AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I was sure you’d dropped the class, which made me selfishly ecstatic. Without even knowing I was doing it, I started looking for you on campus.” He stared into my eyes and lowered his voice even further. “And then, the Halloween party.”
I couldn’t breathe. “You were there? At the party?”
He nodded.
“How? You aren’t Greek, are you?”
He shook his head. “I’d fixed the house’s A/C the night before. Maintenance doesn’t do non-emergency stuff on evenings or weekends, but I’m contract labor, so I agreed to do it. When I wouldn’t take a tip, a couple of the guys invited me to the party. I only said yes because I was hoping you might be there. It had been two weeks, and this campus is so huge I was starting to think I’d never run into you.” He chuckled softly and rubbed a hand at the back of his neck. “Wow, that sounds total stalker.”
Or totally hot. God. “Why didn’t you talk to me that night? Before…”
He shook his head. “You were so withdrawn and miserable. Almost every guy who approached you was rejected without a second glance. There was no way I was going to become one of them. You danced with a handful of guys you already knew—and he was one of those.”
“Buck.”
“Yes. When you left, he followed, and I thought maybe… maybe you two had decided to leave early together, without everyone knowing. Meet outside or something.”
I watched a trio of my classmates enter the building. “He’s my roommate’s boyfriend’s best friend. Well, her ex’s best friend, now. He was a known entity. A friend, I thought. Boy, was I wrong.”
He nodded, frowning. “I was about to leave—my bike was parked out front. Something didn’t feel right, but I was struggling with the same desire to take him out that I’d felt for half the semester with your boyfriend, so I questioned my own motives. I lost a minute arguing with myself, and I’m sorry about that. I finally decided if you two were hooking up, I’d just go around front, rev up the Harley, and be done with it. With you.”
“But that’s not what happened.”
“No.”
Suddenly aware of the lack of people bustling around us, I pulled out my phone. It was two minutes past ten. “Crap. I’m late.”
“Uh-oh. Isn’t this the professor who makes an example of you if you’re late?”
Impressive. “You remembered.” Groaning, I pushed my phone into my bag. “I sorta feel like skipping now.”
His mouth turned up on one side. “What kind of university employee would I be, to encourage you to skip class the last week of the semester?”
“We’re just reviewing. I have an A. I don’t really need the review.”
We stared at each other.
I angled my head and looked directly into his clear eyes. “You don’t have a class?”
“Not until eleven.” Not for the first time, the feel of his gaze drifting over my face was like a soft breeze, or the lightest possible touch. He stopped on my mouth.
Lips parted, my breathing slowed as my heart rate sped. “You never did sketch me again.”
His eyes darted to mine, but he didn’t answer, so I thought maybe he didn’t remember his texted request.
“You said you were having a hard time doing it from memory. My jaw. My neck…”
He nodded. “And your lips. I said I needed more time staring at them and less time tasting them.”
I nodded. Good God, what did he not remember?
“A very foolish thing for me to say, I think.” He was staring at my mouth again.
My lips tingled from his focused perusal. I wanted to rub my fingers across them. Or graze them with my teeth to stop the tickling sensation. When I wet them with my tongue, he sucked in a breath. “Coffee. Let’s go get coffee.”
I nodded, and without another word, we walked toward the student center, the busiest place on campus at this time of day.
“So you wear glasses, huh?” We’d been sitting at a tiny table, sipping our coffees and enduring a decidedly uncomfortable silence, so I’d blurted the first viable thing that entered my brain.
“Um. Yeah.”
Great. I’d just brought up that night. But shouldn’t I bring up that night? Shouldn’t we talk about it? Shouldn’t I ask him if he was pushing me away because he was the class tutor, or because of those scars on his wrists?
“I wear contacts. But my eyes get tired of them by the end of the day.”
Cue the mental picture of Lucas pulling his door open, the apprehension on his face, the glasses transforming him into someone official while the pajamas produced a contrary effect. I cleared my throat. “They look really good on you. The glasses. I mean, you could wear them all the time, if you wanted to.”
“They’re kind of a pain with the motorcycle helmet. And taekwondo.”
“Oh. Yeah, I can imagine.”
We were quiet again, with forty minutes until his class and my rescheduled bass practice time. “I could sketch you now,” he said.
For no good reason, my face flamed.
Luckily, he was reaching into his backpack, withdrawing his sketchpad, and turning to a blank page. He took the pencil from behind his ear before looking across the table at me. If he noticed my heightened color, he didn’t mention it. Without a word, he leaned back in his chair, the pad on his knee, and started drawing, his pencil making the effortless, sweeping arches of someone who knows what he’s doing. His eyes moved from the pad to me and back, over and over, and I sat silently sipping, watching his face. Watching his hands.
There was something intimate about modeling for someone. I’d volunteered as a model once in my junior year art class, for extra credit. Severely lacking in drawing skill, I’d jumped at the extra two points without stopping to consider that I would be sitting on top of a table for an entire class period. Giving a classroom of teenaged boys free rein to stare at me for an hour was a whole new sort of awkward. Especially when Jillian’s boyfriend, Zeke, started his portrait with my chest. He stared unabashedly, showing off his artistic efforts to his tablemates while I flushed and pretended I couldn’t hear his wisecracks about nips and cle**age and how he wished I’d just lose the shirt altogether—or at least unbutton it.
“Most artists begin with the head,” Ms. Wachowski said as she looked over his shoulder. Zeke and the other boys at the table snorted with laughter while I burned with humiliation and the entire class looked on.
