Matriculation: (The Oxford Trilogy #1) by Riley Meyer

Author:Riley Meyer [Meyer, Riley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-05-14T18:00:00+00:00

9

The thought of Maura getting the Tower Bridge treatment made me feel doubly forlorn and just a bit horny—not that I wanted to be involved exactly, but I wouldn’t have said no to watching Tom and Jason going at it. I’m sure Maura wouldn’t mind; in fact, she probably had a lot to teach me. Her experience seemed to well outstrip her years.

But I was going home alone.

As I waited for the lift that would take me up to my floor, I played the day back in my head and found it to be—or at least to feel—very long indeed. I couldn’t believe that only that morning I’d dodged out of Mark’s room, still half-asleep and half-drunk.

Seeing James at orientation, and then drinking in the Fellow’s Garden with Jack... It all felt like it had happened over weeks instead of over one over-packed day.

And tomorrow: only hours away, I had my first classes. What the hell was that going to be like?

The lift arrived and I got in, pressed my button and leant back against the mirrored glass. I saw my nervous expression reflected back to me.

I’d never been to a class at university before. Going to uni wasn’t the ‘done thing’ in my part of rural New Zealand. Oh, sure, a few kids at school had been that way inclined, but not the ones I talked to or hung out with. The whole myth of student life, the rituals of university, were familiar to me only out of books, TV shows, movies. My parents had never gone to university and neither had their parents. All of which meant that the very fact of me being here felt like a cosmic fluke, if not actually just a genuine mistake. I’d read about radiation from space suddenly flipping atoms on earth. Maybe a big dose of radiation had flipped some electron in a computer and turned my Oxford rejection into an acceptance?

The lift rang its arrival on my floor and I stepped out.

My eyes were on my feet, preoccupied by thoughts of the week ahead and the reality of my being here. I walked on auto-pilot to my room and only looked up when I saw, at the periphery of my eyeline, a pair of familiar-looking shoes, standing right outside my door.

I looked up.

Mark was standing there, leaning with his back against my door and his hands in his pockets.

“Hey,” he said, but his eyes were saying something more complicated.

I held up my keys.

“I need to get into my room.”

He nodded slowly and moved out of the way, hands still deep in his pockets, as though he didn’t know what to do with them.

“Rafe,” he said.

I left the key in the lock and turned around to face him.

“Mark?”

“Please don’t be angry.”

I sighed, meeting his dark eyes and finding them, as always, pulling me in.

“I’m not angry. Or not really. But I don’t have the energy to deal with—” I gestured around us, “with whatever this is.”

“I’m sorry I left.”

“Yeah, you were out of there pretty bloody quickly.

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