I walk through the large doors, scanning my NU card onto the machine to go through the security gates and I’m in the middle of unknown territory. There are floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, filled with deep brown paperbacks and textbooks. I know it’s a library, but it’stooquiet here. So quiet that the second I accidentally step on the wrong piece of wood, the few people that are in here snap out of their study focus and give a death glare. But it also draws my attention to the one person I wanted to see.
Wren is sitting at a table tucked in the back of the study zones, the only person in her section. She has a pile of books on the right side of her, her laptop displayed in front of her. She looks different in this setting. She’s not sweaty and panting from skating or working out. Instead, she’s got owl frame glasses on, her hair is tied into a high ponytail and she’s wearing a white tank top and shorts, her knee pulled up to her chin.
I walk over to her with the biggest grin on my face and I step on another wrong plank of wood. You’d think that they’d try to make the floors as soundless as possible but no. Wren shakes her head at me, pulling up her glasses to rest on the top of her head.
“Could you be any louder?” she whisper-shouts when I sit across from her.
“Hello to you too, girlfriend,” I say sarcastically, leaning on my elbows, looking at her adoringly. Maybe the cute puppy look gets a lot of girls going but Wren could not look more turned off if she tried. I reach over to tap her glasses and pull them onto her face. “These are cute.”
Her nose crinkles as she rolls her eyes. “Thanks,” she murmurs, looking down onto her laptop and then back to me. “I need you to test me with these questions.” I raise me eyebrows and she whispers, “Please.”
She turns the laptop towards me and I see the list of questions she has in her Word Doc about a book called ‘Atonement.’ I have no idea what that is but the questions seem interesting. Well, interesting if you’re into literature. Is this my pathetic way of admitting that anything that Wren’s into, means I am into it too by proxy.
“Is this all you need me for?” I ask, scrolling through the endless list. She nods, scribbling something down onto a notebook. “Couldn’t Kennedy and Scarlett do this? As much as I know I’m going to enjoy asking these questions, I know I wasn’t your first choice.”
“Do you have any volume control?” she whispers, pinning me a scary look. I didn’t think I was talking that loud but fine. “Scarlett has an exam today and Kennedy’s working.”
“And you don’t have any friends from your class?”
She shrugs before shaking her head. “Just ask me the damn questions, Milesy.”
And I do.
I learn all about the cultural and social setting of the novel and a bunch of other random shit that I don’t need to know. I don’t know how she’s worried about passing this exam when she answers every question immediately and exactly with the answers that she’s written down. I have no idea what most of the stuff she’s talking about means, but it seems like she has a handle on it.
When I finally get to the last question, I turn the laptop back around to her. “What’s next?”
She scrolls through it, picking up her very annotated copy of the novel before typing something down. “I need to write down some last minute notes and then I’m going to do a timed essay.”
“And you need me here for that, why?”
“So you can confiscate my devices. I’ll get too distracted if I have them in front of me. It’s what me and the girls usually do,” she explains. That makes sense. I can barely study when I’ve got anything in front of me. Maybe I should come to the library more often but if she’s here…maybe that’s not a good idea.
“Do you have that little self-control?” I tease, making sure to keep my voice quiet.
“I have a lot more self-control than you do,” she challenges. “I’m just gonna make these notes and then do the essay. You should go and explore while I write.”
“And risk getting death-stared by every person in here? No thanks,” I say, leaning back in my chair, crossing my arms. “I can just watch you study.”
“Fine, you perv,” she murmurs before getting back into the zone.
Watching her study is slightly motivating me. I know I should have brought some of my own stuff with me, to study for exams that aren’t for months, but I would have just got distracted anyway. Have I mentioned how beautiful this woman is? How is she managing to read, write and listen to a podcast all at once? I can’t figure it out for the life of me but her dedication to studying as well as skating is one of the most attractive things I’ve ever seen. I’ve been making paper boats with her spare paper for almost an hour. She’s still not ready to write her essay yet so I’m this close to dying of boredom. I tap her pen with the fluffy end next to the laptop as she types away.
“Wren. Wren. Wren. Wren,” I press and I know it’s about to irritate the fuck out of her. “Wrenny, Wren, Wren.”
She stops typing, slamming the laptop shut dramatically. “What!?”
I smile wide, popping my dimple out and everything. “Hi.”
Her face almost breaks for a second but she sticks her tongue in her cheek before opening her laptop again. She starts typing as she says, “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?” I ask innocently.
“Annoy me like a puppy.”
“Isn’t that what boyfriends are for?”
“Realboyfriends,” she clarifies. “Realboyfriends can annoy me.Realboyfriends carry my books for me.Realboyfriends don’t rest until they’ve given me the best orgasm of my life. But you, Miles Davis, are my fake boyfriend.”
