I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t the intense, pensive expression he was wearing.
No smile.
No amusement in his eyes.
He was just watching me with his head slightly tilted, like he was trying to figure something out.
There was nothing to figure out. He could go figure out his mood swings.
I ripped my gaze from his and went back to my desk, then flipped to an empty page in my notebook.
The smell of cigarettes and something sweet invaded my senses when he leaned toward me, and I wished it was something I could physically push away.
“Hey. I’m really sorry about—about talking to you like that. I didn’t mean to—to be so harsh.”
Every one of my muscles tensed up as I bit down on my bottom lip. Had I already forgotten how that deep, scratchy voice had a disturbing way of getting under my skin?
Apparently I had.
I set my pencil down. “It’s okay, don’t worry about it. Let’s work on this.”
“Yeah, but I just thought you should know?—”
“Dakota,” I said softly, holding his gaze. “It’s seriously fine. Let’s just get this done.” I just needed to focus on finishing this as quickly as possible, and then I could leave. “What kind of music do you want our focus to be? What’re you best at?”
I already knew he was best at classical, but I didn’t want him to know that I knew.
He shrugged. “We could go classical or modern, it doesn’t really matter.”
It kind of did matter because this project was thirty percent of our grade.
“Okay. Well who’s your favorite composer?”
“Tchaikovsky. Who’s yours?”
“Beethoven,” I said. Classical was what I’d grown up learning, so it worked out perfectly.
Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe we wouldn’t have to spend too much time together to write something.
Or, better yet, maybe I could just write it on my own and tell him he didn’t need to do anything, that I could just pretend he’d helped.
Yeah.
That was a perfect plan.
“Alright. Let’s do something classical-inspired then, maybe with a slight modern influence?”
I glanced over at him, but he was rifling through his backpack for something.
“So…what key do you want to do it in?”
“I don’t really have a preference.”
Not really helpful. “Okay…how about E minor?”
“Sure. Whatever you want, Reese.”
The way he said that in his scratchy, deep voice raised goosebumps on my arms.
