His eyes slid to the bottle, and the smallest crease appeared between his brows. “You’re unbelievable.”
“So you’ve said.”
A quiet, incredulous sound escaped him, but he reached for it anyway. The plastic shifted in his grip, lifting as his throat worked with each swallow.
Light caught at the hollow of his neck when he lowered it, just visible above the collar of his shirt. It would take very little to press him back into the chair and feel that rhythm under my hand.
Soon.
He cleared his throat. “Anything else, Professor?”
Everything under my skin reacted to that tone.
“Sit back,” I said.
He blinked. “What?”
“You’re curling over the table. Fix it.”
Head cocking, he stared at me, popping his tongue once off the roof of his mouth before leaning back into the chair slower than a fucking geriatric turtle.
“There.Am I surviving correctly now?”
Oh, this brat.
“Not even close, sweetheart,” I said. “But it’s an improvement.”
The eye roll came quick, but a smile still tugged at the corner of his mouth.
Fucking cute.
His phone buzzed against the desk, the vibration dragging it half an inch across the wood where it lay face down.
Turning it over, he glanced at the screen, and tension pulled tight across his shoulders.
That same tension carried through his throat, a subtle line drawing from his jaw to the base of his neck as he swallowed around nothing.
“Archibald.”
His thumb pressed into the cracked seam of the case, catching on the split plastic like he needed something solid to hold on to.
“It’s my mom.”
I was on my feet before the words finished leaving his mouth. The distance between us closed without thought, my hand finding the back of his chair first, then the table, close enough to see the glow of the screen reflected faintly in his glasses.
A block of text.
A link.
A blurred preview he hadn’t opened.
“She sends these every time.” The words came out uneven. “Every timea kid goes missing.”
His thumb pressed deeper, nail catching against the cracked plastic, worrying the same spot again and again.
“Show me,” I said, voice low enough it didn’t break the space between us.
His grip tightened once more around the phone before loosening, the device shifting in his hand as he turned it slightly toward me without fully letting go.
