Harper's Rules 1 & 2

Chapter 16: Harper

Fourteen fucking eyes.

Jake Harrison's face, or faces since there were seven posters in total, stared at me no matter which angle from within my own dorm room. Their weighted gazes, even from replicas of the tool, unnerved me in the memories they evoked as I closed the dorm room behind me.

Only thing worse is if he was here in person.

Certainly smells better than if he was here.

I mentally thanked Li's army of pink candles lined up along the window ledge, along with the faint remnants of her dinner that wafted up from the trash can near her desk for the pleasant smell in our room. The longer I looked, the more I noticed how meticulously clean and organized her side of our shared space was, down to the last pens lined up in unison next to her ipad and the crisp folds on her bedsheets.

One of my palms grabbed the corner rail on my bed, lofted over a dresser, and gave it a strong shake test. The slight tremble of the entire structure creased a line of concern between my eyebrows.

Are these even sturdy enough to fuck on?

Nope, doesn't matter. Even so, let's stick to shower fun time on the ground, Harper.

Li herself wasn't here but the rush of water through pipes near the dorm room's entrance told me she was in the very same shower that I hoped, for her sake, she used shoes in because there was no way I traumatized us both by masturbating in bed.

Now though, I used the alone time and unpacked as quickly as I could. A sigh left me at the ridiculously large pile of clothes I'd tossed up onto my bed until I organized it into the small closet. For now, I made my bed, organized my gigantic makeup stash on my ridiculously small surface space around the stack of my newly purchased books on my desk, and crushed all the empty boxes flat.

I paused, slightly out of breath and sweaty, with a giant stack of cardboard between my arms when I locked eyes on Jake's posters by the entrance to our room.

Fuck, this is going to take some getting used to.

With a grunt, I dragged my cardboard down the hallway to our floor's recycling dropoff area. The only wall adornments I owned was the UCLA map Dad insisted I needed from the bookstore, so I tacked that on the wall next to my ridiculously hard wooden desk chair.

Seriously, the bed is made from matchsticks but the chair is petrified wood.

While I stood up and rubbed my ass, I look up and saw one of Li's poster Jakes smirked at me. If she'd gotten posters of Jake in his full USC uniform, like game action shots, then I could've imagined another face was behind number seven's helmet.

But nope, Li had seven versions of a helmetless Jake, whose dark brown eyes stared directly at me from within the confines of our tiny dorm room. I felt their weighted gaze on me while I wiped off my makeup, unpacked the rest of my non-clothing belongings, even when I grabbed my pajamas and changed for bed.

Fuck, this is creepy. At least she doesn't have one taped to the ceiling above her bed.

Jake and I had plenty of opportunities during our semester breaks to rekindle the tiny sparks I hated inside whenever I saw him again. While the temptation was definitely present, I never indulged and accepted the silent tension and focused my efforts elsewhere.

I knew Jake felt the same 'what if?' temptation because his eyes always gave him away. Whenever he saw a girl he was interested in, they turned feral. His dilated pupils always made his dark chocolate eyes look almost black. I'd needed several deep breaths while I pretended I hadn't seen those looks in my direction a few times but was experienced enough that I separated blind lust from actual interest.