I looked over my shoulder and tried my look of death on my newest ridiculer. The guy had the sense to take a step back and drop his sneer.

“Uh, it’s just that Compulsion is the biggest underground club in the state. Finding the location in the painting is part of the mystery. It’s like a real-life urban legend,” the guy explained.

I looked back at the picture, clearly not seeing what I was supposed to. I wished I could share in everyone’s enthusiasm. Their anticipation was tangible.

The girls pulled out their cell phones and started punching the numbers into their GPS. As people figured out the super-mysterious location, there were shrieks and whoops of excitement.

Normally I didn’t think too much about how much I had missed in my single-minded focus to become Aubrey Duncan, super student.

But right now, surrounded by people who clearly had way more excitement in their lives than I did, I felt like I had forgotten about some necessary steps in the whole growing-up-and-experiencing-life thing.

Ugh, this was too deep for a Friday night. There were reruns of Judge Judy on the TiVo calling my name.

“Good luck,” I told the less-than-friendly group before pushing my way back through the crowd.

I headed off campus and walked the two blocks to my empty apartment. The loneliness that greeted me was more pronounced than it had ever been before.

And for the first time in years, I hated it.

Chapter two

aubrey

normally organizing, categorizing, and putting things in their place was all I needed to go to my warm, happy place. Forget mood stabilizers. If I was depressed, just give me a dustrag and sixty minutes to declutter. Sure, my room looked like something out of OCD-R-Us, but it was that small semblance of control that helped me get through the day.

Renee, back when we could talk about more than whether it was T-shirt or sweater weather, would tease me about having my shoes lined up in perfect rows. She used to f**k with my almost obsessive need to have my desk laid out in completely symmetrical piles. My pens and highlighters, an exact number of each, were sitting just so in my green Longwood University mug. My laptop was placed at an exact midpoint between my Texas Instruments graphic calculator and my leather-bound daily planner.

Okay, so maybe I took the whole neat and tidy thing a bit too far. But I liked knowing where things were. I liked knowing what to expect when I walked into my room. Surprises sucked. Being blindsided, whether in a good or a bad way, put me on edge, and it didn’t take a PhD to figure out why.

Too much of my past had been dictated by things beyond my control. One tiny twist of fate, and I had been catapulted into a scary oblivion that I was still trying to claw my way out of.

But if there was one thing Aubrey Duncan did well, it was surviving. Whatever it cost me, I put one foot in front of the other and kept on walking. There wasn’t any other option for me.

“You really need to get in the habit of locking your front door. What if I was a robber here to swipe all of your 90210 DVDs,” a voice called, startling me out of my mission to get the dust bunnies out from underneath my bed.

I slithered out from under the mattress on my stomach and peered up at the good-looking guy with the dark brown hair who was dominating the doorway.

“I keep those under lock and key, Brooks, you know better than that,” I answered, blowing my hair out of my face and wiping a grubby hand across my forehead. I was pretty sure I looked like something pulled out of a ditch. Fortunately for me, Brooks Hamlin wasn’t someone I felt the need to impress.

“Shit, you’re cleaning your room again? Aubrey, this is bordering on clinical, you know.” Brooks shook his head, his green eyes sparkling in amusement.

I smirked as I got to my feet. “Is that your professional diagnosis?” I asked, wiping my hands down the front of his perfectly pressed shirt. Brooks made a face and playfully pushed me away.

Brooks and I were both in the counseling program, though Brooks was a year older and set to graduate in just a few months. Back at the beginning of our acquaintance, I had made the mistake of sleeping with him. More than once.

Brooks was cute and smart and everything I should have looked for in a guy. He checked each and every box. We started dating a couple years ago after we’d shared an Abnormal Psychology class. I was the wide-eyed, freaked-out freshman; he had been the more confident and suave sophomore. But mostly, our relationship was the result of my pathetic need to connect. And I had been convinced that opening my legs was the perfect solution for my emotional isolation. I had been lonely.

A date here and there had eventually progressed to frequent f**king. But then feelings got involved. More specifically, Brooks’s feelings, and the whole thing had gotten entirely too messy. I liked Brooks, truly I did, but my heart hadn’t been in it the way his had been. The truth of it was that it wasn’t just Brooks. Because my heart was never in it . . . with anybody. It was as though the organ was permanently disengaged from the rest of my body.

So I had ended it as gently as I was able to. Brooks had taken it well; kudos to the healthy male ego. And we had, surprisingly, become close friends in the aftermath. I still caught him looking at my boobs more often than I would have liked, but I chose to ignore it.

Brooks handed me a slim paper bag. I peered inside and grinned. “Why, Brooks, are you planning to get me drunk?” I teased, heading out into the hallway, closing my bedroom door behind me.

Brooks chuckled. “Nah, just figured you’d want to break up your wild and crazy evening of alphabetizing the soup cans in the pantry.”