“Is it snowing already out there?” he asks.
“Yeah, just a little.” I take off my coat and kick off my boots.
He takes my coat from me and hangs it up in the closet. “I heard we’re supposed to get some snow off and on today,” he says.
“Oh. Cool.”
For a second, we just stand there. We’re making small talk about the weather. Not awkward at all.
“You hungry or thirsty or anything?” Nick asks.
“No, I’m good.”
“Okay, we can head to my room then.”
I follow him to his bedroom, and he shuts the door. I pull out my laptop from my backpack.
“Should we start with studying for your College Algebra midterm?”
“Yeah, that sounds good.”
For the next thirty minutes, I run through the study guide with him. We work through some problems. He does well overall, solving most of the practice equations on his own. He hits a snag on a couple of them, but I work through them with him and he manages to get the correct answer.
After that, I read over his term paper for his Media Research class.
“Thank fuck I don’t have to study for a test for this class,” he says. “This paper is kicking my ass. Ten pages is a lot of space to fill.”
I finish reading through it, making notes on the portions where he should go back and rework.
“This is good,” I say. “I noticed your citations are a little messy, though. It’s really important that you’re correct and consistent with those.”
“I don’t get why my professor is such a stickler about citations. We have to format quotations and excerpts in such a random way. It’s a pain in the ass to do, and it makes the text look so weird.”
“That’s the rule of citing research. You have to follow the format correctly and consistently.”
Nick drops his pen on his desk and runs a hand through his hair. “Everyone and their damn rules,” he mutters while looking off to the side.
It takes a second for me to register the irritation in his tone.
“Hang on, is that a dig at me?” I ask.
“No.” He doesn’t even look at me when he answers. He just frowns at his laptop screen and starts typing.
“It feels like it is, though,” I say.
“It’s not.”
He’s still not looking at me. He still sounds irritated. I sit there quietly, wondering if I should just drop it. But I can’t just let this go. If he has a problem with what I want out of our fake dating setup, then I want us to talk through it. I really didn’t want to have an uncomfortable conversation about what happened between us the other night, but I don’t want him to be upset and making passive aggressive comments about it either.
“Nick, something is clearly bothering you. Talk to me about it.”
He stops typing and leans back in his chair, then huffs out a heavy breath. “I really don’t feel like talking to you, Poppy.”
I lean back at the curtness in his tone. “I don’t understand why you’re so pissed.”
“I’m not pissed.”
“You sound pissed.”
