Chapter 8
Tapping her fingers against the hardwood of the circulation desk, Bianca lets out a heavy sigh.
Xavier’s defense is happening . . . right now.
They drove in together today in heavy silence, his fingers gripping the steering wheel, his knuckles turning white the closer and closer they inched to campus.
Then, with a terse nod, he went off toward the Information Science department with his shoulders set and his stride long but confident.
He’s one of those infuriating people who look more confident the more nervous they get.
But right now she’s glad. He’s going to walk in that room and kill it, despite the nerves, and his panel will be none the wiser.
Xavier’s prepared and his research is rock solid, but his nerves have bled over to her and she can’t quite shake them. She’s not nearly as good at hiding it as he is, her foot now bouncing in time with her tapping fingers.
After he left, she made her way to the main library for one of her last shifts covering the circulation desk.
It’s reading period, the week before finals, so the library is packed out with students, mostly undergrads, in full cram mode.
The only sounds in the large, high-ceilinged room are the occasional heavy sighs, the much more common frustrated groans, and the constant clacking of fingers against laptop keyboards.
It wasn’t so long ago that she was one of them, barely a week, in fact, but that part of her life is over now.
Probably for good. Three degrees is enough.
More than enough, actually. Now it’s time to head out into that fabled real world people have been insisting she should join for years.
So she’s scrolling through job boards, past all the openings she’s already applied for – which is all of them – hoping she’ll stumble upon something new.
She hasn’t heard anything about her interview yet, not even after she sent emails thanking everyone who’d been on the call.
They hadn’t given her a time frame for an answer, but she knows the job starts on the first of August. That’s two months away, too long for her to have any idea what the hiring schedule should look like.
For all she knows, she won’t hear from them until just before the new semester begins.
And she hates waiting, hates not having control over the situation.
Though maybe her nerves don’t really have anything to do with the job or with Xavier’s defense, so much as what happened the other night. Before they spent hours combing through his presentation for even the slightest weakness before she peppered him with question after question.
The kiss.
It wasn’t just a kiss though, was it?
It was . . . kiss ing .
A gerund.
The contact between their mouths so passionate it had the power to make a noun into a verb.
Fuck, she’s such a nerd.
Xavier would think it was clever though.
He’d laugh and shake his head fondly at her.
Ugh.
Focus. She needs to focus. Job hunt. Her future.
She wants to find at least one job to apply for during her shift and she’s determined to do it.
Inhaling deeply and pushing out the air in one long breath, she tries to force herself to concentrate on the task at hand, but then a voice interrupts her.
“That was one hell of a sigh, Bianca,” Miranda says, coming around the back of the desk to sit in the empty chair beside her.
“I can’t concentrate.”
“Xavier’s going to do fine,” her advisor insists. “You know that.”
“I know . . .”
“So then what on earth is going on in your head? I can practically see the steam coming out of your ears.”
“We kissed.”
“What?” Miranda shrieks nearly as loud as she did when Bianca told her about the fake engagement.
Crap. She hadn’t meant to say that out loud, hadn’t even thought about telling Miranda, but now it’s out there and . . . really the other woman is the only person she can talk to about this.
“Was it good?”
Groaning, Bianca leans back in her chair. “So good. I can’t even describe how good. You might have been right about the circling-each-other thing, maybe a little. It was like five years of tension being released all at once.”
“So has the fake engagement been reclassified then?”
“What?” Bianca tilts her head in confusion.
“You know, are you just going to . . . Do you kids even call it dating anymore?”
“No, that’s . . . no, that’s not happening. We just did it for practice,” she explains and watches at Miranda’s expression shifts from curious to outright exasperation.
“Practice?”
“Yeah, in case it came up in front of my friends in the next couple of months, we didn’t want it to look forced or unnatural.”
Miranda sits up in her chair and leans forward, her eyes wide and unblinking. “I cannot believe the amount of bullshit you’re feeding me right now.”
“No, that’s not . . .”
“You two kissed because you wanted to kiss, whatever the excuse you made up before or after the fact.”
“Maybe.”
“Not maybe, definitely.”
“It doesn’t matter though. We decided that it went a little too far.”
“Wait, it wasn’t just a kiss.”
“It was . . . kissing ,” she says, “with maybe a little bit of dry-humping.”
“Bianca!”
“A very little bit.”
“You two are ridiculous.”
“It’s . . . it wasn’t that big of a deal and it’s not going to happen again, at least not like that, so it doesn’t matter.”
“You really think that you two can live together for the whole summer and not let it happen again. You’ve only got a few shifts left here and last I checked, his only plans were learning how to surf for the next couple of months before he heads off to Greece.
That’s a lot of downtime for the both of you. ”
“We’ll . . . figure it out,” Bianca insists, but there’s a gnawing discomfort building in her chest. She hadn’t thought about it quite like that before.
In fact, she hadn’t really thought about it at all.
Which is unlike her. Usually she plans for every contingency, up to and including near-apocalyptic scenarios.
Not that any of this has been like her at all, really, so what’s one more thing?
“Well, that’s a euphemism I haven’t heard before. You’re going to figure it out . It’s better than talking , anyway. What does that even mean? Every single one of my advisees is talking to someone.”
“Yeah,” she admits, with a rueful grin, “even we don’t really know.”
Miranda snorts in playful derision. “I figured.”
“I should really finish up . . . uh . . .” she glances at her screen, “applying for this job.”
“Yes, you should,” Miranda agrees, standing up. “And Bianca?”
“Yeah?”
“I told you so.”
“What?”
“Just saying it preemptively for the next time kissing happens.”
“Ugh, go away.”
Miranda leaves with a soft chuckle, and squaring her shoulders, Bianca faces her computer screen.
Okay, time to get this done.
She’s rounding out the last few questions on a job application for a director of libraries position at a school district in San Bernardino when he strolls into the library, tie loosened, jacket slung over his shoulder, wearing the easy smile of someone who absolutely crushed his defense.
He’s practically bouncing with every step, and when his eyes find her from across the room, his smile grows even wider.
Bianca can’t help it; she lets out a sharp shriek from the back of her throat and races out from behind the desk to throw her arms around him. He bends into her hug, laughing into the curve of her neck.
“I knew it. I knew you’d pass!”
Somehow she’s happier for him than she was for herself.
“Shh!”
She rolls her eyes at the irony of a librarian being shh’d by a bunch of undergrads, but yeah, finals are coming up, so maybe they should take this somewhere a little more private so he can tell her everything.
“Follow me,” she says, grabbing his hand and leading him toward the reference section.
She leads him deep into the shelves, back toward the microfiche periodicals section, far beyond the reaches of where students tend to wander, even when they’re desperate for a quiet place to study. They won’t be disturbed back here.
“It was like you said.” He leans back against the stacks and lets out a shaky breath. “All their questions were things I’d anticipated. No curveballs, or at least nothing I wasn’t prepared to handle.”
“I hate to say it, but . . .”
“You absolutely do not hate to say it, but I’m gonna allow it because I’m too fucking relieved to care.”
“I told you so!” she says with a cackle, but she can’t enjoy it as much as she’d like, not with Miranda’s parting salvo still ringing in her ears.
“God, I’m so keyed up,” Xavier says, pulling her attention back to the moment. “I feel like I could run a marathon or, I don’t know, at least hike Runyon at magic hour.”
“I feel like that might be the harder one,” she says with a laugh, but it fades as he stares at her from across the narrow space between the bookshelves.
It’s completely still and the moment settles between them, suddenly heady and tense.
He looks away, but only from her eyes, as his gaze slides over the curves of her body with such precision, she feels her cheeks heat up and a burgeoning fire spark in her belly.
Her throat is dry and her tongue darts out to wet her lips and in the absolute quiet of the library, it’s easy to hear the soft rumbling groan that pushes up from his chest as he watches her.