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“Why me?”
His brows furrow over those impossibly green eyes, and he bobs his head back as if he hasn’t heard me correctly. The lines of his face are so perfect that even confusion manages to look good on him.
“What are you talking about,” he asks, and I flick my gaze back over to where Tyler sits chuckling with one of the other boys.
“Why would you pick me instead of Tyler or somebody?”
“Between you and me?” Hunter leans forward, and I reflexively do the same, getting so close that I can smell the aftershave he must have just started using. “Tyler hasn’t even read it. I like the guy, but there’s no way I’m carrying him through this project. Not after I tried to talk to him aboutTo Kill a Mockingbird.The guy thought the whole thing was about a literalscout.”
A flash of mirth dances on his face, and a breathy laugh escapes me. It’s impossible to fathom anybody passing up the chance to read and talk about a book like that, but as life has taught me, not everybody sees the world like me. In fact, most people don’t.
“Okay,” I say, his easy manner coaxing me to relax. Hunter is so comfortable in his own skin that it’s hard not to follow his lead. “So, how do you likeThe Odyssey?”
“Love it,” he responds with a confident grin. “It’s like a lesson in leadership, right? Like, no matter what happens, Odysseus figures out a way to handle it and keep moving forward.”
“Yeah,” I give a prevaricating nod. “But all his men die.”
“Huh.” A bemused smile crosses his face, and it’s clear he never considered that before. “Wow. But, that was Zeus’s fault though, right? Like, how can you beat a god?”
“Fair point,” I admit, and he chuckles, clearly pleased to have scored the win.
“Not bad,” he says with a mock triumphant nod. “Who’d have thought I’d get one up on the brains of the class.”
All the air shoots out of me, and my lungs turn into two blocks of ice. I want to ask if that’s what he really thinks, but my mouth is incapable of forming anything resembling an actual word.
He must read it on my face because he ducks his chin and looks me dead in the eye. “I mean, you are, right?”
He’s just gone and reiterated it, and I swear I’m dissolving into a puddle in my chair.
“Anyway,” he shrugs it off and moves on. “That’s why I was thinking maybe we focus on Zeus. Make our project about a god’s perspective, looking down on all the puny mortals.”
“I guess,” I find my voice at last, not wholly convinced that’s the right track to take.
“What were you thinking,” he asks.
“What about Penelope?”
Evidently, every word out of my mouth comes out of left field, because yet again, he looks at me like I’ve got five heads.
“Penelope? She’s barely even in the thing.”
“But that’s just it,” I say as talking about literature does the delicate job of untying my tongue. “She’s the one who waits. Her husband just takes off on this epic journey, meeting all these challenges and fighting all these creatures, but she just stays at home. She loves him so much that she turns everybody else away and waits until the one person she truly loves can come back to her. It might be the biggest sacrifice in the whole story.” The idea rushes out of me in a flood of words, and when I finish, he’s staring at me with this enigmatic look that makes me shrink back a bit. “At least, that’s what it seems like to me.”
I pull my hands into my sleeves and fix my gaze on the center of my desk, unable to lift them to his face. He must think I’m a complete spazz.
“Sold,” he exclaims in golden tones, and I snap my head up to look at him.
“What?”
“Are you kidding?” Every bit of him is shining like he’s got lights under his skin, and the glow is radiant enough that I almost flatter myself like some of it is rubbing off on me. “That’s amazing! That’s exactly the kind of idea I could never have come up with.”
He leans forward again, and again I find myself mirroring him without meaning to.
A conspiratorial gleam catches in the corner of his eye, and he says, “See? This is why I knew I couldn’t carry Tyler on my back through this project.”
Suddenly, he’s leaning back in his chair again, and I almost tip forward into the magnetic space he’s left behind. Folding his muscular arms across his chest, he shakes his head with a look of total satisfaction.
“Brains of the class,” he says again. “I knew I picked right.”
