Tap & Gown by Diana Peterfreund Page B

for my sake. The people in my club didn’t know this about him. I hadn’t known this about him.
    I don’t know if anyone did.
    “Why don’t you have a roommate?” I asked abruptly.
    “Huh?”
    “It would be cheaper.”
    “It would also be less private,” he hinted. “Now, about that syrup—”
    “Do you have any friends at Eli Law?” I pressed.
    His eyes narrowed. “Why do you want to know?”
    So he didn’t. “How about people still in undergrad?”
    “A couple. And a few at the law school, too. Some folks from my section.”
    Study buddies. And undergrads I’d never heard about before. The defensive tone was back as well, threaded through with a shot of frustration. Now I knew what I’d done to him last semester, kicking him out of the tomb, and why it had made his general disdain for me turn into full-on hate.
    “I told you last year, Amy. I made Rose & Grave my life. Nothing else mattered. I don’t keep in touch with many of my barbarian friends.”
    Something in the way he said it gave me pause. “How about your ex-girlfriends?”
    He sighed and retied the strings on his sweatpants. “Is that what this is really about? I have condoms.”
    Wow, was that not at all what this was about. It was about knowing him, having the slightest idea of what made up this guy’s life outside the tomb.
    “Though to be perfectly honest,” he continued, “I haven’t had sex with anyone in a while.”
    “How long a while?”
    He fixed me with a look I could read clear as day. Longer than you .
    Because of course he knew all about me. Unfair.
    I swallowed. “I think you need to understand a few things about … George.”
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    “I promise you I understand everything I care to.” He turned and entered the kitchen. “And my waffle is getting cold.”
    “But this is going to keep coming up.” I followed him.
    “Whose fault is that?” He ladled more waffle mix into the machine and slammed the top down.
    “What did he tell you?”
    He shoved a waffle plate in my hands. “Nothing.”
    I suppose he didn’t need to. Everyone knew George’s reputation. And Jamie was not stupid. I wondered if he thought I was different, having slept with George. If I expected something special … or could do something special.
    “You know,” I said before I could stop myself, “it’s really not George who should bug you. Remember that guy I was upset about right before Spring Break? Brandon?”
    “And I thought I couldn’t hate this conversation more than I did five seconds ago,” he grumbled without looking up from the machine.
    “Not that either of them should bother you,” I clarified.
    “They don’t.”
    “They clearly do.”
    The buzzer went off. Jamie swatted at it, then righted the machine, pulled out the waffle, and dropped it onto another plate. He grabbed my dish from my hands and brought both over to the coffee table, with the syrup and two forks. As I sat down, I noticed he’d put the older, colder waffle in front of himself.
    “What bothers me,” he said, pouring on the syrup, “is my girlfriend coming over, making a pretty good show of seducing me in the hallway, then stopping mid-act to talk about her ex-boyfriends. Call me crazy.” He shoved a bit of waffle in his mouth.
    Reepicheep rustled in her cage. Lord Voldemort, as usual, was asleep in a coil in his tank. Jamie chewed softly. I ate my waffle. He was quite a good cook.
    Pretty good show of seducing him, eh? Go, Amy . But the tension hadn’t eased one bit from Jamie’s end of the couch. Wouldn’t either, what with this George-shaped gorilla between us.
    “The last time I had sex,” I said, “was Halloween.”
    He nodded slowly. “That was my birthday.”
    I choked on my waffle. This was getting worse and worse. “No!”
    “Why do you think they called me ‘Poe’?”
    I had always guessed it was because he was morose and taciturn and creepy. “Um … because Page 37

    ‘Hotstuff’ was taken?”
    He snorted. No points