I just grinned.
“All right,” he said. “Now hydro means ‘water’ and philos means ‘love,’ so hydrophilic means ‘water-loving.’ That means if you are a water molecule and I am, say, a glucose molecule, I will be attracted to you because we’re both polar.”
He propelled himself forward and grabbed hold of the cords connected to my harness so that we were hovering a mere half foot apart. I knew he was only talking about regular old science-y chemistry, but his voice had this natural purr to it that made me want to make a lame joke about chemistry chemistry.
“Hydrophobic is the opposite,” he continued, blissfully unaware of my inner thoughts. “It’s ‘water-fearing.’ Although that’s misleading—it should be hydro-doesn’t-give-a-rat’s-ass. If you’re, again, a water molecule, and I’m an oil molecule, you have poles, but I don’t. We don’t repel each other, exactly; we simply don’t bond.” He pushed off from me and floated five feet away.
I frowned at the distance between us. “I think I like hydrophilic better.”
He didn’t catch on. Which was probably a good thing.
“Do you understand now?”
“Yep. But that wasn’t the part I was having trouble with.” Adrian stared at me blankly. “Thanks, though; I liked the three-D demonstration.” I smiled and did another somersault in midair, managing to get upright again without Adrian’s help. I grinned at him and pressed the release button on the harness, plummeting toward the ground at a frightening speed. Luckily, I landed on an overstuffed couch, let go of the button, and bounced, doing another somersault on the way up with a lighthearted “whoo-hoo!”
Adrian crossed his arms, a smile clinging to the corner of his mouth. “So you think sledding down a hill is a near-death experience, but you don’t mind doing gymnastics twenty feet in the air?”
“If I fall here, I’ll land on a sofa,” I said in a reasonable tone. “If we crash on a hill, I’ll hit a tree. Sofa. Tree.” I looked at him, holding out my hands and pretending to weigh the options.
He grinned and propelled himself toward me until he could grab hold of my cables again. “Is there anything else you don’t understand?”
Oh, the things I didn’t understand. But I shook my head, because I was having way too much fun with the harness thing to do homework.
“Good,” he said with a slight smile. “Now—we’re going to do something I’ve never done before that I’ve always wanted to try.” For about two-and-a-half heartbeats, I thought he meant kissing me. But he followed his previous statement with “Lucian’s not coordinated enough, Julian’s got a stick up his ass, and Mariana and Dominic would rather die than do anything fun. So—you ready?”
I frowned at him, intrigued. “You haven’t told me what we’re doing yet.”
He looked around the library and held out his arms, smiling the biggest smile I’d ever seen him smile. “We’re going to play tag.”
And he dropped straight down like a rock, hit a sofa, and bounced back up, landing on a bookshelf and using it as a springboard to leap a quarter of the way across the library. I laughed, heading toward the same bookshelf. I was about to push off when I paused.
“Are these steady?” I called to him halfway across the room.
“They’re bolted to the floor, each other, and the ceiling. Just try not to knock any books off.”
I grinned. “Okay!”
Carefully planting my bare feet on the ledge, I grabbed on to a cast-iron light fixture affixed to the edge, bent my knees, and jumped. I probably weighed half as much as Adrian, so I didn’t get very far, but enough to reach another bookshelf and leapfrog myself off that one as well.
Waiting for me to get the hang of it, Adrian clung to the side of a shelf until I was only one spiral-formation away. Grinning, he jumped to one of the sliding ladders on the edge of the room. I followed on a ladder fifteen feet to his right. We both ran along the bookshelves, holding on to the ladders as they slid. Once they picked up momentum, we hopped on and rode them around the room. Luckily the tracks curved at the corners of the library, so we didn’t crash into the walls.
Right when he reached the gigantic fireplace at the far end of the library—where the curved tracks abruptly stopped—he sprang off the ladder and flipped through the air to land, spiderlike, on a bookshelf twenty feet away. I jumped, too, landing ten feet lower, intending to climb up and tag him, since it seemed like I was “it.”