not been sorted into the same dormitories once in all the years we'd been friends.

Except now, finally. It was the early days of January, and I couldn't wait for the sleepovers, midnight conversations and movie nights Krista, Riley and I'd been promising each other. I had moved my things from my old residence to my new one by walking a shopping trolley across campus. Thrice. I couldn't fit all of my clothing and decorations into the cart at once, but I didn't mind all the toing and froing. It was good exercise—if arduous all by myself.

Dad had wanted to drive to Halston from Boston to help me, but I politely declined. 

I'd fibbed that it was going to be a simple, quick trip. Really, he would want to help me unpack, decorate and get settled—just like the attentive father he was. But I'd changed a lot since high school, heck even since last year. I didn't want to have to explain to daddy-dearest how all my flimsy crop tops and miniskirts were, in fact, supposed to cover my bits. 

Or from where those full bottles of vodka and soju had appeared.

It was the fault of my own stubbornness, but I was parched by the time I checked-in and fully unpacked on the eighth floor. To quench my thirst, I took the elevator down to the ground floor, which had a vending machine. Just as I collected an ice-cold coffee from its tray, I heard the automatic door slide open.

A block of muscle, a head of tousled brown hair and familiar green eyes greeted me. Jamie. Somehow I knew it was him, though he and Jake shared the same features. Maybe it was the wry manner he regarded me—in my knit sweater and satin skirt—that was starkly different from Jake's easy-going lenity. In fact, starkly different from the way anyone had looked at me before.

"Oh, dang," I smiled lazily. I cast a cursory glance to the suitcase he pulled behind him.

"Here comes trouble. You living here?"

Jamie nodded. "Vivian. We meet again. How was the first semester for you?"

"Good," I answered casually. "And yours?"