I half-scowled and grunted, "You know damn well they're not all stupid and lazy."

“Oh, I Know not all of them," she continued the conversation fluidly, oblivious to my rapidly changing mood. "But there are a lot of them. My parents have two.”

I stopped in my tracks.

“Have two what? You talk as if your parents own slaves!"

“Certainly not!" Amber's eyes goggled up and down, as if just now realizing how much of a prejudiced jerk she sounded like.

“I didn't mean it Like that," she said defensively.

I kind of glared at her, the anger still inside of me. I tried to think rationally. Looking at Amber watching me with obvious chagrin, I told myself she wasn't intentionally malicious. In fact, she looked downright afraid of what I might think of her.

And yet, when the barista fumbled her order the first time, she automatically went to the ‘stupid and lazy Mexican' analysis. It never even occurred to her that she'd given her order a Little too fast. That was something Amber would have to work on, to put more thought into her judgments.

In a way, it wasn't her fault. She'd been raised in the Heights and I couldn't pretend to know exactly what went on over there, or how her parents raised her. More likely than anything, she was just ignorant and parroted what the people around her told her. Already, in the past year at school she truly had mellowed out quite a bit after being on her own and being exposed to a diversity of people. Hell, two years ago she wouldn't even talk to me. Now, I could honestly say we were friends.

“Look, it's cool," I finally spoke and she visibly brightened. For some reason, what I thought about her actually seemed to matter to her.

“Just... every once in a while, think about how you come off to people.

A couple of years ago, I thought you were a spoiled snobby bitch." She visibly flinched at that.

“And you probably thought I was a dumb jock.

Now look where we are.”

She said nothing but continued her walk. We were almost at the classroom. Just before we went inside, I stopped her and touched her arm again.

“For the record, I was wrong back then. You're a beautiful person inside when you want to be, even more beautiful than you are on the outside."

And then I walked through the door.

Amber didn't speak to me for the entire class. She seemed distracted and lost in her own thoughts. But when it was time to walk out, she fell right into step with me and we started a conversation as if the old one had never stopped.

I walked her back to the house she was renting with her friends, and I stopped in to say hi to E-Beth and the other roommates. And then I was off to head back to my own apartment.

Over the next month or so, Amber and I butted head more than once over what I felt was her close-minded bigoted viewpoint of the world. She thought I was a liberal communist while I tried to point out how I saw myself as moderate in everything.

She quickly learned that I wasn't trying to attack her about her viewpoints, but some heat definitely came into our arguments. More than once we found ourselves huffing and slightly out of breath, our faces flushed from the intensity of our discussions. Usually Amber would crack a smile first. It was amazing how the adrenaline rush of those debates was so similar to the hormonal rush of arousal. I wanted to believe the rosy color in her cheeks might have something to do with me as well.

Fortunately, I was able to let off that physical steam a few of times without resorting to my right hand. While Nataliya and I never made even the slightest attempts to establish a romantic relationship, we came together on occasion to mutually relieve each other's sexual desire.

First there was the time she dropped by the apartment while Danielle and Cherys were both out. She never said a word. Her eyes simply glowed as she attacked my Lips just inside the front door and began stripping out of her clothes. We barely made it to my bedroom.

The second time, we didn't make it. She was perched on her high heels and bent in half over the couch while I fucked her from behind. And when she spread her asscheeks and ordered me to ream out her cornhole, how could I possibly say no?

We had several more little trysts, all of them unplanned and all of them Nataliya- initiated. Then came the strangest sexual event with