Relying On Ben and Jerry (Waltham #1)

Chapter Five: Sticks, Stones, and Other Harmful Objects

“Looks good,” I told her, tucking the slim booklet of silly rules into my purse. “So how do I get to building two?”

“You have a map,” she reminded me patiently.

I held up the bold, blurred mass of ink on the paper, shoved too close together to distinguish. She glanced at it and then back at me incredulously, and I raised my eyebrows challengingly. She made a face at me before she sighed, shrugging as she heaved herself onto her feet. She crossed the small, claustrophobic, pastel-colored office to the glass doors leading into the populated hallway, pulling it open.

Like a stilled fisherman, she reached out a hooked a poor soul from a sea of students and tugged them roughly inside.

“Jeez!” a voice with a prominent southern accent cried out as a boy about my height in size and both of our weights soaking wet combined in voice straightened up, rubbing at his forearm discontentedly. He reached up a worried hand to check the state of his dirty blond mussed hair and then moved that hand to make sure his shirt was still on straight. I glanced apprehensively at the cowboy boots visible over his jeans, but I deemed that I wasn’t one to judge. He looked up at the woman before him, so startled that it was obvious he wasn’t expecting to see her. “Oh, good morning there, Miss Paige. You scared the bejeezus out of me.”

She ignored him, gesturing grandly toward me with a big smile, obviously anxious to get me out of her space. “We have a new student here in our school,” she told him in a charming purr. Sure, bring out the charm when a kind-of cute cowboy wannabe teenager walks into the room. That’s professionalism right there. The cougar glanced at me with what looked like pity. “Would you be a dear and help her find her way to her first class? She’s so turned around, and I’m afraid that she’ll get lost.”

But the boy was too busy staring at me, his eyes, blue like a Georgia sky, wide. “Sweet baby Jesus,” he exclaimed in his loud-mouthed southern twang, “you’re so colorful you’ve gone and hurt my eyes.”

“You’re not that nice to look at, either,” I countered, sassing him, because he wasn’t that horrible. He burst out laughing, and his laugh was just as loud as every other syllable that came out of his foghorn of a mouth. I swear that the building started to shake a little.

“The name’s Colonel,” he told me, offering me his hand to shake. I took it, and his swallowed mine whole. It was warm, probably from wearing gloves, but rationality didn’t stop me from blushing, which overall just made it as awkward as a palm tree.

“Colonel?” I demanded, suddenly realizing what he had said. “Are you for real?”

“It’s actually Michael,” he explained, “but the last person who called me that got a harsh introduction to the back of my hand. Even if I don’t ever hit a lady, I feel the warning works just fine, don’t you?”

I smirked. “Understood.”

“You have a name, crazy colors?” he asked me, smirking as he waved a hand to address my semi-ridiculous outfit. His teeth when he smiled made me realize just how tanned his skin was, too . . .

I snapped out of it, blinking in the glare of the rainbows thrown off of his pearly whites, and blushed again when he noticed the daze I was in. “People call me Lena.”

“So I’ll be callin’ you Tomatoes,” he justified, reaching up and poking my cheek with one finger, “on account of you blushin’ all the time. You look like a Tomatoes, anyway.”

I pursed my lips at him, unsure if that was a carefully disguised insult or a very direct compliment. “Are you going to show me where this class is or are you going to make me late on my first day?”