Page 1 of Dirty Hot Valentine
Chapter One
Keera
“Give me permission to quit now. Or kill me. I don’t care anymore. I just want this misery to end.” Melissa’s voice broke through the quiet in my empty classroom.
I chuckled, adding up the points on a Biology quiz.
“Are you even listening to me, Keera? You look like you’re ignoring me in this time of desperate need. Are you grading something important there? Am I messing up your count? Six, ten, five hundred, seven thousand and twenty-nine…”
Laughing, I wrote the score at the top of the sheet and glanced up. She was leaning back against the frame, forking something green and leafy out of a huge Tupperware container, and looking gloriously frazzled—dress shirt untucked from her pencil skirt, brown tendrils falling out of her French braid, cat-eye glasses perched at the tip of her nose as if pushing them into place would take more strength than she had left.
“Uh…no, you’re not allowed to quit. It’s February.” I reminded her.
“So you know what hell continues till the end of the semester?”
I shook my head, clueless.
“Samantha’s mother’s need to talk after school about her daughter’s grade every time there’s an essay. On the phone.”
“Which Samantha?”
“Beastly,” she said without missing a chew, crunching what smelled like sunflower seeds and kale. “What’s wrong with e-mail? How is anyone of our generation choosing a phone call over e-mail? Even face-to-face is better than a phone call, and I hate people. So if I’d rather be face-to-face, you know it’s bad.”
All teachers hated people, especially parents. The kids were still okay, but parents? Yuck. Except for Brandon Beastly. The twenty-foot tall, recently-single and incredibly sexy dad. “If it was Samantha’s father who wanted to talk, you wouldn’t be complaining.”
“Umm…nope…not even him. He’s too…” She shrugged, crinkling her nose.
Gorgeous. Hot. Dreamy.
“Grumpy. That’s the word. If I’d been married to Samantha’s mother, I’d have been, too. The woman is insufferable. No wonder they didn’t make it.” She scraped up another bite and contemplated the forkful of kale. “Anyway, grumpy or not, I’m totally engaged.”
“Ohhh… Please don’t say the E word in front of me.”
She swallowed her salad and cocked a brow. “Jealous?”
“Yes.”
“Then go get yourself some decent boyfriend.” She walked to my desk and lowered her voice. “Or indecent. It’s probably what you need. You can’t hold on to your V-card forever. You’re twenty-five.”
My cheeks burned out of embarrassment. “Melissa!”
“What? You don’t want me to say the V-word either. How about the other V-word?”
“What’s that?”
“Valentine’s Day? Hello? It’s this weekend. Maybe, if you just get yourself a date, it will finally happen.”
I gathered the quizzes and stacked them, my hands ice cold. “I know when it is, and I had a boyfriend who was supposed to… He broke up with me two weeks before. Same like the one before him, and the one before.” I’d never felt more pathetic.
“Forget about those losers. They must have small dicks or something. You need a real—”
“Can we end this conversation, please?”
She rolled her eyes. “Fine. But you’re coming with me to the mall today. I haven’t bought Jordan anything for the Valentine’s yet. I want to get that done before it’s too crowded.”
Chapter Two
Keera
