“Nuts!” Nick shouted. It was the best he could come up with at the moment. He threw a rock at the pond. It failed to skip, sinking immediately to the bottom, just like his miserable love life.

Here he was again, leaving the scene of yet another botched attempt to get a date. He had been sitting in the student center having a great conversation with Anika, and then Kurt had to show up, elbowing his way into the booth and throwing a rough arm around the cutest redhead that Nick had seen on campus. Instead of being annoyed by his rudeness Anika had smiled so sweetly at Kurt, blinking those long lashes at him. Nick had retreated as gracefully as he could, which was not very.

So now he was once more a man with no options, losing Anika to a man who scratched his package in public then, when he thought no one was looking, sniffed the tips of his fingers as if sampling the bouquet.

“Nuts,” Nick said again, a little more softly. When he’d left high school, he had honestly thought that the situation would change. Surely no guy could sustain the kind of impressive losing streak that he’d had in public school at a college. When he had arrived on the college grounds that first day of his freshman year, the possibilities had seemed endless. Pairs, trios, entire herds of coeds walked around campus, their little skirts flipping in the air, displaying firm, smooth bellies underneath their tight little shirts. There were hundreds of them, and Nick thought that surely one of them would find him “cute.”

He had started his campaign right away, first with optimism, then confusion, then a species of panic. His low point had come last week when his roommate, probably sick of hearing him moan about the situation, had set him up on a blind date. The girl that showed up for dinner was a hunchback with bad skin and glasses thick enough to see Hawaii with. That wasn’t even the best part of it. The best part was when she spent most of the date talking about the guy that she was in love with, Frank somebody or another.

Nick sat on his favorite bench, expelling a hard breath. As he looked from his vantage point there were pairs of lovers all around. One couple was lying on the grass, talking and laughing. A few were walking around the narrow path that encircled the pond, their arms linked together. It was a world full of women who were taken, involved, occupied with another. It wasn’t fair.