Page 31

“Thank you,” I say. “Seriously.”

Quinn’s shoulders loosen slightly. “You’re welcome. Drink it before it gets cold. Then we can do the touching thing. If you still want to.”

If I still want to. Isn’t he cute? I take a sip so I don’t laugh.

“Yeah,” I talk into the latte. “I still want to. But I have practice, so it will have to be later.”

His smile doesn’t disappear all at once, it just stops being a smile, like someone unplugged it.

“Oh,” he says. “Right. You do usually have morning practice. And with the scrimmage tomorrow. It’s important. Right?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

I wait for the argument that would normally come if I was dealing with anyone else. Or the pleading of maybe skipping just one practice. But it doesn’t come. Instead, he does the strangest thing…he stands up from his bed, smoothing out the spot he was just sitting, then turns to his desk and dumps out his pens. He starts to line them up by what looks like color, then size maybe? I squint at him as if that will help me understand what he’s doing better.

He does it a few times.

“Quinn?”

Is he malfunctioning? Did I break my roommate?

“Your muffin’s going to get stale,” he says, not looking at me. “The sugar structure changes the longer it’s cold. It’s better if you eat it within twenty minutes of purchase. Thirty at most. I should have gotten it here faster. I did wait for them to pull a fresh tray, so that might help the freshness.”

He rambles, and I slip off of my bed, closing the distance. “Hey. The muffin is perfect.”

He shakes his head and starts to reorganize the desk drawer. I didn’t know people did that. I watch his hands move things into different places, also by size and color. I lift my hand to touch him and then think better of it. If he recoiled, I think it would probably make everything worse. So I sort of hover my hand next to him, close enough to feel his warmth, but not touching him.

“You have practice. You should eat. The carbs will give you energy,” he says, glancing at me and seeming to realize how close I am. He clears his throat, his eyes dipping to my hovering hand. “Protein after. You said Peter runs you hard. I can, uh, look up recovery windows if you want. There’s a lot of data on glycogen replenishment⁠—”

“Quinn.”

He swallows hard and looks at me; he has a highlighter in each hand. And his glasses are slipping down his nose. I push them back up for him with a single finger and smile, resisting the urge to brush the few strands of his hair that fell over his forehead back. He really is adorable. And the innocence in him is a turn on, I’m not going to lie to myself, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be acting on it.

“I appreciate the nice wake up.” My words make other ‘nice’ wake-ups filter in, and I push those out before my sleep pants can become a problem again. “And later is still happening,” I add. “I’m just going to get yelled at on the ice first.”

He blinks as if he’s processing what I just said and realizing that he glitched a little bit. He nods. “After practice.”

“After practice,” I confirm.

He puts the highlighters down. Picks them up. Puts them down again, exactly parallel. Then he sits down at his desk and picks up a book. He opens it and stares down at it, like maybe it has the answers he’s looking for.

I pick up the muffin and make a show out of eating it. I’m not sure exactly what triggered him, but I think he might have a little bit of OCD or something.

“Mmmm, so good,” I say.

He lifts his eyes to me, a smile starting to pull at his mouth, before he starts chewing on his lip. I swallow, wanting nothing more than to free his lip from his assaulting teeth so I can bask in his rare smile. He’s the kind that seems to only smile when he means it, where I smile all the time, no matter what…it’s my default setting.

I take another bite instead of touching his mouth.

“See?” I hold up the destroyed muffin. “Not stale. Pretty sure that makes it a scientific miracle.”

That gets me a bigger smile, and I want to punch the air in celebration. But I don’t. He doesn’t respond before he shifts his eyes back to the book in his lap.

I finish the latte standing up, in one long gulp, because I don’t want to be late. It’s probably a good thing I woke up to the scent of it, because otherwise I would have been late and then later wouldn’t have happened today, because Peter probably would have killed me.

“I’m gonna get dressed,” I tell him.