Chapter 13 #3
Knox purges a sigh, running his fingers through his artfully tousled hair. “Let’s just—let’s just focus on what we actually came here to do.”
Right. Along with trying to pull off the impossible, I now have to help Knox turn his grades around. I don’t know why I’m being so hard on him. A performance is only as believable as its scene partner, and I’m pretty sure I looked like I was being held at gunpoint.
Could it be that my way of keeping things…professional…is by engaging in meaningless fights to create a larger rift between the two of us? A rift where feelings go to die?
It feels like my belly is sitting in my throat. “Okay, let’s come up with your thesis, and then we’ll work off that starting point to inform the rest of your body paragraphs.”
Knox cants his head at me. “What the hell is a thesis?”
Oh, dear God.
I make a fist and press it between my eyes, as if it’s a medically approved solution to a tension headache. “It’s the main argument of your essay.”
“Ohhh, right,” he replies, his tone thickening with arrogance. “I knew that.”
“Sure you did.”
Readying the tip of my pen between faded lines, I wait for Knox’s bestowment of rudimentary literature knowledge, but I can, with great confidence, deduce that there’s not a single thought behind those eyes.
And to confirm my hypothesis, he follows up with: “What are we arguing again?”
“How does The Great Gatsby provide social commentary on the American Dream and its seemingly corrupt undertones?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Maybe we should just focus on moral decay for now. There’s plenty of examples in the book that support that specific theme.”
His face puckers in concentration, and he snaps his fingers to recall some deep, long-buried memory. “You mean like when Daisy kills Myrtle and never has to face the consequences of her actions because her wealth and inner circle protect her?”
In that moment, I’m dogshit at hiding my surprise. I uncork a million different emotions from the pinhole in my chest—relief being one of them—and I’m embarrassed at how utterly ecstatic Knox’s progression makes me.
“Yeah, actually. That’s—that’s a great example to use.”
He lights up brighter than a shoddy motel sign in the dead of night, or the glowing butt of a cigarette poised over a similarly dilapidated railing.
“Now you tell me something about yourself,” he says out of nowhere.
“What?”
“We made a deal, remember? I get a question right or show off my impeccable learning skills, and you bless me with a fact about yourself.”
I didn’t think he’d actually cash in on it. I mean, nobody’s ever been dying to know much about me. We’re in the midst of a dead sprint, and he wants to go off track (figuratively and literally) to share facts about ourselves like we’re on a first date.
Dog-tired, I concede with a shrug. “Ugh, fine. Make it quick. We can’t get distracted.”
He looks around my room for a second, then gestures to my interior decorating skills. “You have a lot of plants in here, but no flowers. What’s up with that? I thought girls liked flowers.”
A shallow question. That’s good. Safe.
I purse my lips together. “Plants are…more resilient. They last longer than flowers. Flowers can be so temperamental. You forget to water them one day and they’re gone the next.”
“I take it you’re not a fan of things that are temporary?”
Temporariness is one of my worst fears. I don’t like change.
I don’t like that your life can be turned upside down in the blink of an eye.
I don’t like that anyone who enters your world has the potential to leave it within the same breath.
My dad supposedly “loved” my mother enough to create life with her, then just decided to shuck all his responsibilities.
I never got the chance to try and fight for a whole family.
I operate on a set schedule with a set group of people. I trust those in my small circle, and I make an effort not to step out of my comfort zone. An effort that has continuously been tested since Knox came speeding into the picture.
“Something like that.”
As I pull out my student copy of The Great Gatsby—relying on my colorful annotation tabs to cherry-pick certain quotes—my phone buzzes in my pocket.
I slip the device out with zero awareness of the mistake I just made, and Knox has plucked it from my fingers before I can even register who the text is from.
“Hey!” I growl, trying to swipe at the portable addiction that dangles just out of arm’s reach.
Knox doesn’t even have to strain; his arms are naturally that long. I think I also greatly underestimated the lengths he’d go to watch me bend over backwards for him (non-sexually, of course).
“Maybe we should implement a no phones policy,” he muses above my incoherent name-calling, tapping the screen alive to read whatever incoming message has been banished to the nearest intermediate server.
I’m nearly out of breath, my extremities windmilling around. “You’re better than this.”
“I’m really not.”
With a dramatic throat clear, Knox begins reciting my mystery sender’s message. “‘Staten, it’s Leif. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you since the hockey game. Can we talk? Please? I know it’s late, but I really need to see you.’”
My study buddy from the fiery pits of hell cackles like a maniac. “Oh, great. Your little boy toy has finally come to his senses.”
I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s like someone has just pulled the plug in my head, and every smart comeback and feminist urge inside of me goes swirling down the mental drain.
Leif wants to see me? He hasn’t stopped thinking about me? Am I dreaming right now?
“Give me that!” I yell, jumping and knocking into Knox’s immovable body, doing everything in my power to claw for the answer to all my orisons. It taunts me from above, shining its blue light on me, reminding me of the pecking order that I seemed to have forgotten.
“You’re not seriously falling for this crap, are you?” Knox grumbles, looking down at me from his hypocritical high horse, his eyes slitted with a thread of inextinguishable hatred that remains unclipped.
Pawing for my phone is never going to produce the desired outcome, so I switch tactics at the last minute and play dirty, elbowing this half-witted hockey hunk in the stomach to try and get him to release it. God, it sounds like I’m dealing with some rambunctious puppy, not a full-grown man.
As expected, my plan operates flawlessly, the force from my expertly placed elbow causing the device to fall from Knox’s hand and into my lap. Then, while he’s still regaining his bearings, I scramble toward the farthest corner of my room, thumbs twiddling away at the keyboard.
I don’t know what I’m typing. I’m existing on raw adrenaline at this point, and I’ve never felt so liberated before.
Knox wheezes, cradling his abdomen. “Wait—don’t…don’t act desperate.”
Of course. Leave it to Knox to pop my bubble of happiness. My succor vanishes along with it, and the pyre in my stomach—furnished by the monotonous catch of a bellows—coughs up a smokescreen that prevents such emotions from ever returning.
“Excuse me?” I say with a controlled lunacy, failing to screen my next set of words for safe departure. “Wanna try that again?”
“I don’t mean it like that. I’m trying to help you.”
“By insulting me?”
“By offering you my untapped wisdom,” he corrects. “Do I need to remind you that you’re in the presence of fuckboy greatness right now?”
Fuckboy greatness? If this is what the world has come to, Knox would’ve done me a favor by hitting me with his car. “That’s an oxymoron.”
“Hey! Don’t call me a moron.”
“Jesus,” I mumble.
I have a meteor shower of questions for him, but I settle for one that doesn’t trigger my more violent tendencies. “What happened to just being myself? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do if you want to impress your crush?”
Knox’s gaze swings over me in a pendulum, taking inventory of the before picture that he’s probably envisioning in his head right now. “You’ve gotta be yourself plus a little more. Tailor your interests to his.”
I’m not sure what’s worse: relying on Knox for dating advice or having the same hindsight as an equipment-less spelunker tossed into the intestinal tract of a cave system. At best, it’s a grotto of dead ends. At worst, it’s a hibernaculum for some fearmongering creature.
“Look, if lover boy has any brain cells in that hollow head of his, he’d already know that he has a good thing standing right in front of him.”
“That sounded very compliment-y.”
And I don’t hate it.
“You know, I’m actually a pretty nice dude,” Knox tells me, his tone bleeding through me like whiskey over the pillowy platform of a bottom lip.
I’ve never been a sucker for accents, but his Minnesotan one is rounded around the edges, elongating vowels and flattening them in the same breath with a practiced tongue. It’s irresistible.
“You are.”
A new looping thought enters the mix, and this one grabs me by the collar and shakes without reluctance.
Why are you freaking out over Leif when Knox fucking Mulligan is in your bedroom right now? On your bed?
Knox and I are just friends.
Friends who fake date.
Exactly. So what’s your point, Inner Me?
My point is that you could ditch the friendzoner and take advantage of this entire situation by test-driving the car before buying it.
Test-driving what?
Oh my God, the car is Knox.
Everything clicks for me rather slowly, and when I come to terms with my initial shock, I’m no better than a field mouse shrinking under the shadow of outstretched talons.
I don’t see Knox as a potential suitor…do I?
No, I don’t. I can’t. I’m committed to Leif, and I’m a one-man kind of girl.
Though, my lucidity doesn’t come without its own pitfall—there’s a flicker of chemistry between me and Knox that I know is waiting to catch fire.
A flicker of chemistry that could do irreversible damage to our arrangement.