Freshman Girl and Junior Guy (a short story) INTERIM GODDESS OF LOVE PREQUEL

7. Friday Evening (Last Chapter)

Words, actions, flowers, money. It all seems silly now, but maybe it's because the school week is over, it's Friday, and I'm not feeling crazy anymore.

"Don't stand too close to the edge," Quin says, and I roll my eyes before stepping back. He didn't need to say it. There's enough of a barrier on the roof to keep me from falling four floors down.

"Why do you hang out on the roof?" I say, moving back. "It can't be safe here."

"I like being here. I get to see the entire campus."

He's standing straight, looking out toward the school, and he's right. We can see everything from here. The main buildings, quadrangle, the parking lot, the creek in the distance, the hill on the other side. Everything in his kingdom.

"So...you hang out here with your friends?" I'm fishing. I haven't seen him with friends. I don't know who gets the honor of hanging out here on the roof with him. If I'm one of the many.

"Yeah," he says. "Usually it's just me. But some people know I stay here."

There's a bench right behind him and I walk over there, and sit on it. It's a carpenter's bench. Most of the stuff here are tools, discarded wood and boxes, things that might be useful one day and kept instead of thrown.

"Did anyone ever tell you that you're a little weird, for a college guy?" I say.

Quin smiles. It makes him cuter. My heart is happy, but also hurting a little."Everyone who knows me."

"You like being a little weird? A little different? I don't."

"You don't have to like being different. Does it make you want to change?"

Does it? Why did I choose this school, this place? There are easier places to be. I would have blended in somewhere else. I could be ignoring this guy, and spending my Friday night with people who are more "my league." Whatever that means.

None of that sounds like something I want to do.

"I don't want to change," I tell him. "I wish sometimes that it wasn't so hard for me to be myself around everyone though."

"Being yourself is overrated. You don't know who you are yet."

"You think you know?"

The way he's looking at me now...

Stop it, Hannah. Words are words. Don't overthink it.

He shrugs. "You know what they say about being young, right? We have time to be whoever we want to be. And then we can change our minds again. I won't judge."

Easy for him to say.

"Thank you," I tell him. "For the sunflowers. I really thought no one would do it for me."

"Well, I wasn't going to let my friend be publicly humiliated."

My friend. Right.

Roses mean love, don't they? Sunflowers...they mean something else.

"Thanks for being a good friend, then," I say. "I don't have a lot of them here."

"Yet," Quin replies. "There's time."

That's nice of him, Quin, my friend, to say. I wonder if we'll always be friends.

I hope we get a chance to change our minds.

There's time.

Hannah's story continues in Interim Goddess of Love, Queen of the Clueless, and Icon of the Indecisive.