Losing It Read online

  Losing It

  Shay Violet

  shayviolet.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Shay Violet

  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

  Also by Shay Violet

  1

  At some point, the whole virgin thing became a self-fulfilling prophecy. It became my identity.

  Not “Paris Simmons, the girl from Greenville,” or “Paris Simmons, state champion hurdler,” or “Paris Simmons, Palmetto Women’s College honors graduate,” or even “Paris Simmons, the big sister of Miss Teen South Carolina, Paige Simmons.”

  No, I just became Paris the virgin.

  And it wasn’t even intentional. Sure, I was raised Southern Baptist, and in middle school I even signed one of those “purity pledge” cards, promising to remain a virgin until my wedding night.

  But saving myself for my husband hasn’t been a thing in a long time, and unless it’s Christmas, Easter, a wedding, or a funeral, I don’t find my way into church very often.

  I still believe, but my faith has become more of a personal thing, you know?

  So, why am I still a virgin on the cusp of 30?

  Am I ugly? Socially awkward? Lesbian? Asexual?

  I’ll work backwards.

  For somebody who might be asexual, my monthly battery bill is way too high. Yeah, I have a pocket rocket in my nightstand, and it gets quite a workout. My sex drive and appetite are either normal or high, from what I can gather.

  I’m not a lesbian, I’ve never even kissed a girl, not even in college when I hung out with four of the baddest bitches in the world, my girls Ameerah, K.K., Savannah, and Sweet. If I was going to bat for the other team, I had my opportunities. Hell, my little sister did pageants since she was little. I’ve been around plenty of beautiful, strong women, but they’ve never moved the needle for me.

  I’ll confess to being a bit of a nerd, but I still think I can relate to most people. But hey, if you can’t rank your favorite Star Trek captains off the top of your head, then we may have a hard time finding common ground, anyway.

  Oh, and you can try to convince me there’s been a captain better than Benjamin Sisko, but if I agreed with you, then we’d both be wrong, so…

  Alright, all that’s left is that I’m just too damn ugly to have any man even take pity on me and give me a mercy fuck? Is that it? I suppose it’s possible; my girls and I drove up to Orangeburg once for a fraternity party at South Carolina State since Sweet knew a guy there. A couple fraternity brothers were visiting from California.

  We were all sitting on a big sectional, sipping our drinks, and there may have been some weed, there was definitely loud music, and one of the visitors went on a rant about how “All you southern girls are so dark, I can’t wait to get home to L.A., back to my light-skinned honeys.”

  He then pointed right at me and said, “If you weren’t so damn dark skinned, you’d be hella sexy.”

  Let that sink in. And yeah, he was black.

  Apparently, I’m too dark for some brother’s taste.

  Of course, that had Sweet ready to fight, since she’s the most hood of all of us, growing up in D.C., so she stood up and started cussing him, and calling him a bitch and everything, and it almost got physical.

  Cooler heads prevailed, and the guy apologized, but it wasn’t over. A little while later they slowed the music down and people started pairing off, hooking up and whatnot, and Savannah started slow dancing with the guy. Grinding up on him. Which, yeah, pissed me off, but it was a case of “keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.”

  When she saw her opening, Savannah gave the guy the biggest knee in the balls you’ve ever seen, and we ran to the car laughing before he recovered and wanted some payback. But the way she got him, totally unaware and with the force behind it, he might still be rolling around on the floor of that fraternity house to this very day.

  Where was I? Oh yeah, maybe I’m still a virgin because I’m so damn ugly.

  Okay, this could absolutely be the reason a guy would remain a virgin all through college and beyond. I get that. If a guy is repulsive, he’s gonna have a tough time getting any.

  For a girl, though? I’m not buying it. I’ve seen guys hit on literally anything with a heartbeat and a vagina. I recall one time a couple years ago when I had the flu, and I was the hottest mess on two legs. Hadn’t showered in days, no makeup, dressed in sweatpants and a stained t-shirt with holes in it that I’d been wearing for three days, and I needed a few things from the store.

  I drove myself to the Piggly Wiggly, practically laid myself across the back of the cart as I pathetically pushed it up and down the aisles, and I had two guys try to pick me up. And I don’t mean they were being nice because I was sick, I mean it was, “Hey girl, where you going looking so fine?”

  I ignored that idiot, but he persisted until he must have figured I was hearing impaired.

  I looked like a corpse that should have been buried days ago.

  “Hey baby, what’s wrong, you don’t feel so good?”

  “Aha!” I thought. “A gentleman!”

  I was in the vitamin section, looking for the biggest bottle of vitamin C in the store.

  “I’m a little sick, yes,” I answered weakly.

  “I got the medicine you need right here, baby girl,” he replied, grabbing his dick through his pants.

  Seriously?

  Truthfully, plenty of guys who are way beyond having to settle for anything short of what they consider to be a beautiful girl have asked me out, and some have even gotten me out. They just haven’t gotten in my pants.

  So not to sound conceited, I know I’m not ugly. I’m a beautiful, strong woman.

  My virginity I blame— at least in part— on my middle school track coach, who told us that boys were only after one thing, and they could only drag us down, never build us up, and we had our entire lives to worry about them. So, in middle and high school, my grades and sports were enough reason to avoid guys and relationships. I didn’t have sports in college, but my academic responsibilities ramped up, so it was still easy to decline when guys approached me.

  Once I graduated, I had the real world to worry about; finding a job, paying bills, etc. And eventually, the snowball had gotten so big it flattened any guy in my vicinity. A date or two, sure, but once it got serious enough that there was a societal expectation for clothes to start coming off? Uh uh, I was out of there.

  I don’t know how my friend Savannah did it. Or does it. Or whatever. She has confidence and swagger like Beyoncé, and she was like a guy when it came to hooking up; get them to make you feel good and kick them to the curb. Next!

  But that’s just not me. I’m not wired that way. But I’ve decided that once the curtain drops on the old year and the new one takes center stage; Paris the Virgin is being retired. Not that Paris the Hussie is taking her place, but one way or another, Paris Simmons is having sex.

  And I’ve put my money where my mouth is. When my four best friends from college had our annual mid-December reunion at Sadie’s BBQ back in Charleston, we each put $200 in the pot and threw down our New Year’s resolutions.

  Mine was to lose my virginity
.

  We just had our annual June reunion where we spend a couple days in a rented house on or near the beach, eat at Sadie’s, and catch up. Everybody was still in the running for the $1,000 pot we each chipped in for regarding our New Year’s Resolutions, although K.K. and I were the only ones “failing,” since I was still a virgin and she had gained a bit of weight rather than losing any.

  Now I’m back in Tallahassee, Florida enjoying the quieter summer campus that comes with working for a college. I’m in the admissions office at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, also known as Florida A&M, or FAMU. When most people think of a college in Florida’s capital city, they think of Florida State, but FAMU resides on the highest geographic point in Tallahassee, so we spend our time looking down on the Seminoles. Go Rattlers!

  One of the older women in the admissions department, Miss Claudia is always trying to set me up with her nephew, Jamichael. I’ve met him, and he’s not exactly my type, but he’s a former Mississippi State football player whose muscles have muscles, and he’s definitely the type who could help a girl out with a virginity problem.

  Maybe I’ll let him take me to dinner one of these days and let him win me New Year’s resolution money with that big… body of his.

  Until then, back to my pocket rocket and visions of Idris Elba.

  2

  “Paris, I have a special one for you,” my co-worker Miss Claudia called out.

  I rolled my chair around the side of my cubicle, so I could see her, and she handed me a stack of paperwork that appeared to be our standard FAMU application, but with several more pages attached than normal.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “I was hoping you could tell me,” she said with a laugh. “I’ve been at this since you were knee-high to a swamp gator, and I’ve never seen an application quite like this. I’m too old for that mess there.”

  “Okay, I’ll take a look at it,” I conceded. The fact that it was a paper application, filled out entirely in pen, was odd in and of itself. Most everything in our department was done on-line these days.

  “Lucas Tucker” was the name atop the application. I skimmed over it, looking for anything out of the ordinary, and flags started popping up right away. For one thing, he was 32, which wasn’t completely unheard of, but it was unusual. Second, he listed an address, with a suite number, in Topeka Kansas. And he’d gone to high school in Juneau, Alaska.

  I couldn’t recall ever receiving an application from Alaska. In case you didn’t know, Florida A&M is an HBCU, short for Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Alaska wasn’t very high on the list of states of origin for any black college, and having done a little work in the alumni department, I couldn’t recall receiving any donations, mail, or requests for transcripts or anything originating anywhere in Alaska.

  It got weirder.

  Attached to the application were a series of credit-hours achieved and attained at other schools; four-year colleges and universities scattered all over the country. Capital University in Ohio. Chaminade University in Hawaii. Granite State College in New Hampshire. Louisiana State University. There were even a pair of HBCUs in there; Lincoln University from Missouri and Kentucky State. Tokyo International University in Oregon? Something called Sinte Gleska University in South Dakota?

  Yeah, I could see why Miss Claudia wanted no part of this one.

  The notion that the whole thing was some sort of elaborate hoax hit me when I noticed two separate references to a “St. John’s College.” One in Maryland and the other in New Mexico.

  I rolled my chair back around the partition, so I could confer with my older, more experienced colleague.

  “Miss Claudia is this a late April Fool’s joke?” I held up Lucas Tucker’s paperwork.

  “I don’t know what it is, exactly,” she confessed. “But Lucas Tucker seems to be a well-traveled, erudite young man.”

  “Are all of these schools real? Sin-te G-Gleska?” I wasn’t sure how to properly pronounce the alleged South Dakota university.

  Miss Claudia just smiled.

  “And there are really two St. John’s Colleges, one in New Mexico and one in Maryland?”

  “Indeed,” she replied. “The one in Annapolis is the original. The campus in Santa Fe opened later, as a sister school. They use the ‘Good Books’ curriculum.”

  “Oh, of course.” Whenever I spoke with Miss Claudia, I had to make mental notes of things to Google later. The “Good Books curriculum” would be one of those.

  “And Sinte Gleska is a tribal college. On a Sioux reservation.”

  How the hell…

  “I had to look that one up,” she chuckled.

  After working with her for six years, Claudia Daniels finally admitted to not knowing something. Hallelujah!

  “I’m not even sure how to process this application,” I admitted. “The classes and credits he’s taken are a hodgepodge of subjects that don’t seem to be pointing toward any sort of conventional degree.”

  “Indeed!” Miss Claudia declared, using her favorite word for the second time in our brief conversation. “Best of luck to you, Paris.” Her smile was warm and genuine. She could be infuriating, but she never meant to be.

  I set the rest of my work aside and began assembling something resembling a traditional transcript for my mystery man.

  His high school record back in Alaska was exemplary— a 4.0 GPA and a standardized test score far exceeding the averages for students I admitted to FAMU every day.

  The most recent semester he’d completed was the spring one at Granite State College in Concord, New Hampshire, where he’d taken a course load that included a class covering New England’s role in the Civil War, a study of 18th century New England literature, a generic calculus class, and a psych class called “Theories of Personality.”

  His grades, as was his custom, were perfect.

  On a lark, I Googled his name, “Lucas Tucker,” but I got no hits that seemed connected to my guy. There was a minor league baseball player in California by that name, but he wasn’t the right one.

  I went five pages deep in the search results before concluding it was a dead end. Social media didn’t help, either.

  I set Lucas Tucker’s stuff aside and plowed through a pile of work I could actually complete, so I could feel like I’d accomplished something more in the eight hours at my desk than researching obscure colleges.

  At the end of the day, I took one last look through his application when it dawned on me – Columbus, Ohio. Annapolis, Maryland. Santa Fe, New Mexico. Honolulu, Hawaii. Tallahassee, Florida. Those five disparate cities shared one thing in common – they were all state capitals.

  I looked up the rest of the cities in which he’d taken college classes and the place he’d grown up- Juneau – and I knew I was on to something.

  Sinte Gleska University was the only aberration; it was in Mission, South Dakota, just about seventy-five miles from the state capital, Pierre.

  But it turned out to be the exception that proved the rule; believe it or not, it was the closest college or university to Pierre.

  I was intrigued.

  3

  I was proud of my detective work, but I still had questions.

  College isn’t cheap. How was he funding this little tour of higher learning? It seemed more and more that maybe this entire enterprise was some sort of scam, that maybe he was staying one step ahead of the law, or the IRS, by constantly staying on the move.

  Was his ultimate goal to receive a degree? Did he have a plan to assemble his assortment of classes into something meaningful?

  Who was Lucas Tucker?

  I shared my state capital discovery with Miss Claudia, hoping to be the rare person to impress her with my intellect.

  “Miss Claudia, I think I figured out the Lucas Tucker guy,” I said excitedly.

  “Indeed?” she responded, rolling her chair out of her workspace to look at me. “Is it the state capitals pattern? I wondered how long it wo
uld take you to figure that out.”

  Grrrr.

  “He’s, what, trying to go to college in every state capital?” I guessed. “But how’s he paying for it? New student loan every semester, or does he, I don’t know, have an advance for a book or something?”

  “Why don’t you call him and ask him?” Miss Claudia suggested. “You’ll have to talk to him eventually anyway, no time like the present.”

  Okay, full confession time. I am a little shy. I hate talking on the phone, especially to people I don’t know. My advantage is that when I do have to speak to strangers, I generally have the upper hand, since I’m the one holding the keys to the kingdom, so to speak. They’re calling me because they want to get into Florida A&M, and I’m sort of a gatekeeper.

  I left work that afternoon and stopped at the grocery store to grab some pasta to make for dinner. I walked across the parking lot to Starbucks for my favorite iced green tea, and I noticed an unusual vehicle taking up several spaces nearby. It was a shiny trailer that looked like a silver bullet. Had it been midday, I imagined the glare would be blinding. As evening approached, it was still impressive. Two men were standing nearby discussing it, so I didn’t feel quite so strange walking over for a closer look.

  “I’m telling you, it’s a ’56,” an old man in a retired military baseball cap said to his friend standing nearby.

  “No, we used to have a ’56 Airstream and that model was a little different. It’s older. ’54, maybe. Can you believe the way it shines?”

  It was hooked up to a black pickup truck I can only describe as “muscular.” It was a sleek, sexy truck, polished so that it looked as if it just left the lot. It said “F-450 Limited Edition” on the side.