The Roommate Dilemma

The Roommate Dilemma ROOMMATES SERIES ASHLEY ZAKRZEWSKI Copyright © 2022 by Ashley Zakrzewski All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Contents Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 The Roommate Series About the Author Chapter One It takes too goddamn long for Samuel to convince the security guards that no, he will not shoot up the building. He’s just going to see Eric Baxter, who couldn’t get off his ass to see his best friend. Eric always enjoyed making things difficult for Samuel; said it made him into more of a man. Well, too bad the idiot didn’t take his own advice, Samuel snorts. Bloody college students swarming around him like ants who lost their way home, maybe it would have made him taller. Samuel had always been the taller one, even though Eric was a year and a half older than him, and Eric always made sure that the age difference hit home whenever the two of them were going to do something stupid. The same stupid that’s making Samuel trudge through the halls of college students getting out of class, occasionally backtracking with a grunted fuck because he missed a turn to Eric’s office. He has to shove his way past a couple making out in the middle of the hall, and all he can think is I thought that shit was done in high school, but he’s just as lost as Dorothy, and college certainly isn’t Kansas. The din of students arguing about some assignment their Anthropology teacher posted starts giving him a raging headache, and he’s already having enough of a shitty time trying to find Eric that it’s a wonder he hasn’t just started flying off the handle at some poor kid. He only holds on to this string of sanity with his brother’s help of reminding him to breathe and that’s all Samuel can do, even if it’s not as relaxed as his brother would have liked. All he can hear through the annoying as fuck chatter is his breathing, and he’s snorting like a bull, and all he’s seeing is red, and then there’s a flash of a different red. First thing he thinks is fire! But it isn’t the case when this girl interjects his panic with a phrase masked with the politest contempt he’s heard in a long time. “Excuse me, Professor Bailey–” “Call me Landon–” “Professor Bailey, I’m sorry, but I have to go. I’m twenty minutes late and I need to pick up my daughter from daycare. I won’t have anyone thinking I abandoned my daughter. Thank you for class, sir,” she spits as she flies out into the hall, running full force into him. She miraculously manages not to fall as she quickly glances up at Samuel, and the fire in her hair doesn’t match the cool fire he feels licking at his scars as her ice eyes brush over them before she mumbles a short sorry and rushes off, her hair almost whipping him and burning him for a third time. Somehow she even smells of smoke, but no, that wasn’t right. She smells like lemons, but in the laundry detergent sort of way. Fuck. Maybe it was still some naivety not yet burned out in Samuel, but he had still been holding on to the hope that people with a different fire would still have more compassion than others. Maybe even people as young as she was would have been more accepting and not frightened, and he’s hit with the realization that she has a child, and looks no older than twenty. For a brief moment, Calvin fills his mind, always Calvin when he’s least wanted, and he hopes the girl never had to endure a night with a man like Calvin. Like he does with all unwanted information, he sorts it out of his mind. There are only clean lines allowed with Samuel, nothing out of place, except for his hair hanging over his scars, just as it’s been since middle school, and only grown back now that his time in the military is over. He missed the curtain of hair filtering out all the things he didn’t want to see, because he knows how the world truly is, and even though he enjoys reminding everyone how awful it is, he doesn’t enjoy facing it that much. Of course, Eric always had a blast reminding Samuel how it made him look like an emo loving fuck and got him a black eyeliner pencil for his fifteenth birthday. Samuel used it to draw fake tattoos on his arms because it attracted girls and made him look cool. Now he has the real ink, but he still misses those days of smudgy drawings of skulls and song lyrics. Somehow he finds his way to Eric’s door and barges right in, just as they did when they were in school. Damn the consequences. He sees Eric jump a little in his chair, as it seems that Eric was actually doing work, which probably is a first for the man. It reminded both men of how long it’s been - nearly ten years - since they met up for a couple of weeks in D.C. when Eric had just finished graduate school in business and Samuel had been working at the Pentagon itself for a couple of years. They’re both older than they’d been back in elementary school when they’d first met: Samuel in the first grade and Eric in the second. They’d bonded over Eric ordering Samuel not to tell