Page 120 of On His Team

Her eyes drop to the pan. Then to the counter. A smile pulls slowly across her mouth. I realize how the sentence sounded only after it’s already sitting between us. I don’t take it back.

Gianna clears her throat and walks toward her bag. “Okay, well. Since I’ve apparently been provided room and board, I have homework.”

She takes the stool beside mine and opens her laptop. We manage to work for about ten minutes. At least she does. I get through half a page before I become aware of her foot resting against mine under the table. I don’t know when it happened. It might have been an accident at first, but neither of us moves, so eventually it stops being one.

Gianna is working on some kind of finance spreadsheet. She keeps squinting at a column of numbers, then checking something on the course site, then returning to the sheet with increasing irritation.

I try to read. Her pen taps against her mouth. I read the same sentence again.

She sighs.

I read it a third time. Then she reaches across me for my charger.

I stare at her. “You unplugged my laptop.”

“You’ll survive.”

“I was working.”

“You’ve been on the same paragraph since I got here.”

That shuts me up because she’s right.

Gianna smiles like she knows it, plugs my charger into her laptop, and goes back to whatever she was doing.

I watch her.

Her hair is starting to dry weirdly on one side. She’s wearing the same sweatshirt with the hole in the cuff that I’ve seen at least four times this semester, and she keeps pushing that sleeve over her hand while she types.

This is what I mean when I say I didn’t know.

I knew Gianna was pretty. Everybody with functioning eyes knows that. I knew she was funny because I’ve heard her make an entire room laugh. I knew I liked talking to her because at some point she became the person I sent pictures of Stanley sleeping to without considering why.

I didn’t know any of that was supposed to add up to this.

Now that she told me, I can’t stop seeing it.

Gianna turns her head slightly. “Are you going to do your homework or stare at me?”

I lean back in the stool. “Trying to do both.”

Her fingers stop over the keyboard. She looks at me. Then her eyes narrow, but there’s color moving into her cheeks.

“You’re getting worse.”

“Me?”

“You know exactly what you’re doing.”

I don’t, which is probably the funny part. But I’m learning.

We eat dinner at the table. Gianna takes one bite of her green beans, then reaches across and steals one of mine. I look at her fork. She chews. She steals another. I move my plate farther away.

Gianna looks personally offended. “Wow.”

She reaches across again, and I catch her wrist.

For a second, we both stop. Her fork is suspended halfway between our plates. My hand is wrapped around her wrist. Her eyes meet mine. The whole thing changes so quickly that it almost makes me laugh.