"You're doing that thing with your jaw again. The clenchy thing."
"I don't do a thing with my jaw."
"You absolutely do. It's like—" She put down her mug and demonstrated, exaggerating the tension in her face until she looked like an angry cartoon character. "This. You're doing this."
Despite the wanting, the frustration, and the complete collapse of his carefully structured existence, he felt his lips twitch.
"I don't look like that."
"You totally look like that. All the time. Every time I leave a cup somewhere. Every time I reorganize something. Every time I exist, basically."
"That's not?—"
"It's fine." She grinned, bright and impish, and picked up her coffee. "I think it's cute."
Cute.She thought his psychological torment was cute.
He watched her take a sip of coffee, watched her eyes close in appreciation, and watched her throat move as she swallowed. The collar of his shirt—hisshirt—slipped another inch off her shoulder.
Four thousand three hundred and twenty-four minutes.
She wandered towards the refrigerator, mug in hand, still talking about color theory and contrast ratios and things he should have been paying attention to because they involved his team and his arena and his professional responsibilities.
But then she opened the fridge and bent over slightly to examine the contents, giving him a perfect view of those tiny shorts stretching across curves that he had absolutely no business looking at.
Look away,he told himself.She's a guest. She's a colleague. She's temporary.
"Do you have any yogurt that isn't arranged in a weird little formation?" she asked, still bent over, still completely destroying his ability to form coherent thought.
"They're sorted by expiration date."
"Of course they are." She grabbed one from the back—the wrong one, a peach that didn't expire for another week when she should have taken the strawberry that was closer to its date—and straightened up. "You're impossible, you know that?"
"I've been told."
"By who? Your label maker?"
"My coach. My trainer. My—" He stopped, and took a breath. "Everyone, generally."
She laughed, that warm sound that seemed to fill the entire kitchen, and leaned against the counter to eat her yogurt. His shirt gaped slightly at the neckline, revealing the delicate architecture of her collarbone, and he had to look away.
His gaze landed on the refrigerator.
Specifically, on the team magnets. He had one from every team they played and he'd organized them last night after she'd gone to bed. They were color-coded into a precise gradient with reds on the left, oranges in the middle-left, yellows in the center, greens in the middle-right, blues and purples on the right. A perfectly satisfying rainbow.
Now there was a gap where the green magnets should have been. And his favorite magnet, the small Emerald Enforcers logo that he'd gotten from a charity event three years ago, had been moved to the completely wrong side, nestled among the oranges like it belonged there.
"You moved my magnets."
She looked up from her yogurt. "What?"
"The magnets." He pointed. "You moved them."
"Oh." She glanced at the refrigerator. "Yeah, I was looking for a grocery list. Thought you might have one under?—"
"They were organized."
"They're magnets."
