Chapter 8
June
It was Saturday afternoon, my first session in the library with Sir Oliver. I got here fifteen minutes late to find him working with his head down. He was seated at a long table at the farthest possible corner by a large window where no one ever sat. I had to round a stack of bookshelves just to find him because the spot he picked was entirely secluded from the rest of the library. He probably chose it so he could murder me unseen. Or just to give me a difficult time searching for him. But my gut told me it was definitely the murder thing.
He was wearing a typical red flannel, black trousers, and white Converse on his feet which were tucked under the table. I had a pretty good idea of what was under that flannel, too. One of those rock and roll T-shirts with letters you can’t even read or something silly like a crying skeleton on the front.
As I neared him, I could see inside his open flannel. Unreadable letters? Check. Crying skeleton? Almost. Two skeletons kissing each other. Somehow, that was even worse.
I tugged on the chair across from him and sat down. “Do you always wear the same thing?”
“No. Sometimes I wear nothing at all.”
I scoffed. “Gross. I feel bad for your roommate.”
“Who said anything about doing it in my room?” he asked casually. Shit. That was almost funny. I hid my giggle with a glare. His face remained hard. “You’re late.”
“Yeah, well, it’s Saturday and I have a life.” Lies. I’d called Daya just to take up the alone time I had this morning, and she ended up going on and on how horrible her boss was. I wasn’t mad about it. She wasn’t asking about my life nor was I forced to sit and stare at the wall alone until it was finally time to meet Oliver, so it was a win-win.
“I do too. That’s why we plan when to meet. To avoid conflicts.”
I rolled my eyes, pulling out my notebook and laptop and sticking my backpack on the floor. I hadn’t realized I was meeting with Oliver Awad, High Ruler of the Library and Keeper of All Clocks. Fucking asshole.
“Are you always this much of a dick, or is it just for me?” I asked, opening my notebook and scratching the date into the top corner of a clean page.
“All for you,” he said before pulling a large textbook off a stack of two he had set in front of him. “I found these textbooks while I was waiting for you.” I stared at him, my pen about to snap in half in my grip as he held the book in my direction. “Look through this one and try to find a topic for us. I’ll do the same with the other.”
“Don’t need it. I already have a topic.”
He smacked the book back down. “Oh?”
Our gazes remained locked, and I hoped that if I were ever to suddenly gain laser vision powers, it would happen now so I could sear a hole into his infuriatingly large head. “Let’s do the history of how bearded men are statistically uglier and academically inferior.”
“Actually, recent studies have shown that the female perception of masculine faces is generally improved with the presence of facial hair,” he said without missing a beat.
I rolled my eyes. “Wow, you had that one locked and loaded.”
“Good comeback. Nothing to say now that science has shown you’re empirically attracted to me?”
“In your dreams, Oliver.” The onlyway he would ever look empirically attractive to me is if he were falling off the edge of a freaking cliff, arms and legs flailing as he screamed.
“Another excellent comeback, Juni. I’m really very impressed. Now, topics.” He picked the book back up and slapped it on the table in front of me.
Argh!Fucking asshole!
My ears began heating up, a fire scorching through my veins making my hands itch. There was no doubt in my mind, I was going to kill this guy before the semester was out. I was going rip his heart right out of his chest and have it for dinner. And it wasn’t even going to be on purpose. It was going to be in a fit of anger provoked by him. Zero ounce of control remained in my body. Only dark words and bright fire and red rage.
“Juni.” My own name echoed through my head, my brain gone and my skull nothing more than an empty opera hall where the word simply bounced from wall to wall. “June.” I snapped back to the present. Oliver looked at me fiercely, repeating my name. “Stop staring at me and focus. I know you’re into my beard, but we have a project to do.”
I slammed my hands on the table. It was the only way I could possibly drain some of the energy that was building inside me. My emotions—no, my rage was so strong it made me want to run seven miles, to punch through a brick wall, to stomp so hard the entire campus quaked into rubble. The corner of the table bit at my palms. I focused in on the sensation. “Oliver, I am going to fucking kill you. I am going to bring a glaive to our next study session, and I am going to kill you with it.”
“Old school,” he said with an impressed look on his face. “I like it.”
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. My ire would not stop swirling. Was it hot in here? I was sweating. I began snapping my fingers, trying to click away some of the frustration. I was a pot about to overflow, a stopped-up flask about to burst. Oliver eyed my snapping fingers, his eyebrows caving in the middle. It took me a moment to come to, but I forced my hands to still. I couldn’t let him see how much he was getting to me.
“Why don’t we work out a plan?” he asked almost kindly. “Before we settle on a topic.”
My teeth clenched hard, my throat forcing down a heavy swallow. I pressed my hot palms into my forehead, wiping my hair back behind my ears as I tried to regain my composure. “What do you mean?”
“I did the math.” His gaze remained hard on me, though his expression had changed. Was that caution in his features? Did he think I was crazy? “There are seventeen Saturdays and Tuesdays until our final four classes. If we can spend the first two sessions planning, then we’ll have thirteen for working, one for editing, and one for practicing.”
I took a deep breath. “You really think we’ll need thirteen for drafting?”
“I don’t plan to work on this outside of the allotted time. I can’t. So, yes, I think I could easily spend two sessions gathering research, one organizing it, five on the essay, and five on the PowerPoint, roughly.”
Oh my god. Oh my god. My rage drained instantaneously. It was official. I was speaking to the most boring man on the planet. I should’ve known from his lack of variety in clothing, but oh my god. “You’re a lot of fun, you know that?”
He rolled his eyes, and I found myself waiting to hear what would come out of his mouth next. I just knew it was going to be so super fun and interesting.
Much to my dismay, he said nothing. He pinned me with a look before hunching over his notebook, scribbling what I could only assume to be complete nonsense onto the page. His chunk of hair loosened as he looked down, falling in front of his nose. Ugh. What a dickhole.
◆◆◆
Oli
You’re a lot of fun, you know that? I mocked in my head with a foolish voice. You’re a lot of fun. Weeeuu, a lot of fun. I could show her a lot of fucking fun. If she was so bored, I’d gladly make things more interesting.
She was fuming just a few seconds ago, and I had plenty more in me to make her blow her top. I thought she was actually going to burst, which is why I toned it down, but apparently, that just bored her.
Fucking brat.
No, I didn’t need seventeen sessions to bang out a project. What was I, a fucking snail? But I did need seventeen sessions to figure this girl out. Perhaps more. I wasn’t a damn miracle worker, and she was the most complex curse. Her strength and wit made me want to explode, and I was inexplicably infatuated with her despite my best efforts.
It wasn’t until my chair began squeaking that I realized how vigorously I was bouncing my leg. I immediately willed it to freeze as I continued jotting down notes on the paper in front of me. Useless notes that did nothing but buy me time. Notes like: Week 1: Planning. Week 2: Also planning. Week 3: Lose my last bit of sanity. Week 4: Ask June to marry me. Week 5: Escape the dungeon June locked me up in for asking her to marry me.
“Oliver, that’s not helpful,” she said sharply.
I looked up, unsure of what she meant by that.
“You just broke down the next however many weeks in the most vague and useless way and now you’re writing silently. What the hell am I supposed to do?”
Ah. Easy. I glanced down at the textbook I’d set in front of her.
She grabbed it with two hands and held it up next to her head, jerking it as if she were going to smash my face with it. She then lowered it down to the table, and I had to swallow my laugh. June was funnier than she realized, funnier than she meant to be.
I did actually end up writing a decent plan as we sat there in silence for the next forty-five minutes, dividing up exactly how much time we would spend on outlining, how many words we would need to type each session, and how many slides we would need to create each week. It made me feel a lot better about the whole project, which was fucking monumental. Not only did it make it all a bit more organized and digestible, but it also showed me that if I worked slowly enough, I could easily spend two days a week bugging Juni until the end of the semester. There was no way I was going to let us finish this project quickly.
June had cooled down significantly while we worked. I was now staring at her, watching the way she leaned her cheek on her palm, her elbow propped on the table as she took notes with a gel pen. Her handwriting was bubbly from what I could see, which I found amusing considering she was the fucking devil. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she dotted her i’s with little horns as opposed to hearts.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
“Horribly,” she said without so much as shifting in her position. “It’s too cold in this library yet too hot outside, and I’ve been made project partners with a fucking minotaur. So, my day is not going very well, thanks for asking.”
I bit down on my piercing to keep from smiling. “I meant with the project.”
“Fine.” She punctuated whatever sentence she was writing with such a forceful period that I thought it would send her pen ripping right through the paper. She sat up, straightening her notebook in front of herself. “We’re going to present on the Dark Ages. Our presentation will be divided up into two parts. For the first ten minutes, we’ll present general information about the time period. For the last ten minutes, we’ll debate about whether or not the Dark Ages were, in fact, dark. Our essay will be a persuasive essay on why they were not dark.” The look she sent me showed nothing but pure apathy. She literally did not care what I thought.
My lips threatened to quirk up at the corners as I nodded. I liked the idea. “Good job, Juni.”
Her indifference faltered for only a split second. “What?”
“I said good job, Juni.”
Had I not been observing her so closely, I would’ve missed the little flat-lipped look she gave to the table as she closed her notebook. It looked like her version of a smile she so desperately wanted to refrain from.
Into praise much?
“On Tuesday we can create a shared doc and type out all the notes we took today so we both have them easily accessible,” I said, literally only suggesting such an excessive step to hold us up a bit more before we started doing real work.
“Fine.” She shoved the textbook in my direction. “Put that back. I’m done now.”
She piled her things into her backpack and walked away without another word, her hips swinging as she rounded the corner and exited our little nook. I couldn’t keep my eyes from lingering on the shape of her body in her skin-tight jeans right up until she disappeared from my view.
I was never a religious guy. Fervently the opposite, actually. But I was starting to think Professor Brown might’ve been my savior for pairing me up with this woman, because she was undoubtedly, unfortunately, the evil goddess I’d contort myself into any shape for.