“Maybe we should implement a no phones policy,” he muses above my incoherent name-calling, tapping the screen alive to read whatever incoming message has been banished to the nearest intermediate server.
I’m nearly out of breath, my extremities windmilling around. “You’re better than this.”
“I’m really not.”
With a dramatic throat clear, Knox begins reciting my mystery sender’s message. “‘Staten, it’s Leif. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you since the hockey game. Can we talk? Please? I know it’s late, but I really need to see you.’”
My study buddy from the fiery pits of hell cackles like a maniac. “Oh, great. Your little boy toy has finally come to his senses.”
I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s like someone has just pulled the plug in my head, and every smart comeback and feminist urge inside of me goes swirling down the mental drain.
Leif wants to see me? He hasn’t stopped thinking about me? Am I dreaming right now?
“Give me that!” I yell, jumping and knocking into Knox’s immovable body, doing everything in my power to claw for the answer to all my orisons. It taunts me from above, shining its blue light on me, reminding me of the pecking order that I seemed to have forgotten.
“You’re not seriously falling for this crap, are you?” Knox grumbles, looking down at me from his hypocritical highhorse, his eyes slitted with a thread of inextinguishable hatred that remains unclipped.
Pawing for my phone is never going to produce the desired outcome, so I switch tactics at the last minute and play dirty, elbowing this half-witted hockey hunk in the stomach to try and get him to release it. God, it sounds like I’m dealing with some rambunctious puppy,nota full-grown man.
As expected, my plan operates flawlessly, the force from my expertly placed elbow causing the device to fall from Knox’s hand and into my lap. Then, while he’s still regaining his bearings, I scramble toward the farthest corner of my room, thumbs twiddling away at the keyboard.
I don’t know what I’m typing. I’m existing on raw adrenaline at this point, and I’ve never felt so liberated before.
Knox wheezes, cradling his abdomen. “Wait—don’t…don’t act desperate.”
Of course. Leave it to Knox to pop my bubble of happiness. My succor vanishes along with it, and the pyre in my stomach—furnished by the monotonous catch of a bellows—coughs up a smokescreen that prevents such emotions from ever returning.
“Excuse me?” I say with a controlled lunacy, failing to screen my next set of words for safe departure. “Wanna try that again?”
“I don’t mean it like that. I’m trying to help you.”
“By insulting me?”
“By offering you my untapped wisdom,” he corrects. “Do I need to remind you that you’re in the presence of fuckboy greatness right now?”
Fuckboy greatness? If this is what the world has come to, Knox would’ve done me a favor by hitting me with his car. “That’s an oxymoron.”
“Hey! Don’t call me a moron.”
“Jesus,” I mumble.
I have a meteor shower of questions for him, but I settle for one thatdoesn’ttrigger my more violent tendencies. “What happened to just being myself? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do if you want to impress your crush?”
Knox’s gaze swings over me in a pendulum, taking inventory of the before picture that he’s probably envisioning in his head right now. “You’ve gotta be yourself plus a little more. Tailor your interests to his.”
I’m not sure what’s worse: relying on Knox for dating advice or having the same hindsight as an equipment-less spelunker tossed into the intestinal tract of a cave system. At best, it’s a grotto of dead ends. At worst, it’s a hibernaculum for some fearmongering creature.
“Look, if lover boy has any brain cells in that hollow head of his, he’d already know that he has a good thing standing right in front of him.”
“That sounded very compliment-y.”
And I don’t hate it.
“You know, I’m actually a pretty nice dude,” Knox tells me, his tone bleeding through me like whiskey over the pillowy platform of a bottom lip.
I’ve never been a sucker for accents, but his Minnesotan one is rounded around the edges, elongating vowels and flattening them in the same breath with a practiced tongue. It’s irresistible.
“You are.”
