Nathan Marsh's State of Being

Chapter Five

confident

I took a deep breath and put a smile on my face. I waded through the crowd lining up to get out of the classroom as I made my way to a desk in the middle of the room. There were three girls chatting as they took their time putting their things away.

I stepped closer and when the girl in the middle, Kenna, noticed me, she grinned easily.

"Hi," I said, nodding to all three of them. "Kenna, can I talk to you for a second?"

She nodded, raising a brow at her friends, who smirked and walked away. I felt my palms sweat and wondered when that became a thing. Before my last relationship, I'd never had a problem asking a girl out. The only time I'd been nervous was when I'd first kissed Jason, telling him my feelings for him before that went south, then north, and then way down into the underworld where it burned to ashes.

"What's up. Nate, right?" she asked, her pretty blue eyes shining as she tucked her short hair behind her ear.

I'd only met her once before. She was late to class a few days ago and ended up in a seat next to me in the back. We'd joked about the professor's obvious toupee and I borrowed her a pen that she forgot to give back.

"Do you wanna hang out sometime?" I asked, biting the bullet.

Kenna grinned. "For sure. Want my number?"

Surprised it was that easy, I nodded and she giggled at my expression, holding her hand out for my phone.

She put her number in and called herself, her phone lighting up in her left hand. She handed mine back after sending the call to voicemail and grabbed her things. "I'm going to a party tomorrow night with my friends. I'll text you the address if you wanna come?"

I nodded, smiling as she walked away, slipping out of the less-crammed doorway.

I let out a deep breath in relief. That wasn't so hard at all. Kenna was extremely pretty and probably out of my league, but even she accepted my request for a date.

Walking out of the empty room, I grinned to myself, feeling pleased. Not everyone was as shitty of a person as Jason was, and that's what I needed to remember. I deserved better.

**

"You coming to the party?" I asked Noel over my shoulder as the guy behind the counter in the library checked out the book I needed for my Literature class. He had sharp, deep green eyes and I swore I knew them.

Noel shrugged, gaining my attention again. His brown eyes looked bored. I wondered how his presentation was coming along that he'd been working on for the last few days.

It had been a couple weeks since he'd first gone with Harley and me to the library and this was the first he'd tagged along again since. He wasn't as into going as we were and he once said he didn't understand how I could study so much. I'd only shrugged and said I was used to it, which was true.

I'd had a lot of free time growing up, bored alone at my house when my friends were busy having dinner with their parents. It could have been sad, but I ended up secretly sliding to the top of my graduating class so I guess that made up for it.

It was also easier to put my energy into learning rather than facing my issues, whatever they might be at the time. It probably wasn't healthy, but it was habit.