She kept her head down when he approached their table in the library. It seemed best to—that way, he couldn’t easily ask her why she had run off like that. He would have to wait until she was completely calm and ready. She might even get a chance to breathe and come up with something casual in the meantime. Something like I just remembered I left my curling iron on. It was even possible that he would buy it, considering how he took his seat. He just did it silently, effortlessly, as though none of this was a big deal.
Girls panicked and fled from him all the time.
It was fine, it was fine.
And then came the note.
Did I do something wrong the other night?
She tried to ignore it, she really did. But there was just something so vulnerable about his writing—he’d pressed own way too hard, and crossed out three lines before hitting on the right one. Plus he had underlined wrong, as though aware of how bad he could be.
She just couldn’t avoid him, or answer him meanly.
No, you didn’t do anything wrong. I really needed to go, she wrote on the back of the paper he had passed her. Followed by a hastily scribbled answer, on his side.
It was more the speed you went at that concerned me.
I didn’t go that fast. I just sort of jogged a little.
You hate jogging. It makes your boobs punch you.
How do you know that?
I overheard you tell Becky Rivero.
So you were just always listening in high school.
You make it sound like I bugged your bedroom.
Did you?
Yeah. Also there was that one time I climbed in the window when you were sleeping and watched you creepily from a corner. Don’t worry though, I’m the hero of this story so it was totally romantic.
She paused there, eyes running over those words again and again. Every bit of sense in her head saying he was fooling around. Then every other bit of sense telling her to panic now.
We should probably get back to work.
Scared you with that romantic thing huh?
I wouldn’t say scared exactly.
Good, because I didn’t mean it like that.
Of course you didn’t mean it like that.
It was just a joke, you know, because of Twilight.
He had drawn little cartoon vampires around the word, but she didn’t feel comforted. She felt unsettled, somehow, as though someone had exchanged her clothes for ones two sizes too small.
I know. Obviously I know that. You spent four years telling me how hideous and unappealing I am to all mankind. I’m not likely to think you suddenly want to date me.
Right. Exactly. It would be pretty weird.
Extremely weird. And ridiculous.
Oh totally ridiculous.
Preposterous, even, she wrote sloppily in the margins of his side—because that was what they’d started to do now. Somewhere in the middle they’d descended into rushed scribbles all around the edges of each other’s words, diagonal and upside down and scrawled in circles.
But that only made his pause more obvious.
His pen hovered, then touched the paper, then went back to hovering. He wrote a word and crossed it out, like he had at the start—only worse than that. Now he seemed pained by it, as though the words were sticking to the insides of his fingers. They wouldn’t flow down the pen, to the point where he just had to talk.
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.”