Bad Enough for You (Currently Editing)

Epilogue - Those Mattresses at College, They Were Not Made For Sex

“It’s okay,” I took a deep breath and folded the map back up. “I have it all taken care of. I have Bradley on speed-dial with the order to overnight me boxes of cupcakes when things get stressful.”

“You’re going to have cupcakes shipped all the way from California.” Eli deadpanned, looking at me from behind his sunglasses. “You’re kidding me, right?”

“No!” I said, looking out the window at the dreary weather. “Pennsylvania sucks. All this rain and no cupcakes. Remind me again why I’m coming here?”

“Because you wanted to make your own decision. The campus is small, there won’t be a lot of people, and they’re a nationally ranked school.” Eli repeated the same words I had all but forced him to remember during our flight here. “And, hey, no bashing on my home state, okay? Just because it happens to rain a lot and the weather is more hormonal than you, leave it alone.”

“I’m just mad because you would think that there would be a cupcake place! I mean, it’s a town!”

“Adrienne, this is what Pennsylvania looks like.” Eli gestured with his left hand to the fields that surrounded us on either side. For the past two hours since we had left the airport, we had been making our way through small town after small town, having to wait for trains (and not passenger ones, either) to make their way through the small towns. It had became apparent from early on that this state I was about to call home for the next several months was nowhere near as busy as this one. There were no skyscrapers unless you went into the cities, which were few and far between, and really no fast life. Roads were windy, through seemingly endless fields where tractors sat abandoned in the middle and the occasional man in bright orange and carrying a gun could be spotted tramping through to the tree line. The towns were small in size and many of them hardly had enough businesses for Main Street.

Eli assured me that this was mostly how it was in southwestern Pa. If you went to the middle of the state, there were more developed towns, and from there on out, the big cities like Harrisburg and Philadelphia. We were two hours outside of Pittsburgh now and almost to the school.

“I don’t like it.” I said.

“You haven’t even been here three hours.” He raised an eyebrow at me, the corners of his lips tugging into a smile.

“It smells like cow manure.” I made a face at him.

“You’re just making that up." He shook his head. “Now stop acting like a baby. You don’t want to fly all the way back to California and tell your dad that he was right, do you?”

“No,” I muttered as I slouched in my seat. As I looked out the window, I felt Eli’s hand cover mine, fingers wrapping around it and squeezing lightly. I rolled my head to look at him and was met with his most encouraging look.

“You’re going to be fine.” He said. “You’re smart and pretty and you know how to handle your alcohol. Not to mention, you have this little spark of fiery determination that’s completely sexy and…”

“Are you sure you’re telling me that I’m going to be fine in school? Or are you just trying to convince me to let you pull over so we can have a quickie?” I asked, one eyebrow raised at him.

“What?” Eli sputtered. “I wouldn’t! I mean, if you want to, I won’t object, but I wasn’t.”

“Oh, c’mon, Eli.” I shook my head at him. “You can’t tell me that you haven’t been thinking about it. I mean, we’re only going to be able to see each other on the weekends, so it’s not like we’re going to keep our normal routine.”

As much as I had wanted Eli to go to the same school to me, it wasn’t exactly realistic. He had already put through his acceptance to another college, which happened to be only less than an hour away. We weren’t planning on breaking up any time soon or to let our different schools tear us apart. Our only plans for now were to travel back and forth on the weekend to see one another. If things went well, Eli was going to transfer to Hollowbrook for the spring semester.