Chapter 5 A Lesson In Flirting #2
“And miss an opportunity to watch you squirm? Nah.”
Pish, I’m not squirming. I’m observing…from afar.
With a hint of homicidal tendencies toward my newly proclaimed archnemesis: Golden Boy Leif Kennedy.
Dude is annoyingly virtuous. Everyone likes him—students, teachers, middle-aged moms who want to divorce their incompetent husbands but don’t have the guts to.
He’s everything I’m not, which makes sense as to why Staten would be hanging around someone like him.
“I have Abnormal Psychology with Staten. She’s really nice,” Foster vouches, his effort to help ironically making things worse as he rubs salt into the hemorrhaging wound.
I get it. I turned the nicest girl on the planet evil.
I continue to stalk Staten’s every movement, indignation snowballing into an impassable roadblock that stunts the rabbiting of my heart.
Her glossy lips quirk into a rare smile, and she tucks her bangs shyly behind her ear, hanging on to every—probably idiotic—word that comes out of Leif’s fat mouth.
Now, I may not be book smart, but I’ve stockpiled some street smarts in my twenty-one years of life, and I can disassemble a flirtatious interaction with my fucking eyes closed. Let me break it down in David Attenborough terms.
First: the unsuspecting male. A Neanderthal.
Usually oblivious to the advances of the female; will continue to talk despite having nothing interesting to say.
Second: the sex-hungry female. A bloodthirsty predator.
Uses suggestive body language to lure a mate—pronounced cleavage, bedroom eyes, close proximity.
Due to the male’s low IQ, the female’s efforts of courting could be mistaken for friendly conversation.
This is exceptionally prominent when said female is in a rut—or, as we humans say, the friend zone.
And judging by the closed-off body language of the male, he has yet to understand the gravity of the situation.
For someone who knocked me on my ass earlier, Staten seems to have zero game. Maybe it was easier for her to pretend with me.
Sutton, slowly inching into my periphery, stares at the awkward exchange like he’s watching a nature documentary, the crunch of kettle-baked potato chips assaulting my eardrums. “What the hell is she doing?” he muffles around his food.
What the hell is she doing?
Staten, abandoning her previous seduction scheme, now cocks her hip out and has her palm on the table, her body at a strange forty-five-degree angle.
She’s also doing some weird thing with her neck, as if she’s trying to fling the hair out of her face without employing the help of her hands.
All the while, Leif continues to drone on about God knows what.
“Maybe it’s like an interpretive dance?” Crew offers.
Oh, this is hard to watch.
Even with my subpar eyesight, I can still pinpoint the blush sprawling over her cheeks like a variegated sunset.
The look in her eyes is telling enough—she’s got it bad for this guy, and she’ll do anything to get on his radar.
Then she explodes into loud, high-pitched laughter, making her not-so-subtle crush flinch, along with my eavesdropping teammates.
When Leif gets up to refill their communal beer pitcher, Staten glances around suspiciously, holds her hand up to her mouth to do a quick breath test, then wrinkles her nose in disgust. It’s kind of endearing.
“I can’t look away. This is worse than a car crash,” Axel exclaims, an undercurrent of amusement coasting through his tone.
As an incoming penumbra claws across the floorboards with the silence of a shadow-bound wraith, the business of the bar picks up, a dozen more college students filtering through the door and meandering over to the counter.
A decent line has formed, stranding Leif somewhere near the end, and impulsivity grabs me by the throat.
Squeezing, smarting, staunching the much-needed blood flow to my brain.
I don’t think. I just act. Any concern about my friends’ unwarranted opinions gutters quicker than a kerosene flame underwater.
Like the valiant savior I am, I jump up from my seat, saunter over to Staten, and voluntarily thrust myself into the line of fire.
Will I get burned? Probably. Do I care? Not really.
I park myself right in front of her, caging her in with my mountainous body and showing her how a real pro exploits close proximity.
“Guys don’t like it when you try so hard,” I tell her, bestowing my great fuckboy wisdom in the name of science.
I’m surprised when she doesn’t shirk away from me. “Excuse me?”
I jerk my thumb in Leif’s direction. “Dumbo isn’t getting the hint.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” she hisses, anger burnished in the amber-flecked pits of her eyes—anger solely reserved for me.
Is it wrong that I’m flattered? I don’t know any other guy who gets to be the lucky recipient of her fuck-you face.
“If you want him to notice you, you have to act more subtle. Leave a little to the imagination, you know? You want him to chase after you, not the other way around.”
“Oh my God. Are you spying on me?”
“Technically, this is a public place.”
A guttural growl slithers between her teeth, an unvoiced diatribe coiling back to strike at me like a cornered rattlesnake. Her anger has irradiated in a short amount of time, but her pint-sized height puts her at a disadvantage. A chihuahua that’s all bark and no bite.
Staten bristles, shoving her pointer finger into my chest as she glares up at me through mascara-lined lashes. “What part of ‘giving zero fucks about you’ didn’t make it through your thick cranium?”
Yes! She’s touching me again! I mean, oh, nooo.
Ignoring her jab, I flex my pecs, a smug grin flourishing over my lips.
“I can help you out. I don’t know if you know this, but I have a pretty good track record when it comes to flirting.
Never gotten a bad review. Ten out of ten customers always walk away satisfied—or struggle to walk, if you catch my drift. ”
Staten’s mind must be buffering because it takes her five extra seconds to recognize our incriminating position.
She snatches her finger away, shaking it like she’s just come into contact with some kind of biohazard.
“I’d rather slam my boob in a car door than let your STD-walking ass anywhere near my love life. ”
“Your nonexistent love life, by the looks of it. And I stay on top of my routine checkups, thank you very much.”
The humongous vein in her forehead palpitates, her small hands balling into fists to probably prevent herself from scratching my eyes out. Her whole frame trembles with bottled-up indignation threatening to overspill—threatening to fossilize my body in thick, blackened tar.
“I don’t need your help,” she repeats with clipped breath.
I hold my index finger up to pause her train of whoop-ass, hook said finger in the direction of a busty blonde who’s been eyeing me from across the room, and beckon her with my best panty-dropping smirk.
Without fail, she minces over to me in six-inch heels like a moth to a flame, biting down on her lower lip in coquettish compliance. She wears her lust as a heady perfume, but no matter how concentrated the concoction is, none of my caveman urges activate.
“Hi, Knox,” she greets, her tone drenched in enough sex appeal to cure worldwide erectile dysfunction.
“Ten p.m. You, me, my place,” I say point-blank, brooking little room for her to decline—which she doesn’t, of course.
I hood my eyes, make a show of staring at her lips, then lick my own to subliminally plant the pussy-wetting thought of some mouth-to-mouth action in her head.
Is it alarming that I’m hitting on her with zero emotion? A little bit. I blame Staten. She’s blocking my cock with some weird, nerdy electromagnetic waves.
“Can’t wait,” Blondie drawls, doing a little bounce on her toes so that her sinfully exposed cleavage takes center stage. You couldn’t pay me to look down. We’re in unprecedented times, folks.
I dismiss her with a flutter of my fingers, and she walks back to her throng of girlfriends with an overly sensual sway in her hips, squealing and whispering in frenzied excitement. I mean, she did just meet the Knox Mulligan. Squealing is an expected aftereffect.
I turn back to Staten—whose jaw is wrenched all the way open—and shrug my shoulders nonchalantly. “See? Easy.”
The soft underbelly of her neck turns pink, and that badass attitude of hers takes an unforeseen hike. “Yeah, maybe for you,” she whispers dejectedly, staring longingly at the back of Leif’s head.
It’s as if her flimsy confidence has been crushed under a hovering boot sole, soft bits embedded in rubber ridges that drag against a rain-blasted real estate of coarse aggregate. Destroyed in the blink of an eye.
There’s a weird feeling in my two-sizes-too-small Grinch heart, and I can’t determine its genesis. It kind of feels like…sadness? Sympathy? Definitely nothing that I’ve had to familiarize myself with before, and certainly not when it comes to the feelings of others.
“The offer still stands. I can teach you.”
What am I doing? Is this all just some ulterior motive to get her to tutor me? Or to get closer to her? Is it because I still secretly feel guilty for hospitalizing her?
She snorts, and my God, it’s one of the best noises I’ve ever heard—a noise I shouldn’t have the privilege of knowing.
Not unlike a honeyed tone whispering in the dark of a bed chamber, under the silk of sheets, cocooned in a duvet of illicit infidelity.
A microcosm where undesirable emotions lay to rest.
“Never in a million years.”
I start to head back to my friends—whom I’m assuming have been watching this entire interaction with bated breath—and shove my hands into my pockets. “Uh-huh. Tell me when you change your mind.”
“I won’t.”
“If you say so.”
She’s so going to change her mind.