8

I bombed the stupid quiz. I felt like none of the material had ever been covered in the history of forever. How was that possible? Well, it probably had something to do with the fact that I couldn't concentrate to save my life and no studying ever got done. Every time I flipped a page in my textbook, light would glint on my ring. Now that I'd broken the seal and actually looked at that damn thing, I couldn't seem to stop staring at it.

I left my class, and the miserable quiz behind, in search of sustenance since I'd skipped breakfast after oversleeping. Yes, that meant I stayed up most of the night – not studying – while trying to figure out what every little nuance of shit going on in my life meant. Tucker was confusing at best. Wes seemed to be hiding from me, though to be honest, he was Tucker's best friend and probably only spoke to me out of regard to that relationship. Then there was that post-nup business Mr. Brighton had sprung on me during dinner. It was completely ridiculous. I was so lost in my thoughts about all those things that I didn't even hear someone shouting my name until he was right up next to me.

"Mina!" An exasperated tone finally caught my attention and I startled before spinning to see Carlos standing there. "I get that you've been ignoring my messages, but you'll seriously pretend you didn't hear me calling out to you in public too?"

I glanced around to see that there weren't that many people about to witness this. I tipped my head toward the little café across the street that I'd been headed to. "I was focused on getting to Louis' and lost in thought. Can we put this on hold until I get some food in me?"

"Oh, you're just hangry then," he joked while backing it up with a knowing smirk. Sure, he knew that about me, but so did everyone I had ever spent more than 24-hours around. I rolled my eyes and continued with my quest for food. It just so happened that now, someone was trailing along beside me. I thought briefly about how it might look if someone saw me out with Carlos, but then realized I didn't care. I was allowed to have friends, even if I didn't necessarily want them.

"I wanted to apologize," Carlos was saying as we entered the café. I held up my hand to stop him.

"Food first." Thankfully, there was a table available so that I could sit down and take a load off while waiting for my order. Had I attempted to come in before class, that would not have been the case. Louis' was popular with the students on campus for a reason. They had the best, greasiest, breakfast sandwiches and biscuits in the south. They were an instant hangover cure for many, and just a tasty treat for the rest of us. Louis' was one of the few reasons I thanked my lucky stars for my petite frame. It was also how I knew the only curves I'd ever attain would be through surgical means, because if Louis' food couldn't add the pounds to my body, preferably in all the right places, then nothing else would.

Once my sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit was delivered along with a smattering of home fries covered in cheese, and a vanilla coke the world was right again. I dug in and ignored the wanting looks Carlos gave me as I moaned my pleasure. It was not meant to entice him but as a show of appreciation for the food I'd been desperately craving.

"What?" I finally asked as I wiped my mouth with a napkin to sop up some of the extra grease that coated my lips.

"I wanted to apologize, about the Charlotte thing."

"You already did that."

"Yes, but then you started ignoring me, so obviously I didn't do a good enough job."

"I'm not ignoring you, I blocked you."

He sat back, taking me in with sad eyes. "Why? Why would you block me? We weren't dating or exclusive."

"It wasn't about Charlotte; it was about everything else you said." I shrugged my shoulders. "Besides, I think our little adventure ran it's course a while back, otherwise there would have been no Charlotte."

"But," he started to say something and reached for my hand. That's when he must have felt it. The ring. Carlos pulled away, as if he'd been shocked, and glanced down. "What is that?" He asked as his eyes rounded in surprise.

"Oh, that's my wedding ring," I offered up nonchalantly.

"Wedding ring?" He laughed then. "Okay, I know you're mad at me, but you don't need to pretend to be married now. Damn babe, I thought we were in a better place than that."

"Carlos, we had an agreement before. That's all it was. Actually, I thought we were simply mutual fuck buddies who didn't want strings attached and major distractions. As it turned out, you were just using me for free tutoring, and I guess you also thought the sex was payment for my troubles."

"What the fuck?" I turned to see Wes standing there with a blonde sorority girl hanging off his side. No, I wasn't being judgmental. She was actually a sorority girl according to the pink, barely-there Alpha Kappa Theta t-shirt she was wearing. Did I mention I had a severe loathing of sorority girls? Don't give me crap about it either. I had my reasons, and they were legitimate ones.

"Wes?" I asked, as if the question might change the fact that he was standing in Louis' and had overheard the worst possible part of my conversation with Carlos.

Wes didn't bother to disappear the way I wished he would. Instead, he slid into the booth next to me so forcefully that he managed to bump me out of the way to make room. I glared at him as he side-eyed Carlos. "You want to explain yourself, Mrs. Tucker?"

"Mrs. Tucker?" Carlos asked, his eyes sliding from me to Wes and back again.

I shrugged my shoulders and addressed Carlos then, not Wes. "I told you I got married."

"I thought it was a joke because you're mad at me."

"Why were you mad at him?" Wes asked before the blonde became impatient.

"Wes, what are you doing?" Her question came as she popped her hip out and shot daggers at me with her eyes.

"Yes, Wes, what are you doing besides interrupting my breakfast?"

"Well, I heard you talking about some man fucking you as payment for something and didn't think that could possibly have been right since you know – you're married to my best friend."

I laughed. Literally, I doubled over with laughter, and there was no telling if it was just the start of a nervous breakdown or if I truly thought the whole scenario was hilarious. Everyone just stared at me until I got myself under control and dabbed away the tears that had fallen. I wouldn't quite call them happy tears, definitely not sad ones either. Are crazy tears a thing? If so, I'm pretty sure that's what they were.

"Wes," I introduced as I flipped my hand from him to Carlos who was sitting quietly on the other side of the table still. "Carlos."

"Okay, that explains nothing," Wes addressed the obvious as we all just sat there.

I sighed. "Okay," I turned to look at Wes then. "Since you're obviously not going to just let this go, I'll explain. Carlos has been my fuck buddy for a while. A little over a week ago, I accidentally overheard another woman on the phone, and he had to explain that he'd been seeing someone, for months. That was actually against our little fuck buddy code. We weren't exclusive, but we also were supposed to be upfront about anyone else being in the picture, because I certainly never wanted to come across as 'the other woman' in someone else's relationship," I glared Carlos's way as I mentioned the last part.

"So, then he told me he knew it was wrong, but he thought if he came clean, I would have stopped helping him with his classes. In conclusion, essentially, he was still fucking me so that I would continue tutoring him and helping with his papers. I don't know who that makes more pathetic in this situation, the guy who was knowingly using sex to pay for tutoring or the girl who didn't realize that's what was happening." When everyone just sat, staring at me in stunned reaction to my blunt honesty I carried on.

"After Carlos stupidly admitted that's what was happening, I blocked his calls, and ended up marrying your best friend in Vegas on a whim." Obviously, I could not pick apart the particulars of that whimsical Vegas wedding, or the fact that it had been a business transaction in the works, but Wes would understand what it meant.

"Carlos ran into me on campus a few minutes ago and demanded to know why I was ignoring him," I continued my recap. "I told him I couldn't talk about it until I'd eaten breakfast, since I was in a shit mood after just bombing a quiz that I wasn't able to study for, thanks to all of life's recent changes and stressors." I flipped both hands in the air, as if to encompass the whole café and maybe all my troubles too. "And here we are, where you overheard the worst part of a ridiculous conversation and assumed too much. Now that everyone is all caught up, I'd very much like it if you would get the fuck up so I can leave. I'm pretty sure your girl of the night would also like it if you paid more attention to her than me."

The sorority girl did not like being called out that way, and I felt a little bad about calling her a 'girl of the night', but she had to know that's all it was with Wes. She stomped off and Wes didn't appear to notice or care. "You know this wouldn't look good if someone saw," he mentioned while making a quick motion to indicate the fact that I was sitting across from another man."

I glared at him. "Carlos is sitting across the table from me in a public place. It's not like he is, oh, I don't know, sitting in the back seat of a car driven by my best friend, groping me like an octopus, or jumping me on a sidewalk in front of my apartment building." I huffed. "This," I pointed out the window, "is my world. I'm a college student. I know people. Some of those people are going to be male and I'm not going to apologize for speaking to them, especially when there was unfinished business that needed to be tidied up."

"You didn't need to tidy anything up with that dick. He was using you," Wes insisted, as he started showing a little temper.

"And he's not the only one who was doing so, now, was he?" I laughed when he realized the error of his argument. "Pot, meet Kettle," I told him before sliding down under the booth and crawling across the floor until I was free of the table. When I stood, I pointed to the mostly eaten breakfast sandwich still sitting there. "You can pay for that since you ruined my appetite."

"Did you just crawl under the table to get away?" he asked while staring stupidly at me.

"Yeah, so?" I turned and walked out of the café, pissed off at the world all over again. Stupid men! Stupid life! Stupid tears! I was not going to cry again. I was sick of crying. Damn it. I swiped at the wetness on my face and then stared at the sunshiny, blue skies above me. Where was the rain when you needed something to blame for the tears that you didn't want anyone to see falling?