The cute thing about this is how genuinely confused he sounds.
If an emotion can actually have a “sound” to it.
“I break loads of rules. It’s a personality.”
“Clearly.” He is closer. I do not know how he got closer. I did not authorize for him to get any closer. Up near enough now that I can see the flecks of bronze in the hazel eyes, the small pale scar riding his collarbone above the hoodie’s neckline, the way his mouth tilts when it is deciding to be a problem.
“I came in here for tape.”
“Congratulations. There’s the mops. Knock yourself out.”
“I have completely forgotten about the tape.”
“I can tell. It’s very moving. A grown man, undone by adhesive.”
He laughs, and that is its own catastrophe, because it is a real one — startled out of him, bright, unguarded, nothing like the showroom smile he wore in the doorway — and the laugh ships another wave of him across the not-distance between us. My body is staging a coup. I can feel it gathering its little troops.
“What’s your name?” he asks.
“Why? Are you writing a complaint?”
“Might be. Depends on how it goes.” His head tips. A piece of dark hair falls, and he doesn’t fix it, which I suspect he knows, which I suspect is half the point. “Come on. You’ve got the prettiest scowl I’ve seen since I crossed an ocean, and I don’t even know what to call it.”
“It’s called ‘leave,’” I say. “Two syllables. You can do it.”
But it comes out wrong.
It comes out warm. It comes out with the corner of my own stupid mouth, lifting,traitor, and he sees it. Something in his expression goes soft with a pinch of delight, and dangerous all at once, and the half-step becomes most of a step, and now there is genuinely very little air left to share, and what there is, is on fire.
His hand comes up.
Slow. Telegraphed, the way you’d move toward something you didn’t want to spook, and the absurd, mortifying truth is that Iwatch it come— the goalie who has built an entire identity on stopping things letting this one sail straight in— and his knuckles graze the line of my jaw. Then his thumb settles just below my cheekbone, his palm warm, and it smells of orange, sugar, and trouble.
The whole left side of my face decides that this,this, is what it was built for.
“There it is,” he murmurs.
“There what is?” I say, and it barely sounds.
“You stopped scowling.”
I have. I am furious about it.
Furious in a low, glittering, full-body way that has gotten its wires badly crossed with something that is not fury at all, and his thumb moves, a small slow arc across my cheekbone, and my eyes do the thing romance novels are always banging on about, the thing I have eye-rolled at in four hundred Goodreads reviews.
They drop to his mouth.
His mouth, which I now see is also doing the thing.
We are both, apparently, doing the thing.
This is a terrible idea,reports the part of my brain still filing paperwork.You don’t know his name. You have known him for the length of a decent song. Tomorrow you have to prove to an entire institution that you are a serious athlete?—
And he tilts his head, and I tilt mine.
The universe’s oldest and stupidest choreography: the warmth of him eclipses the cold, and his breath ghosts over my lips, blood orange, espresso, and every objection I have ever filed gets quietly, comprehensively overruled until…
Voices in the corridor.
