Never Sweeter(22)

It was like hearing a gunshot, despite the fact that he was whispering.

And god, the eye contact he made. She couldn’t deal with it.

She had to glance down at her hands as they exchanged words.

“But just so you know…I don’t think you’re hideous.”

“Okay, well that doesn’t really make any difference to”

“I mean that was all just me being a shallow asshole. Because clearly, you are not hideous at all. You have all the hair and those dark eyes and the real pouty top lip and…and you know,” he said, but she didn’t.

Not until he made a certain shape with his hands in the air.

An in-and-out shape, of the sort he was not supposed to ever, ever make.

“Did you just mime the curves of my body?” she asked, voice so thick with incredulity and confusion and horror that he jerked back. He shook his head once, hands suddenly flat on the table and eyes mildly panicked, as though he knew he had to back out of this fast.

And he tried to, too. He really tried.

“Nope. No, ma’am. No that is not what just happened,” he said, as firm as you pleased.

But it just as quickly collapsed. He crumbled over one eyebrow raise from her, face briefly scrunching in a way that would have been adorable if this wasn’t the weirdest thing of all time. He even half facepalmed, and followed it with an apology that somehow sounded like someone wincing.

“Please, can we pretend that is not what happened? I don’t know where that came from; it was super weird and I’m so sorry. I promise to never mime your body again.”

“It’s cool. It’s really fine. Let’s just go back to studying.”

“Yeah. Thank you.”

God, he sounded so relieved. Though for the next minute his face stayed the color of ripe tomatoes. And he didn’t write anything or read anything, either. She heard no scratch of a pen on paper. No whisper of pages being turned. Only silence.

Then finally, a far-too-mournful-sounding observation.

“I guess we can’t just expect to shift from enemies to friends without it being occasionally uncomfortable and sometimes full of inappropriate hand gestures.”

“Is that how you saw me? As your enemy?”

He didn’t look up at her when she said it.

Or when he answered, in the lowest possible tone.

“No. I was…I was just mostly talking from your perspective.”

“And what was yours? How did you think of the shit between us?”

“I don’t know. I think you want me to say a game, but that wasn’t true. It never felt like a game to me. It felt like I was trapped behind glass watching a really shitty version of myself operating my body.”

Now he looked up at herright when she needed his eyes to stay down.

She knew she appeared too shaken by what he’d just said. She knew that he would see.

And he did. He just took it a different way from the one she’d expected.

“Though that’s not to absolve myself of responsibility. I don’t want to do that. I just…I don’t know how else to explain what it was like. I would go home and just be my ordinary self and wonder what the fuck happened. I still don’t know what the fuck happened.”

There were words she wanted to say here, but none of them came out.

Nothing came out. She felt suddenly frozen overmuch to his consternation.

“Letty, are you still breathing?”

“Yeah. I just forgot how for a second.”

“Because you hate what I said?”

“Because you keep saying amazing things,” she said, part of her already wanting to take it back. It revealed too much and seemed too grateful. Her voice trembled in the middle. You could hear the tears in it.

But then he dipped his head to hide his smile, and she just couldn’t.

She had to make it a subject change instead.

“Now, can we actually do some work? I think we’ve written about three relevant words.”

“Well in fairness to us, it’s kind of hard to write relevant words about movies in a library.”

“We can do plenty. This is the part where we get a ton of quotes down so we can jam them into our presentations and essays to make us look super smart.”

“You do that? You, Juliet Judith Carmichael, take shortcuts to look super smart?”

She wanted to hate him for the raised eyebrow, and for using her full name.

But she couldn’t. The most she could manage was suppressing the laugh.

“I’m going to act like you didn’t say that dreaded thing and just skip straight to the question.”

“You really hate it that much, because I th”

“I said, I’m skipping to the question.”

“Okay, cool, cool. What was the question again?”