Which was kind of true.
It was just her brain that kept telling her otherwise.
It kept whispering that his reaction hadn’t been good enough. He’d immediately bellowed at his friend to get the fuck out of there, but he had said very little about the picture he might have taken. And though he’d told her he had nothing to do with it, she couldn’t help wondering. Maybe it was all part of some elaborate prankeven though the word elaborate could never possibly cover something like this. To pretend to like her, to gradually wear her down, to seduce her in the strangest and most unintentional seeming way…it was all way too much effort for a nude picture he could make a joke of. Even Lydia had deemed the idea ridiculous, and she had spent the half hour prior to being told shaking her head over them dating.
He tried to murder you, she had said, which put her firmly in the not-on-his-side column.
If he did something wrong, Lydia would definitely tell her. She would know.
There was just no way.
“Are you okay honey?”
He leaned very close to whisper the words. So close his breath brought up goosebumps in places they didn’t usually occur, like the side of her throat and the curve of her jaw. And then there was the expression on his faceso anxious and vulnerable.
It made any anger or doubt very hard to maintain.
Harder yet when she saw Chad slink into his seat about five rows down. Then he turned just a little, and she saw the reason for his bowed head. He had a black eye the size of a small grapefruit. The lids had swollen to such an extent that seeing was completely impossible, and there were only a couple of explanations. Fewer than a couple, if you factored in Tate’s fist. She hadn’t noticed at first because it was his left, not his right, and he’d kept it out of her line of sight.
But when he reached down for his textbooks and piled them onto his desk…
There it was. A nice, livid corresponding bruise all across his bulky knuckles.
One of his knuckles was almost as black as Chad’s eye, and twice as swollen. Broken, she thought, then got a hot shock of something through her body. Annoyance, she wanted to call it, but annoyance rarely made your heart thump like this. It didn’t make your palms sweaty.
And it definitely didn’t give your voice an awestruck tone when you whispered a question.
“Did you punch him in the face for taking a picture of me?”
“I literally have no clue what you’re talking about.”
“Just saying the word literally really strongly doesn’t make it sound more true.”
“I didn’t say it strongly. I said it in a totally normal way.”
“Even having it in there at all is kind of dubious.”
“Dubious in what way?”
“The lady doth protest way too much.”
He snorted at that, loud enough to almost interrupt Professor Harrison midflow. He was saying something about the grade criteria for the joint projects, and his attention flicked upward. Only briefly though, and not enough to stop their conversation.
They just had to do it more quietly, leaning close enough to feel each other’s breath on their lips and cheeks. To see each other’s eyes in color-streaked snatches.
“How do you know I’m not protesting the exact right amount?”
“Because your left hand looks like it was hit with a hammer.”
“Maybe it was. Maybe I”
“Had a confrontation with Thor?”
He rolled his eyes, which seemed pretty convincing.
But glanced away, in a manner that wasn’t.
“My hand doesn’t look that bad.”
“I think the middle knuckle is broken.”
“Man, those are some good X-ray eyes you’ve got.”
“I don’t need X-ray eyes. It looks like it’s on backward.”
“It’s fine. It’s nothing. I did it in practice.”
“You haven’t been to practice for a week. Coach stopped me in the hall yesterday to ask if I had seen you and pretty much suggested that I had poisoned your mind.”
He had acted fairly casual until that point.
But now he whipped a look at her. He raised his voice an octave, loud enough that a pixie-haired girl in an absolutely gorgeous red jumpsuit turned around and shushed them.
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah.”
“He bugged you about it?”
“Kind of, yeah.”
“I’ll punch him, too.”
She knew he was being funny. He boxed the air with his one good fist, like some cartoon from the 1930s. Why I oughta, she thought, then wanted to laugh.
So it was a surprise when her voice came out so furious.
“You shouldn’t be punching anyone, ever.”
“Not even when the punching is justified?”
“Punching is never justified, you lummox.”