His shoulders relax as he tries to suppress a giddy grin and I feel it too. The way the air around us vibrates with possibility, the way the tension between us is pulled so taut but relief finally feels on the horizon.Please kiss me, I think to myself, desperate for my read on him to be right.
“Okay,” is all he says, but his assessing gaze says so much more. He takes his time looking me over, like he’s committing my body to memory, his gaze heated but so painfully casual. Like he actually has all the time in the world. My body hums with an incessant urgency, willing him to do something,anything. Because I am paralyzed, afraid to move for fear that I might miss the exact moment that I burst into flames or erupt into light. He glances away, clearing his throat. “Now that’s cleared up,” he says, smirking, “we should probably get to studying.”
I quickly recover from the disappointment, brazenly asking him, “So to be clear, you apologize?”
“I apologize,” he says, his smile growing.
I spin around, making my way to my printer and pulling out two copies of the reading we’re meant to be doing.
“Now we’re even,” I say with a subtle arch of my brow, handing him his copy. “Wait! Actually—” I grab his hand without thinking, realizing I did so when I feel the warm embrace of his hand in mine. I don’t let go.
I lead him to my room, recognizing what this seems like and deciding that I don’t care. I playfully shove him toward my bed, surprised when he lets himself fall into it.
“Nowwe’re even.” I’m smiling, incapable of stopping, because when I look at him embedded in my sheets, he is too.
“You getting in here, Beckett?”
Heart racing, I will my nervous system to chill out.I will not be over eager, I decide from one moment to the next, aware of how this man’s presence is making it difficult to be consistent. I sprawl myself opposite him and hand him a pen, shaking my article for emphasis.
“We have work to do,” I remind him, smiling down at my reading. I hear him hum in acknowledgement and force myself to concentrate on something other than Ben Cabot for even a minute.
The sun is nowhere to be found by the time our study session nears its end, and the flutter in my stomach has yet to abate. Not that reading about romance novels has done anything to ease the sexual tension so thick, I could cut it with a knife. When I look across to Ben, his large frame exaggerated by the way he’s so casually laid himself opposite me, he’s squinting at the paper as if that will help him understand what he’s read any better.
“I think what she’s trying to say,” I start to explain, “is that even though these novels are often expressing real problems or realistic relationship dynamics, they’re ultimately unrealistic. That in an ideal world, these issues would no longer persist, we would have achieved real equality, and we would be free to choose relationship dynamics that seem unstable or unhealthy, or whatever.” He’s squinting again when I meet his eyes, more questions now than before I bothered trying to explain this stupid paper.
“So you’re saying women want a world where they can be submissive, or stay with the toxic guy, without judgment?” I ponder this for a moment, unsure.
“No I think… I think women like to read about worlds where women get to choose what it is they want. They want to experience vicariously through these texts, what it is like to realize what you want and actually, for once, choose it.” I feel my cheeks heat at my interpretation. “Like, these books aren’t some project in humanity, but they do allow women to imagine what it would be like to go after what they want and get that happily ever after, peanut gallery be damned.”
He’s contemplating me, studying me like he could discover whatever he wanted to know if he just looked hard enough. “Paper get boring?” I quip, suddenly feeling vulnerable and wishing it would stop.
“What doyouwant, Olivia?” He says this contemplatively, but his gaze intensifies.
“What do I want?” I laugh, knowing full well what he’s referring to.
“Yeah. It’s a simple question,” he shoots back, a playful grin failing to hide the seriousness in his gaze.
My stomach flutters, my mind reformulating what I should say over and over again, deciding it’s too risky. Yes, I want him to kiss me. Yes, I want him to close this distance and touch me. But verbalizing that feels like a quick ride to vocalizing other things, and that scares the shit out of me. I just got out of a relationship with hisbrother, for god’s sake. The thought train I’m on has me stalling, engaging in old strategies to get myself out of this corner I’m starting to feel backed into. I give him a look that says the answer is obvious, subtly rolling my eyes.
“I want what every girl wants— a happily ever after. I told you, I’m just like the rest of them,” I shrug, pleased with my response.
“Don’t do that Olivia,” he says, his gaze steady and heated as he tilts his head to the side, deciphering me. The move unsettles me and I feel hot under his scrutiny.
“Do what?” I play dumb, but heat creeps up my neck.
“Deflect,” he says with nonchalance, like heisn’taware of his question’s significance. Something at my core heats and twirls around itself simply because of the way he’s regarding me.
“I told you. It’s not my fault you don’t like my answer,” I tell him, quickly opening a random book. Before I can even pretend to be deep in intellectual thought, Ben’s oversized hand— really it’s unsurprising he plays basketball— juts out and steals the book away.
“Ben!” I leap across my bed ready to steal back my book and wind up unceremoniously straddling the book snatcher. I’m acutely aware of the way my body is resting on his, the hardness of his quads and the warmth of his skin radiating beneath me. He looks up at me through thick lashes, a sheepish grinpainted on his stupidly perfect face. He holds the book up, as if inspecting it.
“Well, this isn’t on our reading list.”
“I was—” I reach out to grabSocial Principles and the Democratic Stateonly to find my wrist clutched in Ben’sotheroversized, wonderfully warm, rough but not too rough hand.
“What do you want, Olivia?” he cuts me off, his grin wavering, his jaw set in determination and restraint.
And I’ve seen this look before. Not in real life, and not directed at me, but I’ve read it in books and I’ve seen it in movies. This is the moment where the dam breaks. Where their carefully charted plans fail, and everything goes to shit in the most spectacular of ways. It’s the moment they say “fuck it” and disregard the world around them. And I feel myself at the precipice of this moment with Ben, and I am terrified and electrified at the same time. I’ve never been on the other side of this kind of disaster.
