by Maya Hughes
“Come on, Books, I always work best when I’ve had a beer. And it might help get your creative juices flowing.” From the look on his face I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of getting under my skin if he was joking, but I was sixty percent sure he seriously studied while having a couple beers.
“You’re not really giving me a lot of confidence about what we’re going to be going over today. Do you always do your papers drunk?”
“Getting drunk and having a beer or two are different things. Plus, getting plastered isn’t how I do things during hockey season.”
Glancing around the living room, we didn’t have a place to sit. Not when the couches looked like a herd of unicorns had had an orgy. Chewing on my bottom lip, I grimaced, as that meant we only had one other option unless I wanted to lug all my stuff back to the study room.
“Come with me.” I nodded and led him back into my room where my computer, notebooks, and everything else was already.
“The expedition is getting their first glimpse of a rare sight. After much patience and persistence, the crew is finally able to film the Halstead in her natural habitat.”
Declan’s English accent narration from behind me as he stepped into my room made me crack a smile, even though it shouldn’t. Putting on my serious face, I spun around and motioned to the other chair in my room.
Sliding into my rolling chair, I fired up my laptop and opened our paper.
“Do you want to email me your portion?”
I spun around and banged right into his knee, jumping at how close he was.
“Are you always so stealthy?” I rubbed the spot where his diamond-capped knee had rammed into my leg.
“My skills extend beyond the ice. I’m more than willing to show you how far.” He grinned, and his little dig at me wasn’t appreciated. I didn’t even stop my eye roll this time.
“Let’s get to work. The sooner we finish, the sooner we turn it in and can get out of each other’s hair until the next assignment.”
We sped through the portion of the assignment we’d both taken responsibility for. I read over his work and was pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t a dumpster fire. It was actually pretty good. With a few tweaks it wouldn’t be too far off what I’d completed.
The final point was where we locked horns. He threw up his hands and pushed out of his chair.
“What does it matter if they make these amazing scientific discoveries if they don’t have a way to get those out to the world?” Declan paced across the room.
“They would be increasing the knowledge pool of their communities.”
“Again, if no one knows about it and they can’t disseminate the information, they might as well not have discovered it at all. They need the business and information infrastructure before they can jump right to science breakthroughs.” He sat back down and leaned forward in his chair.
“Sometimes learning and knowledge for the sake of itself is enough.” It wasn’t all about the fame and glory.
“How does that help lift the community out of poverty though? Isn’t that the assignment? We’re supposed to figure out a way to address it, not create a wonderfully educated bunch of people who have no way of improving their situation because they can’t get their ideas in the hands of anyone.”
He stared at me with his arms crossed over his chest, and I racked my brain trying to come up with a counterpoint to his point. A few false starts and I admitted defeat by spinning back around to my computer and typing it out into our paper.
His smug face popped into my peripheral vision as he spun his chair around and sat on it backward. Always so smooth, if I’d tried that move, I’m sure a trip to the ER would have been in my future. As if the wide grin on his face wasn’t enough, he hummed “Eye of the Tiger” like he’d gone toe to toe with an over muscled Russian foe.
“Fine, you made a good point.” My jaw clenched so tight I could probably have cracked a few walnuts.
He threw one of his hands to his chest and made an exaggerated gasp. Lifting his other hand, he smacked the back of it to his forehead and pretended to faint. Fighting the urge to smile, I kept my lips in a straight line. The corners might have creeped up the tiniest bit.
“I appreciate you admitting you were wrong. I’m sure that took a lot out of you.” His full lips were parted in a wide smile, and I tried to imagine what it would look like without teeth. Weren’t hockey players supposed to have missing teeth? Broken noses and stuff? Look like they’d gotten into a fight with a grizzly bear?
“I never said I was wrong! I said your point was more applicable to this assignment.”
“Potatoe, potato. I’ll take what I can get. I feel like I’m one of those people on a documentary channel, making discoveries left and right. Next thing you’ll do is tell me you secretly pole dance at night to make money for school.”
“It’s not too much of an open secret, and my stage name is Bentley.” The sarcasm dripped from my voice, and it was worth it for the look on his face.
His mouth hung open, and he jumped back so fast he nearly toppled over the chair. A grin curled his lips, but I managed to keep a straight face.
“Was that a joke? Or do I need to start frequenting all the strip clubs in the area? Maybe you’d like to give me a little show right now.”
And then my barely stifled grin was gone, and my teeth gnashed together. If I made it through this semester, I wasn’t a hundred percent sure my teeth would. What made it even worse was the vision dancing through my mind of whipping my shirt up and over my head and how his hands would feel on my bare skin. I shook my head to banish those thoughts from my mind. His hands around my waist, trailing up and down my back. Nope! Not going there!
We wrapped up the last of our points in the paper, and I read them over silently while pacing my room as Declan scrolled through his phone. Every so often I’d glance up and catch his eye, but he’d quickly go back to his screen.
The visions I’d pushed aside popped back into my head every time our eyes clashed. A shiver would raced down my spine like a mini torture session as I stared into his eyes. More than once I’d walked straight into the edge of my desk. Cursing under my breath, I rubbed the sore spot and hated that I was falling into his green-eyed, full-lipped, ungodly sexy trap.
“Your turn.” I handed him the small stack of papers I’d printed after we finished the assignment.
“My turn to what?”
“To read it over. I never turn anything in without proofing it at least twice, so you can do the other one. I’ve marked up the things I caught. Here’s the pen.” I held the pen, and he stared at it with his eyebrows scrunched together.
“I trust you, Books. It’s fine with what you got.”
“No, this is an assignment we’re doing together, so you need to look it over too. What if I’ve temporarily forgotten all the rules of English grammar, or I decided to throw in a few curse words?” I arched my eyebrow at him as he slid the pen out of my hand. A small spark of disappointment flared through me that he hadn’t touched my fingers when he took the pen. I needed to get him out of here before my knees gave out and I went full-on mermaid, flopping around on the floor.
“I’d say whatever grade deduction we got for you throwing in a ‘fuck’ or ‘shit’ would be well worth it. Hell, for that kind of behavior from you, I might just be happy not playing all season.” He had a huge grin on his face as he stood and followed in my footsteps, pacing the same track. I sat on the bed, bouncing a little.
It still hadn’t sunk in fully that Declan was standing in the middle of my room. I ran my hands over the thick bedspread. The weather was turning quickly with a cold snap over the weekend. My gaze shot to the papers in his hand as he took the pen he’d been running along his lips, which drew my attention to the perfect vee above his upper lip. His cupid’s bow was so mesmerizing I saw myself running my lips over it. He dropped the pen out of his mouth, and my gaze snapped to the paper as ran his pen
across the sheet.
Had I actually missed something? I’d only wanted him to review it to ruffle his feathers a little and make sure he was pulling his weight. My fingers itched to get my hands on the paper so I could see what I hadn’t caught.
I nibbled on my bottom lip as he paced. The light from my desk lamp caught the thick curls of his light brown strands. His biceps bunched as he held the papers up, flipping through them. And the pen was back to his full lips. I swore he was doing it on purpose.
I had half a mind to call him out on running my pen along his lip, but he’d entranced me with his pacing, and I couldn’t stop staring.
“Take a picture, Books; it will last longer.” He chuckled and peered down at me over the papers in his hands. “You think that by now I don’t know when someone’s checking me out?”
“I wasn’t!” I blurted out way too quickly and loudly to not have been totally checking him out. My spine stiffened, and I ducked my head, examining the incredibly interesting rug I’d picked up before the semester. I’d never noticed that there was a little purple woven in there between the blue and green. The sheets of paper popped into my view as he handed them over to me.
I checked over the couple of suggestion he’d had, kicking myself for forgetting those commas, and slid back up to my computer to make the changes on the document. One final read through of the paper on my screen that was like pulling teeth and I hit submit.
A wave of satisfaction crested as I saw the confirmation email hit my inbox. Declan’s phone pinged, and he got it too. We’d done it. First assignment done with minimal bloodshed. Maybe this semester wouldn’t be so bad.
“We’re good, right?”
“Yeah, we’re good. I was thinking maybe we should work ahead and see what the next assignment is.” I already knew, but I didn’t need to tell him that. He already thought of me like a robot pretending to be a college student; no need to confirm it. Although I didn’t think robots came with the kind of shitty life baggage I carried.
“I’d love to, but I got to go.” He picked up his bag off the floor. And my stomach curdled like I’d asked him out on a date and he’d turned me down. It was a Saturday night. He was Declan McAvoy. The parties across campus waited with bated breath until he arrived.
“Of course, we’ve already run over the time we were supposed to meet anyway,” I said, glancing at the clock on my desk.
“No worries, Books. It’s cool. No need to go into shut-down mode. We can have a longer session next time. I didn’t schedule out any extra time for tonight.” His vagueness told me it was probably something that would erase the tiniest bit of respect I’d gained for him over the last ninety minutes.
Leading him out to the front door, I felt a small kernel of disappointment smack into my stomach, which was stupid. It wasn’t like I expected him to hang out any more than needed to complete the assignment.
This was an Alcott-enforced requirement. It wouldn’t be anything more than a study partnership, no matter what.
11
Declan
“How much longer until you’ll be back with us?” one of the guys from the team asked after we placed our orders with the waitress, who wasn’t Mak. I’d spotted that within ten second of walking through the door.
Not that I was checking on her or anything. At three weeks into the semester it felt like each day stretched on longer than the last. The first few days I got up and got ready with Heath like I was going to practice before it hit me. I wasn’t practicing with them. My hands itched to get out there with the guys and skating side by side as we all fell into a rhythm on the ice. Instead, it was me and Heath running drills and one-on-ones until I couldn’t feel my legs anymore.
I could see Archer laughing his ass off about my being kicked off the team. It made me want to punch something. I let him get under my skin more than I should. Hard not to when your biological father was campaigning for the end of your professional career before it even began.
The vision of skating out onto the ice wearing his number, replacing him with a better, faster version with the crowd yelling my name burned a deep satisfaction into my gut. I wanted that bad. I wanted to see his smug fucking face when I made my first goal, and he’d know it had nothing to do with him. I’d done it on my own, and I didn’t need him.
Clinking glasses brought me back from that fever dream to the carefree people around me. The bar wasn’t too busy because it was only seven on a Friday. Most people had come earlier for lunch or would show up later.
There were a few old games playing on the screens around the bar, and some of the people had their notebooks and computers out. Three Streets had a strict no-studying policy after eight on Fridays, lasting through the whole weekend.
The study and assignment sessions had gone smoothly since Mak had figured out I wasn’t a knuckle-dragging moron. Working together when the other person wasn’t under the assumption that you’d only learned to spell the week before made things easier. Her micromanaging had ratcheted down once she realized I could finish assignments on time and up to about eighty percent satisfaction for her. Our truce had been a silent one.
The way her eyebrows pinched together when she did her proofreading pacing always made me laugh. Maybe it was because she took her glasses off. She run her hands over her eyes like she was recharging their powers and did a methodical back-and-forth pattern across the floor of wherever she was. I don’t think she noticed that she took exactly ten steps in each direction, modifying her gait to hit the wall in any space we were in. I was tempted to take her out into a wide-open space to see if she’d break out into lunges to hit her ten-step method.
Why I noticed this? I had no idea. There were a lot of things I was noticing about her in such close quarters. Like how she rolled her pens under her long, slender fingers on her leg whenever she was thinking. Or how her lip was always shiny and wet when she let it out from between her teeth when she was deep in thought.
These were things I shouldn’t be paying attention to when it came to her, but I couldn’t stop myself. My gaze followed her the second she walked into the room, and all I wanted to do was run my hands along her skin and break the tension building every minute we spent together. I caught her looking at me just as much as I stared at her. Her eyes would dart away, and her cheeks got pink. She was driving me insane.
Pop music played in the background, and glasses clinked behind the bar. She would hate trying to study in this place. She loved her den of solitude back in the library where it was so quiet you could hear a mouse fart. I shook my head, clearing those thoughts away. Why the hell do I care where she wants to study?
Preston drummed his fingers on the table like he always did anytime anything got under his skin, which meant his fingers were practically nubs.
“Don’t worry, Pres. He’s got it under control. Relax.” Heath smacked a glaring Preston on his back. The other guys at the table laughed at Heath’s mantra to everyone: relax. He hadn’t found a situation yet where relax wasn’t his advice.
“He’s right. Every assignment has been an A so far. If we ace the midterm, then there’s no way I can fail the class.” I rolled my bottle between my hands, coating them in cool condensation.
Preston rubbed his hands over his face and along his jaw.
“We need you, man. The junior they have in your spot isn’t cutting it. No offense,” Preston said, turning to one of the other juniors sitting at the table with us.
The kid held his hand up and shrugged. “None taken.”
And then Preston was right back in it. “The practice sessions have not been going well, and the fans are noticing. It will only be a matter of time before this ‘special practice schedule’ lie you’ve been telling is out everywhere. And if the fans know, then the other teams will know. They were gunning for us before; they will be out for blood if we step on the ice without you.”
“You’re making it sound all doom and gloom, Pres. I think it’s an excellent opportunity for us to all step up ou
r game and make sure that if we were to lose a man, we could still dominate out on the ice,” Heath piped up, always trying to look on the sunny side of things. Preston glared at him.
Sometimes Heath’s chill, it-will-all-work-out philosophy was annoying as hell. But I’d allow it in this case because Preston’s nostrils flared and that vein on his forehead bulged as he tried to compose himself.
Heath lounged at the end of our booth like he didn’t have a care in the world. I honestly didn’t think he did. He was relaxed to the point that it sometimes put the people around him on edge.
Preston’s beer thunked down on the table.
“If you’re not back, there goes our streak and our record. You need to stay focused.”
“Have you met Makenna? Do you think there is any chance in hell that I could do anything that wasn’t up to her standards? She’d sooner disembowel herself with a rusty spoon than turn something in she hasn’t proofread fifteen times and forced me to proof at least twice.”
That seemed to satisfy Preston, and he sat back in the booth. His lack of faith in me would have pissed me off if it weren’t for the fact that I knew it only came off that way.
He was freaked out about leaving the ice permanently after graduating. Unlike the Kings, he hadn’t been able to get a development team spot after high school. His school hadn’t had the connections or visibility for scouts. He’d started on the team as a walk-on, and through unbelievable dedication and badassery, he’d become team captain for our senior year. I respected the crap out of him, even if his worrisome mother-hen routine got old sometimes. It came from a place of friendship.
“Well, don’t piss her off. She could always tell the professor if she doesn’t think you’re pulling your weight, and then you’re screwed.” Preston drained the last of his beer.
“How do you know I won’t report her for not pulling her weight? Maybe she’s holding me back from my true Sophomore Seminar calling.”