Page 93 of Any Port in a Storm

“No,” I pout. “But I’m stuck on this section, and Spillinger went away for the weekend. I won’t be able to talk it through with her until after my lectures on Monday.”

“In that case,” Nick muses, “we’ll just have to take your mind off it.”

“And how, pray tell, do you suggest we do that?” Thanks to the way our thighs are still in full contact on the couch, my mind immediately jumps to a very particular way he might distract me.

I issue myself a silent reprimand—that’s certainly not going to happen.

Nick taps my shoulder with his pointer finger. “Allow me to curate your weekend.”

“You’re going to curate my weekend?”

“Yes, that’s what I said.”

“Hmm.” My eyes trace a line of freckles across his nose. “And what does that entail, exactly?”

“Well,” he says, like this is something he’s considered for more than thirty seconds, “tonight, we’re going out.”

“Can I come?” Max peeks his head around the door to his bedroom. “Erin cancelled on me last minute.”

Nick glances to me. I shrug.

“Sure,” Nick agrees. “You can come.”

“Cool.” Max joins us on the couch, forcing Nick to scooch even closer to me. It takes everything in my power to ignore it.

“Where are we going?” I ask coyly.

Nick’s lips turn up. “Secret.”

Max looks between us, a suspicious expression creeping in. “Will I be…in the way, or something?”

“God, no,” I protest at the same time Nick turns violently red and says, “No way.”

Max chuckles. “If you say so.”

Nick takes us to an Italian restaurant in the North End that I know is one of his favorites. “My treat tonight, guys,” he says over the free bread.

“You don’t have to do that,” I argue. “I may be pathetic, but I’m not totally broke. Yet.”

“At least let us pay for dessert?” Max breaks off a piece of ciabatta.

“Okay,” Nick agrees. “But we’re going somewhere else for that.”

I wrinkle my nose. “This is all very mysterious, Nicholas.”

He bumps his knee playfully against mine under the table. “And what woman doesn’t love a man with deep dark secrets?”

“Hmm,” I muse. “You have deep dark secrets?”

Nick looks at me over his water glass. “Maybe just one.”

I don’t know why, but I feel hot all over.

My phone buzzes in my pocket then, shaking the tension right out of the air. “It’s Grace,” I tell them. “She’s in a fight with Leo.”

Max looks up sharply. “She’s still with that guy?”

I consider him carefully from across the table—his curly black hair, stark against his pale skin, a pallor honed through countless hours in his lab. He looks like he’s just one shade away from a total vitamin D deficiency. And at his brown eyes, narrowed now at the phone in my hand.