Arrogant Bastard(26)

I snicker as she scribbles today’s date on the corner of her paper and throws her pen down. “Yes, Jensen. I’m fine.”

I don’t believe her.

The eight a.m. bell rings and Mrs. Davenport takes attendance. Claire Fahnlander watches us from the corner of her eye. I swear she’s plotting all the ways she thinks she’s going to make me hers.

She’s in for a world of disappointment if she thinks I view her as anything other than a piece of ass, and even then, I have no intention of fucking around with that. She’s probably been with half the school, or at least anyone with a football jersey and a half-smile.

“You’re different now,” I whisper to Waverly. She stares straight ahead at the white board.

“Can’t get anything past you, huh.” Her voice is hardly audible.

“So you did it. I know that much,” I cross my arms and sit back in the chair, not even attempting to fight the grin consuming my lips. I lean over to her, whispering into her ear, “But the biggest question is, were you thinking of me when you came?”

Waverly jolts and pushes her chair back, causing a metallic grinding noise to beckon all eyes our way. Mrs. Davenport stops yammering about reactants and holds her marker in the air. She scans the classroom and spins around, resuming her lecture with an air of annoyance in her tone.

There’s nothing I enjoy more than watching a girl squirm from the heat of my stare. She was a delicate flower when I met her a few days ago. Now she’s blossoming right before my eyes.

Quiz sheets are passed to us and the teacher rains silence upon the classroom and mutters something about an hour.

An hour to take a quiz? I flip the sheet over. It’s thirty questions. I hate when teachers give way too much time for these. She probably wants some quiet time so she can do a little online shopping or Facebook browsing during work time. No one needs a whole fucking hour to take a thirty-question quiz.

That’s an hour of sitting here with my quiz finished and being unable to breathe a single word to Waverly. As pleased as I am that she touched herself last night, I want to make sure she’s okay. I’m not a complete asshole.

She finishes her test after fifteen silent minutes and turns it in before coming back to her spot and pulling a book out from her bag. I squint to see what she’s reading. Jane Austen. How classy. Of course she wouldn’t read anything modern. I doubt Mark Miller allows his precious daughter to be exposed to modern-day romance and all its oversexed dialogue.

I turn my quiz in and take my sketchpad from my bag along with a carbon pencil. Observing my surroundings, I’m left with minimal options. I can either draw a picture of the radiator to my left, the back of Claire Fahnlander’s narrow head, or Waverly reading. I opt for the latter.

Leaning back in my seat, I rest my pad across my lap, making broad strokes and creating the outline of her book’s profile. Her hair spills down the side of her face, covering all but the silhouette of her pointy nose and her dark lashes that curl up at the ends. There isn’t a speck of makeup on her face, but she doesn’t need it. The fluorescent light isn’t ideal, and the shadows it casts on her aren’t the most flattering, but none of it matters. She’s still fucking stunning.

Ten minutes pass and I’m almost done with the outline. I begin shading, finding myself in the early stages of getting lost and forgetting where I am. I don’t feel like I’m sitting in Chem class drawing my tragically pure stepsister. My mind is blank as I grip the pencil. I use my fingertips to smudge certain areas just a little. My hands will be gray by the time I’m done, but I don’t care.

That’s the beauty of art—it transports me. It makes me forget. There aren’t a lot of things I can lose myself in, but this is one of them. When I draw, I’m not an arrogant bastard. I’m not Jensen Mackey, son of Josiah. I’m not a hundred shades of fucked up in the head.

I’m just me.

Waverly shuts her book and pulls in a deep sigh as if she’s just read a beautiful passage and needs to let it marinate for a bit before she can move on. I know that feeling. I get that way after I draw something I never knew I was capable of drawing.

She turns to me demurely, her eyes falling on my paper and then narrowing as she realizes the girl on the paper is her. “You drew me?”

I shrug. “You were convenient.”

She pulls the sketchpad from my lap and inspects the grayscale drawing. Her eyes soften a bit and she fights a smile, not unlike the first time Juliette found my drawings for the first time.

“You do these?” Juliette asked, flipping through the pages of my sketchpad. Women. Nothing but beautiful women.