"Do you really need this?" I ask Scott with raised eyebrows as I look down at the box that I'm holding.

"Yes," He nods. "I really need that."

"It's junk," I say to him, putting the box down on his new desk.

"It is not junk," Scott insists, giving me a look that only makes me laugh.

"What are you going to do with a rubber frog?" I ask him, pulling said rubber frog out of the box that I had just carried up to Scott's new dorm room. He'd asked me to help him move in since his parents and Nick were all busy and since Jasper is busy with Conner today, I don't have anything else to do so I agreed to help him.

The dorm room is small but it isn't as small as I thought that it would be. There's two elevated beds, one on each side of the room, and then there's two desks beside the bunks. Underneath the bunks, there's a dresser and two tall wardrobes pushed against the back wall with a window in between them. Everything is so bare now since Scott's roommate, whose name is Aiden, hasn't shown up yet and Scott chose his bed first, the one on the right.

"To fling it at people when they annoy me," Scott justifies, taking the rubber frog out of my grip and then he grabs the front feet in one hand and the back feet in his other before backing up and firing it in my direction. It hits my shoulder before landing on the ground at my feet. "See? It's very effective."

I roll my eyes at him and sit the frog on the desk. "Do you have your schedule yet?" I ask him.

"Yeah, I got it at orientation at the beginning of the summer," He says. "I think all of my classes are over by three but on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I have a lecture at six."

"So we can hang out after school sometimes," I offer. "Since this campus is only a ten minute drive away as opposed to the half an hour drive that it is to your house."

"Yeah, when does your shift end with Sebastian?" He asks as he starts unpacking his clothes into the dresser beneath his bunk.

"At four on Monday Wednesday Friday," I reply, finding his bedding stuff in one of the totes that Scott had put in front of the wardrobe. "Should I make your bed?"

"Are you suggesting that I can't make my own bed?"

"Can you?" I ask him with raised eyebrows and my head teasingly cocked to the side.

"No, but I'm still offended," He jokes as I roll my eyes at him and then grab the mattress topper and the dark blue sheets that he brought before I climb up onto the small twin mattress.

"I'm sure that your ego can take it," I tell him from on top of his bunk. "You're buying lunch, right? I'm starving."

"Why do I have to buy?" Scott wonders but I know that he's only kidding.

"Let me rephrase that," I sigh, rolling out the memory foam mattress topper. "I'm starving because of all of the grueling work that I've done today to help you get comfortable in your new dorm room. I'm sweaty and sore and just so hungry."

"Alright, you make a good point," He relents. "What do you want?"

"What's around here?"

"So far, I know that there's a few pizza places and a place called Oasis, which has a bunch of food and they deliver."

"Do they have mozzarella sticks?"

"I'm sure that they do."

"That place then," I decide as I begin to wrestle with the sheets to get on the bed, which is a lot more difficult on a bunk bed where you can't actually get off of the bed when trying to get it to stay. "I could go for some mozzarella sticks."

"I'll order it then," Scott chuckles just as there's a loud knock on the door and then somebody's walking into the room. I assume, since he unlocks the locked door, that he's Scott's roommate. He's tall but not as tall as Scott, and he has long-ish black hair with a pointed nose and round gray eyes.

"You must be Scott," He says to Scott as they shake hands. "I'm Aiden."

"Hey, man. This is my friend, Jo," Scott says, pointing up to the bunk where I'm still working with the sheet but when he says my name, I politely extend my hand over the edge of the bunk and the roommate shakes it. I blow some stray blonde hair out of my face.

"Hello," I greet him before going back to the task at hand which now feels like a wrestling match so I focus my attention on that more than I do on listening to Scott and his new roommate get acquainted.

"Joey, do you want some help?" Scott eventually asks me, trying to bite back a laugh.

"No," I sigh. "It's fine, I've got it."

"Are you sure?"

"Scotty. It's a sheet, alright? I've got it," I insist just as my phone bings with a text in my back pocket so as they start considering ways of moving the furniture around in the room, I pull my phone out to take a break from the monstrous sheet and see that it's Noah who texted me, wanting to know if I wanted to go with him to a movie tonight with Conner and Jasper since he'd agreed to go and he didn't want to be a third wheel.

"Jasper's missing you already?" Scott wonders teasingly when he sees me on my phone.

"It's Noah," I inform him with a pointed look before I text him back in the affirmative.

"That's her boyfriend," He tells Aiden as he finishes emptying his clothes into the dresser. "Anyway, I think that I'm going to put my desk under the bunk."

I put my phone back in my pocket and started wrestling with the sheet again. "He's not my boyfriend," I teasingly glare at Scott. "I know that you know that I broke things off. And we never even dated."

"That all sounds so much more complicated than just saying boyfriend," Scott shrugs and I notice Aiden trying to hide a laugh but he doesn't do a very good job at it.

"It's okay, it's none of my business," Aiden adds. "Anyway, I have a few more trips to make and my dad is bringing up the futon soon, so we can put that there?"

"SCOTT," I say his name abruptly and rather loud, stopping both Aiden and Scott in their thought processes as they look up at me.

"Jo..."

"Give me the box that this sheet came in," I demand, holding my hand over the edge of the bunk so that he can give me the box.

"Blaming the box won't get you anywhere, you know."

"No," I sigh, pointing at the label on the box that size "twin" on it. "But blaming you will. You bought twin sheets."

"Jo. The bed is a twin sized bed."

"Oh my, God," I groan, plopping onto the bed in defeat. "The bed is a twin XL. That's why they're not fitting."

"There's a difference?" He wonders as Aiden leaves the room.

I throw the box at Scott's head in response.

"I seriously didn't know," He tells me with a small laugh. "I'm sorry."

I climb off of the bed and then tie my hair up in a ponytail to keep it out of my face. "You're unbelievable," I tell him but I can't help but laugh a little bit myself. "Absolutely awful."

"I didn't know," He repeats but he's still grinning.

"I'm going to take your car and go get the right sized sheets from the Walmart down the street and I'll pick up the food on the way back," I tell him.

"I can go get them," Scott says.

"You can stay here and bond with your cute roommate," I say, picking up his keys from the empty desk. "You want hot pink sheets right? Or something like zebra print."

"Surprise me," He mutters sarcastically as I put my shoes on to leave the room but before I step out the door, Scott claps his hand around my wrist and pulls me to turn around to face him again. "Seriously though, thanks a lot for all of your help today. I honestly wouldn't have been able to do it without you."

"Of course," I say with a small smile. "It's not like I had anything better to do."

"Macy never would have done it," Scott mumbles quiet enough to where I'm not so sure that I heard him at all but when I see a pinch of sadness flash across his face, I know that I heard him right.

I put a hand on his shoulder and offer him the brightest smile that I can. "Hey, forget about her. Do you know how many hot girls there are in college? A lot. Alright? We passed at least three just coming up here. Go find one of them. Make nice."

"You make it sound so easy," He says with a laugh.

"It is that easy," I assure him. "Especially for somebody like you."

"Like me?" His eyebrow quirks up.

I open my mouth to say something like 'yeah, like you. Attractive beyond belief, incredibly nice, funny, smart, adorable' but Aiden and his dad come back into the room and I don't say any of those things.

Scott introduces himself to Aiden's dad after he sits down the metal futon frame under Aiden's bunk and then when I notice the man curiously glancing over at me, I feel my queue to leave.

"I was just leaving," I announce, inching my way to the door. "I have to go see if Walmart carries Twin XL Justin Bieber sheets."

And then I disappear out the door with Scott's keys to go pick up some sheets and the food that Scott ordered from that Oasis place with directions on my phone telling me how to navigate campus, which is intensely busy today considering it's move in day for all of the first year students.

When I get back to the dorm with Twin XL sheets that are about the same color as his plain twin sheets, that dark blue, Scott is alone in the room again and he tells me that Aiden and his dad went to lunch before his dad drives back home, which is two hours away from here.

"Thanks again, Joey," Scott says as I finish putting the sheet on the bed, much easier this time now that they're the right size.

"You're welcome," I assure him. "Again. Do you wanna go hunt for cute college students?"

"No," He shakes his head and laughs. "Not today, everybody's just tired and sweaty and probably with their parents."

"Right," I sigh. "Point taken. You'll have to take me to these campus bars sometime though."

"Sure, just give it a few weeks for everything to get settled and then we can go out," He assures me as he throws our food containers into the trash and then he starts unpacking the rest of his stuff. "Once I'm done unpacking this box, I can take you back home. I have a floor meeting in an hour."

"Alright," I walk over to him and start helping him empty the contents of the box onto the desk including books, movies, and text books. "You know, on my way over here, I saw a girl going into 810, just down the hallway. She was really cute. Black hair, kind of tall, really cute shoes."

He shrugs, "I'm not into black hair."

"Macy had black hair," I refute.

"Macy had brown hair," Scott informs me. "Black hair just seems so sketchy to me, you know?"

"No. I don't know. You really shouldn't be so picky about hair color though," I say with a quiet laugh as I shake my head. "But okay then, brunette. I'm sure there's plenty of those around too."

He shrugs again, pushing some books onto the shelf of his desk. "I'm actually more into blondes, really."

My breath catches in my throat and then, as if to remind me of my own hair color, a few blonde strands fall in front of my face and I quickly push them back behind my ear as I try to capture something in my brain to say to that. He didn't mean me. God, get your head out of your ass, Jo, he isn't talking about you. I'm not the only blonde in the world. "Maybe her roommate then," I breathe, finally gaining mobility in my hands again so I grab his calculus text book and sit it in the stack of his other text books while hoping that he can't notice the blush that's heating up my face.

"Yeah," Scott says, his lips curved into a lazy half-smile as he glances in my direction. "Maybe."

"Well, uh," I stammer, trying my damn best to calm down the speedy rate of my heart. "The box is empty now and you have that floor meeting to get to so we should probably get going."

"Right," He agrees, grabbing his keys off of the cluttered desk. "Let's go then."

I take a deep breath just to remind my lungs how to breathe and then I grab my bag from the dresser and leave the room with Scott following right behind me. We don't speak all the way down the hallway and to the elevators, which are incredibly packed right now considering it's move-in day so everybody is trying to get their stuff into their rooms. Being on the eighth floor, it's kind of hard to carry a mini fridge up the stairs.

I don't know why I had reacted that strongly when Scott told me that he has a thing for blondes- it's kind of normal for guys to have hair color preferences, girls do it too. Although I've never had a specific hair color type, I know that Jasper likes dark hair on guys so it's not strange. And I know that being blonde isn't very rare at all so I'm no special snowflake in the hair color department and yet, when he told me that, I got all clammed up as if somebody had just professed their love for me.

"So thanks again for helping me out today," Scott says when we get into the elevator to ride down to the first floor. "I really do appreciate it."

"Anything I can do to help," I tell him, forcing a smile onto my lips. "I know how hard the move was for Jasper and I. I can't imagine the torture of moving in on the same day as hundreds of other people too."

"Yeah, it's pretty miserable," He agrees with a nod.

I'm pretty calm now- totally forgetting about the earlier incident and I think that my blush is receding too, so that's a major relief. Before I respond to Scott, I start thinking about Jasper's warnings. How I'm playing with fire by hanging out with Scott, who just got out of a long-term relationship when it is very likely that I myself could form a crush on him. I always knew that it was a possibility for me to do that, I just didn't think that it'd happen over something as ridiculous as Scott telling me that he likes my hair color.

"What are you thinking about?" Scott asks me once we're out of the dorm building and moving toward his car that's in the parking lot across the street. We pass a lot of students saying goodbye to crying parents and trying to maneuver a TV out of the backs of cars.

"Nothing," I say quickly.

"You look like you're thinking about something," He accuses me.

I just shrug. "I'm just thinking about all of the awesome college parties that you will be able to get us in to."

"Really," He wonders with a small laugh. "You seemed very focused."

"Frat parties are very important to me," I lie but I mean, I'm sure it's a pretty believable lie considering that I really do enjoy a good party and Scott knows that.

"I'm not in a frat," He reminds me.

"No, but you can still go to the parties," I tell him with a roll of my eyes once we approach his car and I get in the passenger side while he gets in the driver side and starts up the car.

"I think that you're lying," He catches my lie a lot easier than I thought that he would, which both surprises me and deflates me at the same time. "Seriously, what's up?"

"Nothing," I insist. "Honest."

"Alright then," He appeases me although I know that he still doesn't believe me, as he shouldn't because that's a terribly overused and obvious lie, but he lets it go and I'm thankful for that. "So you think my roommate is cute?"

I crinkle my nose at the change in conversation but go with it anyway. "Sure, he's pretty cute. Don't worry though, I'm not going to try anything."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah," I confirm. "That'd be really awkward, don't you think? I mean, if we dated or even just hooked up, I'd have to see him all of the time around your room and you'll probably become friends so I'd have to hang out with him a lot. I mean, I guess being friends with Noah is alright but I don't need two ex-whatevers in my life, that'd just give me a headache. Besides that, I cut things off with Noah to uncomplicated my life so hitting on Aiden would kind of negate that."

"Uncomplicate your life," He repeats it not as a question but still in a way that's asking for an explanation.

"Yeah, I just have too much testosterone in my life right now. I mean, I've been talking to this girl in my principles class, Haven, but that's two hours out of my week and then I leave and I have Jasper, you, Noah, Conner's always around too, and now there's Felix."

"Well, that's not so bad. Especially since I don't think that you have to worry about drama with Jasper or Conner. Felix is just an asshole and he'll evaporate soon enough. So you really only have to worry about Noah."

"And you," I add and I'm pretty serious but I say it with a wide, teasing grin just to make him believe that I'm joking. If only he knew the amount of inner turmoil that boy is causing me right now.

"And me," He agrees instead of assuring me that he's nothing to worry about, which is what I was expecting him to say.

I look away, out the window, because I just know that he's going to make me blush again. What is wrong with me? Like I said, I knew that there was a risk with me starting to feel something romantic for Scott- he's gorgeous and amazing- but I just assumed that it would be a slow growth, something over time. But this stupid heart palpitation thing that I have going on right now, it was instantaneous. I had no time to prepare. How ridiculously unfair is that?

"Okay, well this is you," Scott says a few moments later as he pulls up in front of my apartment building. "I'll text you on Monday and we'll go to dinner."

"Right. Thanks for the ride," I say, offering him a small smile before I turn to kiss him on the cheek, my standard goodbye.

And then it happens. You know? That cliché 'I meant to go for his cheek but actually found his lips' sort of thing. I never understood how that could happen until it happens to me. I'm not sure if it really was an accident- he started turning his head while I went to kiss his cheek- or if he did it on purpose or maybe I did it on purpose, just subconsciously. That's a huge possibility considering my thought processes as of late.

The most shocking thing about said accidental kiss, though, is that it lasts longer than I would have thought that it'd last. I pause when our lips touch and I have a moment to realize how soft and incredible his lips feel against mine and I know that it sounds crazy, but it feels like Scott momentarily leans into the kiss before I'm pulling away, finding my bearings again.

My face now a flaming red and my eyes incredibly wide, mostly from humiliating terror, I try to find something to say. "I'm so sorry. Um. I'll..."

"See you on Monday," Scott finishes for me, awkwardly clearing his throat.

"Right. See you then," I blurt out as fast as I can and then I can't get out of the car fast enough. I almost trip over my own feet as I stand up and shut the door but I stand balanced on my feet and then all but run into the building to the second floor to the apartment.

Once inside, I shut the door with a loud slam and then turn and lean my back against the hard wood of the door as I try to process what just happened. I just kissed Scott. Or he just kissed me. Or we just kissed each other. No matter which one it was, I really liked it- more than I should have- and that terrifies me more than I ever thought that it would.

Feeling hopeless and humiliated, my back slides down the surface of the wall until I'm in a crouching position with my face hiding in my hands, wondering if I can just sit here and hide like this forever.

"Jo," Jasper says my name from the living room in a slow, cautious voice. It's also kind of breathy, which makes me suspicious that Conner is here too and they were just in the middle of something on the couch when I barged in but I don't open my eyes to confirm my suspicions. "Are you alright?"

I shake my head and sniffle. "You were right," I mumble into my hands. "I knew that you were right the whole time but it still sucks. Just please buy me ice cream and don't tell me 'I told you so'. Dear God."

I hear his footsteps as he pads over to where I'm crouching at the door but by the time that he's standing in front of me, I'm already breaking down. Maybe from the humility, maybe from the ridiculousness of the whole thing.

I mean, really. He had been moping about his ex-girlfriend earlier in the day. He's not over her, I know that, and yet I kissed him and it felt so good.

This is going to hurt so bad.

I only cry for a minute or so and then Jasper helps me to my feet and wraps me in his arms in a tight, comforting hug. "You'll be alright," He assures me without even knowing why I'm crying. He has no idea what's going on so it's ridiculous for me to believe him and yet, I do. He's always right after all.

I'd always understood Jasper's hesitancy about me being friends with Scott and I knew just as well as he did that I was playing with fire here.

I'm playing with fire and if I don't stop, I am going to get seriously burned. But I am in too deep now. I'm going to jump head first into the flames. It'll probably end in some third degree burns but at the moment, that's a chance that I'm willing to take.

It's like going skydiving. You know that the fall is going to be amazing and so you get on the plane and you're so eager to jump but then when you get there and it's time to jump out of the plane, it becomes so much scarier when you're looking down at the Earth, at the potential pain that can be caused if something goes wrong. You know the potential risks of getting hurt in the fall and it's absolutely, mind numbingly terrifying.

But you jump anyway and just enjoy the fall and then hope for the best.

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Song: Little Do You Know by Alex & Sierra
Picture: Gerard Butler, who plays Sebastian