“Dance with me.”
He blinked. “Excuse me?”
I unplugged my headphones and hit play. Music flooded into the room.
“Dance with me,” I repeated, grabbing his hand.
But his arm stayed stiff, locked at his side like he’d been carved out of unwilling marble.
I groaned, already breathless as I started shimmying around him. “Do you ever get tired of being so uptight? Seriously, I will happily pull the stick out of your butt whenever you want. I won’t even make you beg. All you have to do is ask...nicely.”
“I don’t have a stick...anywhere,” he muttered, ears pink, refusing to move even an inch.
I snorted. “You’re cute when you lie. Because when you lie, you don’t evenknowyou’re lying. You genuinely believe whatever nonsense is spewing from your mouth.”
I spun in closer, bumping his shoulder with mine, grinning. “You think you’resostoic, Mr. Tough Guy, but you’re not. You’re an adorably awkward boy who falls for his own fantasies”
I pinched him in the side, right above his hip. He jolted—a tiny, scandalized convulsion—and a single laugh burst free.
“Aticklish, adorably awkward boy who falls for his own fantasies.”
Another defenceless laugh escaped his tight security, and I laughed with him, delighted. Hearing him laugh made medelighted. I continued to pirouette around him in a messy orbit, waving my arms like some deranged, pastel-colored planet, letting the music crash through me in one last surge of delusional bravery.
And he continued to watch me twirl and flail and giggle, his cheeks a shade of cherry red so vivid it could’ve been evidence. His eyes were bright, too—too soft, too focused, toosomething—for a man allegedly above dancing, emotions, or basic silliness.
But just as the song swelled, his hand shot out, fingers wrapping around my wrist and tugging me back toward him. I barely had time to register what was happening before he spun me once—effortlessly, like he’d done this before, like he wasn’t supposed to be good at this but somehow was—then dipped me without warning.
I laughed in surprise, stomach hiccupping, his arm firm at my back, the other gripping my waist. My eyes flew to his, wide and beaming, and for one suspended second, we just...looked at each other, both a little breathless, both smiling like we’d accidentally broken some unspoken rule.
Then the music tipped into a quieter, introspective bridge, and the spell thinned, ruining the moment. He straightened me almost immediately—too quickly, like he’d suddenly remembered himself—and let his hands fall away. The space rushed back between us. I slowed, stopped, exhaled.
“It didn’t work,” I said finally.
He frowned. “What didn’t?”
“My mom. Hervoice. It’s still ringing in my ears. I couldn’t dance her out of me.”
Khalifa stepped closer, cupped both palms around my ear like he was about to tell me a secret, took a dramatic breath, and bellowed: “Leave Lillian alone!”
The shout reverberated through my skull. I yelped, half laughing, half ducking, because the heat of his breath grazed my neck on the way out, sending an involuntary shiver darting down my spine.
He pulled back, eyebrows lifted, pleased with himself. “Did it work?”
I paused, letting the buzzing settle into something manageable. “Yes,” I said dryly. “But only because you popped my eardrum and spit in my ear.”
His face crumpled in mortification as he reached up, sweeping his thumb over the curve of my ear in gentle apology. “Sorry.”
I turned the music off and bent, collecting my papers, stacking them with more force than necessary. My mother’s relentless voice was gone now, replaced by the humiliatingly persistent replay of Khalifa casually sticking his finger into my ear like it was the most normal Tuesday activity.Fantastic. I’d traded lifelong trauma for...ear intimacy? Growth?
He crouched beside me and started helping gather stray notes, his long fingers smoothing the creased corners before passing them to me. We worked inaudibly, knees bumping, my breath still a little uneven from my impromptu dance therapy.
And every time his skin skimmed mine, a miniscule spark shot through me. Probably static electricity.
Probably.
When the floor was visible again, he looked around, then back at me. “Are you tired?”
“Not really,” I said, adjusting my long waves where they’d slipped loose from my banana clip. “Why?”
