“Nine days until no more… restrictions.” I rolled my eyes directly at him as his brows danced up and down. “Eh? Eh?”
I couldn’t help checking to see if Lucas was still in the room. He was talking to the Zeta girl he’d spoken to before—but he was watching me over her head.
Benji sidled by on his way to the aisle, a grin splitting his face. “I’ll take Hot Tutors for $200, Alex,” he said in an unnaturally feminine voice before he began humming the Jeopardy theme song. He was still humming it when he smiled at Lucas just before exiting.
I hoped I wasn’t blushing as Lucas fell into step with me, but neither of us spoke until we were outside. Clearing his throat, he gestured toward Benji’s retreating back with one shoulder. “Does he, um, does he know? About..?”
He worried his bottom lip and the small silver ring, a slight frown on his face.
“He’s actually how I figured out… who you were.”
“Oh?” He walked with me toward my Spanish class, as he had once before.
“He’d noticed us… looking at each other,” I shrugged, “and he asked me if I went to your tutoring sessions.”
Closing his eyes for a beat, he took a breath. “God. I’m so sorry.” I waited, hoping he would tell me the reason for the Landon/Lucas charade, finally. We hiked across the hilly campus in silence for a minute or two, every step taking us nearer to my class. Without a single cloud in the sky, the sun warmed us in direct patches of light while we froze in the shade cast by trees and buildings.
“I noticed you the first week.” His voice was soft. “Not just because of how pretty you are, though of course, that played into it.” I smiled, watching our feet as we matched our steps. “It was the way you lean onto your elbows when you’re listening in class, when something catches your interest. And when you laugh, it’s never to get attention, it’s just—laughter. The way you obsessively tuck your hair behind your ear on the left side, but let the right side fall down like a screen. And when you’re bored, you tap your foot soundlessly and move your fingers on the desktop like you’re playing an instrument. I wanted to sketch you.”
We stopped and stood in a square of sun, well away from the shadowed entrance to the language arts building. “Almost every time I saw you, you were with him. But one day, you walked up to the building alone. I was holding the door for several girls in front of you, and I waited for you to catch up. When you reached me, you look pleased, and a little surprised. Unlike the others, you didn’t expect the door to be held for you by some random guy. You smiled up at me and said, ‘Thank you.’ That was the last straw. I prayed you’d never come to a session, and not with him. I didn’t want you to know I was the tutor.
“He took you for granted, even when you stood next to him, holding his hand. Like you were an accessory.” He frowned, and I remembered feeling exactly like that with Kennedy. Often. “I never wanted you to get hurt, but I wanted to take you from him. I had to constantly remind myself that it didn’t matter if you were his or not, because you were on the other side of a line I couldn’t cross. And then you didn’t show up the day of the midterm—or the next, or the next. I worried that something had happened to you. He was kind of reserved the first couple of days. By the end of the week, girls were flirting with him before class, and the way he responded told me what had happened.
“I was sure you’d dropped the class, which made me selfishly ecstatic. Without even knowing I was doing it, I started looking for you on campus.” He stared into my eyes and lowered his voice even further. “And then, the Halloween party.”
I couldn’t breathe. “You were there? At the party?”
He nodded.
“How? You aren’t Greek, are you?”
He shook his head. “I’d fixed the house’s A/C the night before. Maintenance doesn’t do non-emergency stuff on evenings or weekends, but I’m contract labor, so I agreed to do it. When I wouldn’t take a tip, a couple of the guys invited me to the party. I only said yes because I was hoping you might be there. It had been two weeks, and this campus is so huge I was starting to think I’d never run into you.” He chuckled softly and rubbed a hand at the back of his neck. “Wow, that sounds total stalker.”
Or totally hot. God. “Why didn’t you talk to me that night? Before…”
He shook his head. “You were so withdrawn and miserable. Almost every guy who approached you was rejected without a second glance. There was no way I was going to become one of them. You danced with a handful of guys you already knew—and he was one of those.”
“Buck.”
“Yes. When you left, he followed, and I thought maybe… maybe you two had decided to leave early together, without everyone knowing. Meet outside or something.”
I watched a trio of my classmates enter the building. “He’s my roommate’s boyfriend’s best friend. Well, her ex’s best friend, now. He was a known entity. A friend, I thought. Boy, was I wrong.”
He nodded, frowning. “I was about to leave—my bike was parked out front. Something didn’t feel right, but I was struggling with the same desire to take him out that I’d felt for half the semester with your boyfriend, so I questioned my own motives. I lost a minute arguing with myself, and I’m sorry about that. I finally decided if you two were hooking up, I’d just go around front, rev up the Harley, and be done with it. With you.”