Undeclared (The Woodlands) - By Jen Frederick Page 0,3

All I could hear was the name Noah, over and over, thumping with each beat of my heart.

Noah

“Tap your Goddamn pencil one more time, and I’m going to snap your fingers off along with it,” Bo muttered to me. I looked down at my hand, not even realizing it had been in perpetual motion. “Just go and talk to her.”

“Can’t. She’s working,” I said. But she hadn’t been working two hours ago, or the many other times I had spotted her during the past week. The truth was that I was a coward. Facing Grace Sullivan after nearly two years of no contact was more terrifying than the first time I was on patrol in Afghanistan. At this point, I’d rather face down ten angry insurgents than one 5’ 6” girl I could probably pick up and toss with one hand.

But back then, I had been through ninety days of basic training and was surrounded by my buddies, all of us armed to the teeth while we were deployed. Here my only weapons were my lackluster verbal skills and the knowledge that she had written to me, once a month, for four years.

I justified the two weeks since classes started by telling myself I first had to do some recon. No mission is undertaken without good intelligence.

I had to find exactly the best time to not exactly ambush Grace, but at least find the right way to let her know I had landed back in her life.

I found out she had all early classes and was done by noon every day. I learned she lived in a swanky house two blocks away from campus. Bo had chatted up some chick down at the library desk and learned that Grace did her required weekly hours of service on Thursday nights and Sunday afternoons. The one thing I hadn’t managed to obtain was her cell phone number, so I resorted to stalking her around campus.

“If I told the guys that the idea of meeting Grace has turned you into a quivering pussy, they wouldn’t believe me,” Bo mocked smugly, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms behind his head.

“Half those guys would give their left nut to be me right now,” I shot back.

After a few months of regular care packages, Grace had become our unofficial mascot. When the boxes from Grace arrived, the unit hovered around me like vultures and would randomly grab stuff out of the box. They weren’t jackasses enough to take the letter, though. Everyone knew that was hands-off. But I had made the mistake of showing Bo her prom picture, and then everyone wanted to see “their Grace.” My CO even made me pin the picture up, as if she were some kind of community property.

I suspected more guys jacked off to that picture of Grace than to the chick on the cover of Juggs. I guess I was doing my part to benefit unit cohesion, but fuck me, the next picture she sent I kept for myself.

About two years into my service, all the young, single guys and some of the attached ones had begun to view Grace as something of a myth. She was faithful and generous and, after the inclusion of her prom picture, we knew she was, hot, too. She was curvier than the average coed, but I liked that. In her prom dress, she looked like a ‘50s pinup model, with her dark hair curled and a flower pinned near her forehead. While it could have been the padding of her dress, I suspected that she was stacked.

You couldn’t tell the color of her eyes from the picture. She said they were hazel, a mix of yellow and brown that changed depending on what she wore. I may have fantasized a few times about what color they would be when I went down on her or when she was stroking me off.

I looked back over at Bo, still leaning casually back in his chair. “After she’s done working,” I told him, not sure if I was trying to convince him or myself. I’d wait until she was off work and then walk her home. Sit on the swing that hung on the big wraparound porch of the house she lived in, and try to explain my complete silence for the past two years. Automatically, I wondered what color Grace’s eyes were when she was angry.

I hadn’t ever been good at explaining myself, and I knew this time wasn’t going to