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More than the smiling, he’d hoped this would help her relax around him like she did around Stephanie.
With anyone else, she held this firm shield between them and herself. It wasn’t that he wanted to become her best friend or anything, but if they were going to be around each other, he’d rather she was comfortable.
Just like when he realized she didn’t like being touched, he despised the idea that he was the reason she felt the need to hide behind her little self-preserving wall.
When the end credits rolled around, Nathan was slouched back in his seat, popping the last of the popcorn in his mouth and sucking in empty air through his straw. They gathered their garbage and bags and walked out of the theater, tossing thrash away as they left the screen room.
“So,” Nathan said, adjusting his bag over his shoulder, “did you like the movie?” He already knew she was going to say no, but it was worth a try.
But she caught him off guard, as she sometimes does.
“Oh, yeah. Honestly, it’s one of my favorites.” She’d taken her time with the Reese’s Pieces and tossed the last one into her mouth as they walked. “My brother and I watched it during the summer before he went to school so I’ve seen it two times. Well, three now.”
Nathan froze in his tracks, his mouth dropped open. “You what?”
Tully noticed and turned to look at him, her eyebrow raised. “What?”
“Is that why you didn’t laugh?”
Something shifted on her face, her steady expression lifted a bit, and her eyes sparkled with a subtle amusement that her mouth didn’t give away. “So that’s why you were staring at me? To see if I laugh?”
He stumbled over his words for a moment, trying to find an excuse. She’d noticed that? He hoped his embarrassment wasn’t as obvious as hers usually was. “You knew?”
“It’s hard to focus when some creep is staring at me the whole time.” She shrugged and walked out of the theater, the door swinging shut behind her into the early October evening.
Nathan nearly tripped trying to catch up and get in front of her, to put this misunderstanding to rest. How utterly embarrassing. She thought he was some creep. She’d probably call this whole thing to an end and stage a fake breakup right now, leaving him stranded with still piss-poor grades.
“Whoa, whoa. Hold on. I’m not being a creep. A creep would try holding your hand in the popcorn or whispering weird things to you. I was just seeing if you were—”
“Okay,creep.”
He saw it then. The way her lips were pursed with dimples peeking out. There was a lightness to her voice: a tease. It was softer than the way Tommy did it, but it was definitely there. She was smiling. Well, almost smiling, though it looked like she was trying not to.
Nathan started, stunned for a few moments, then relaxed. “Fine, call me a creep if you want.”
She smiled then, a real one. Small, just a lopsided tilt of her lips, but it was there. Genuine. For a second, fleeting and insignificant, he felt the same way he did the night at his party—dizzily buzzed and sober all at once.
“Are we going to study or not?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Nathan grinned, and gestured with his arm for her to pass him. “After you.”
twenty-four
tully
Tully got home well after six p.m.
The movie had added about two hours onto their time, but they got carried away with the studying and by the time they had packed up, it was late enough to grab a bite to eat.
She paid this time, since Nathan had spent plenty of money on her in the past few days and now she was rather indebted to him for both that and the fact that he saved her from his friends’ questioning.
She had suspected that the interaction with his friends would have left her on edge the rest of the day, but somehow Nathan’s stupid suggestion to watch the movie had completely bypassed everything else and she had been in a pleasant mood since.
A small smile and airy chuckle appeared without her noticing as she remembered how panicked Nathan was after the movie. Watching him stumble over himself trying to explain his staring made her chest contract the same way it did when she saw a puppy or read a particularly swoon-worthy moment in a romance novel.
He was awfully cute. She was starting to understand the hold he had on so many girls.
Nothing could spoil her mood at this point. Not even Joliet, who was descending the stairs when Tully walked in the front door.
