2. Waverly
2
WAVERLY
S ometimes even a smoking hot bad boy wasn’t enough to even the playing field. Or in my unsuccessful case, save me from my smart mouth.
My head shot up so fast that my neck cricked. “If you're going to be such a smart ass about it, then I'll go back to my damn bees and you can wander on home.” Pain shot through my teeth as I gritted them in a brutal smile that was all gleaming whites and tight lips.
Why was I letting him get to me over something so small? Why ?
Because I’d set– I thought I’d set –the time aside for myself. Just me. And maybe today I wanted to be a teensy bit selfish just for once.
“Could it be that the geeky bee girl has a little sass in her…hive?” Jax extracted the textbook from my hands and crawled–literally crawled– to settle beside me, so close his pants leg brushed my thigh.
I pulled my brown corduroy skirt tight around my knees and tried to sidle sideways, but he placed the open book on my thighs, freezing me in place and making a book stand of my lower half. The backs of his knuckles grazed over my tights leaving a searing path in his wake. He stilled for a second, staring down at his hands, before he removed them without so much as a hint of a reaction of what I experienced.
Guess that’s Geek girl zero, bad boy feels nothing.
I swallowed, itching to move away but unable to avoid the job I agreed to do. This isn’t part of the school policy . Or my scholarship. My satchel slid off my legs and landed at my side between us. I reached forward but Jax beat me to it–again.
Long artist’s fingers picked up my sketch pad. I cringed as he flicked through, studying the pages and my toddler level drawings.
The protective urge to snatch my work back clawed at my empty stomach, but I knew he wouldn't ruin it. He was an art student, right? Of all things, he got it about not screwing around with other people's work.
Not a word passed his lips as he delved deeper into my brain where I’d vomited my thought process onto the page in tiny dot-to-dot drawings. My cheeks heated as the boy who bullied me for the better part of the last semester and could buy out my entire family with a flick of his fingers saw just how silly the workings of my mind appeared on the page.
Unease lit a dark light inside me, replacing the clawing with a level of cringeworthyness I couldn’t avoid.
Opting to ignore that instead I repeated his motion, flicking through the text we studied last week until I picked out a familiar diagram. “We were… Here. Turn on your listening ears, Arthouse,” I begged quietly in an effort to distract him from my months of work at Rippton U. Please let it work. “Indulge me.”
“That’s new, bee girl.” He finally moved, though not in the way I expected.
I thought he reacted to what I’d called him, but Jax was busy working through my patterns, tracing above them with an inked fingertip. There was something familiar in the way he swirled his hands over the path my chosen insect tracked, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Pun. Ha.
Frustration rose in me at not being able to pick the annoyingly absentee item out, and my words emerged waspish. Or bee-ish.
“If you're going to give me a nickname, make it better than bee girl, or something.”
Jax lost his composure, his head tossing back to light me up with a grin of a thousand watts right in my face. If it was possible, his smile made him more handsome, which just wasn’t fair.
“Damn, girl. You've got some balls.” He leaned a little closer, brushing his lips against my ear.
Shivers rioted over my skin while I clutched my textbook to my chest, losing my page all over again. “You– What?”
His breath whispered along my throat, slipping beneath the high neck of my knitted top. “Maybe I'll call you Honey. Hell, maybe one day I'll take that sassy mouth and find out whether or not you taste like ambrosia, too.”
You want to know what I taste like?
I licked my lips, seriously considering the offer those arched lips presented before sense cracked into me. Hot, flirty, or otherwise, anything Jax related was worse than a bad idea. The sort that could lose me my scholarship. He wouldn't even care of the ramifications because for a wealthy kid like him, there weren’t any. And I’d just be–buzz–another inkless notch on his bedpost.
“You can't say things like that,” I shoved the book at him and got up for the second time, putting a few extra feet between us and much needed breathing room. The leather/smoke scent of him dissipated a fraction, and I missed it. Almost . “I’ve got a lot of work to do. Go back to the bar, Jax. I'll email notes you can read at your leisure later.”
That last line left me shaking. When did I become such a bitch? Oh, that’s right, when an entitled billionaire offspring pushed their way into my world and took up residence without asking permission.
Completely rattled, I grabbed my bag and patted around for my phone.
“Hey,” Jax caught my hand, tugging me back down to where he still reclined on the grass beside my hives. “Don’t go,” he all but cooed the words, and I found myself kneeling next to him.
One look at those cheekbones that could cut diamonds and I pressed my hands over my face in the facade of stealing a single, private breath for myself. But I couldn't block him out, and the dove’s cry I needed to heed about running far and fast echoed between brainstem and non-firing synapses.
“Why can't you find someone else to torture?”
“But I enjoy tormenting you.”
Uncovering my face, I looked at Jax, who patted my piece of plastic. Keeping his gaze locked on mine, he raised his fingers to trace along my tights over my calf muscle where my skirt had ridden up. He hadn't moved an inch otherwise, but the look on his face was nothing short of curiosity. Maybe a flicker of something else undecipherable.
Part of me desperately wanted him to keep looking at me the way he did now–not the way others did, like I was a pickled specimen in a lab to be poked at, a rarity at Rippton U, but something he needed to figure out.
“If I promise not to tease you for an hour, will you sit down and teach– talk to me?” he corrected himself, the ghost of a smile etching the corners of his perfect mouth that damned me with every word.
I knew I was going to agree to anything he said. I knew it, damnit.
Also, my mouth moved on its own. “You can do that?” I stared at him with incredulity.
I expected a grin, a laugh, even a snarky comment, but Jax’s face remained open and carefully neutral. Too careful, like he reined in whatever weighed on his mind with pure purpose.
But whose purpose, his or mine?
I learned early on in our lesson planning that I couldn't trust him. Not when he didn’t turn up the first few times and when he did, he fell asleep.
And I still couldn't say no.
Head over heels, stuck in a loop, in love with the bad boy bully, anti-Stockholm, what you wanted to call it. I was all in. And all paid up. Hence, the inability to leave part. And stuck with Jax.
I couldn't trust him and I needed my time to be done as fast as I could make it work. Which didn’t include crouching beside him on the grass as dusk set in like some sort of lovelorn teen that I’d never been in the first damn place.
Neutral is good.
I repeated the phrase over and over in my head until my brain rattled with it.
Not a laugh or a snicker came from him as he stretched out that one hand. Golden eyes fixed on mine, holding me in place for a single moment.
Managing to grasp control of my faculties, I ignored his reach and settled on my situpon, scooting a foot away from him. And I was back to where I started.
Cue sigh.
“All right. One hour. Then I have to finish my diagrams of my bees who are now sleeping, just as I would like to be, and get my assignments done.”
“You want to be in bed right now?” Jax did laugh at me now but it was more in a friendly manner and so alien I couldn’t possibly accept the response at face value.
Then the insinuation hit me like a slap in the face with a cold comb of honey, and my face flared with heat again. “Do you have to make everything about–”
He waved my indignation away. “I know, I know. You have a lot of things to do, and you don't have the time to waste on a poor artist who doesn't take the time to learn important facts of the universe.”
Jax had never been poor in his lifetime, but I didn't harp on that.
“Fine.” I turned the book face out and hovered over the page I found earlier.
Jax kept his silence, though I felt the weight of his assessing gaze as I speed read through the passage and gathered my thoughts. Pushing his darkening presence aside as best I could, I worked out what I wanted to push him on, and then I started to talk.
Miraculously, he listened.
By the time we finished the long shadows that crossed the beehives to the garden to us when we started melded into a haze and I could barely pick out the words on the page. A lone bee buzzed contentedly around us, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was past his bedtime, too.
At some point, Jax turned the torch on his phone on and edged a little closer, flipping the edge of his leather jacket around us. I didn’t start itching, and I didn’t object either as I kept talking while tracing my bees’ progress with my finger, and eventually completed my diagrams under his watchful eye.
For maybe an hour, a little more, my peace returned with a strange artist I never shared a slice of quiet with at my side, one who chose to watch for once rather than tease.
By the time I finished Jax lay on his back with his arms crossed behind his head on his satchel as he watched me, his phone held up unwaveringly. His knees bent, feet planted firmly on the ground, he wasn’t bad company for the hour and though I already knew the subjects I talked on, I didn’t mind revisiting them, despite how geeky that sounded in my own head.
Maybe I was as bad as he accused me of being, but I didn’t care. Working through my own headspace let me filter over the thought that eluded me earlier, before he broke into my peace and then repaired it again.
I stopped talking and frowned. My fingers traced the pattern of the lone night flying bee again and again. “They move in figure eights,” I murmured, “but see when the next rotation is slightly higher? He always goes up, and over. Never below. I wonder if it’s just this hive.”
“I wonder.”
I glanced over at Jax to where he no longer stretched out on the grass but hunched over his knees, his long arms wrapped around them as he watched me the way I studied the bee’s flight and with the same intensity. I shook my head then glanced back to my bee, my mind still turning the thought over. Moving away from him had been a good choice. I could breathe again. Jax sucked all the air away from me.
On the other hand, I didn't mind tutoring him, providing that he at least appeared to be listening and not being the incessant asshole he’d been previously. Jax the mystery artist for the win. I’d never seen his art, nor had I asked to, despite looking up his art name online when we were first paired up. But that was as far as my stalking went.
After that I closed the browser and never weren't back. I didn’t need to. Jax Palmer had a reputation. More than once I’d thought about it, but his attitude hindered anything more I might offer in a personal nature. No doubt I’d be considered a flirt in return or a…whatever.
He spent his college hours studying the origins of fine arts for a graphic design degree though for whatever reason he had opted to take on two math and science subjects. To be honest with myself, asking him anything in terms of art was so far out of my league as to be laughable. One only had to look at my bee sketches to see that. Plus, I couldn't bring myself to open a fresh conversation with him on the topic.
Not that we had actual conversations, just his incessant teasing. And my teaching, if it could be called that. Hanging out for that bit longer just to get my last few minutes in the garden hit beyond the realm of unusual for us, though the last hour had passed in a quiet type of peace that mirrored the one I’d sought outside the college classrooms in the first place.
Sliding the abandoned textbook off my legs, I flipped to a fresh page in my sketch pad. My hand hit dewy grass, seeking my pencil and when I glanced back, my pad was gone.
It was in Jax’s hands, however. He didn’t flick through the pages like he had before while I watched on tenterhooks. No, sitting in the quickly falling darkness, phone torch clenched between his teeth, he drew over my damn bee paths .
A strangled sound that could have been more appropriate on a dying domestic animal ripped from my throat as I lunged forward, and grabbed at air.
Jax twisted away, up on one knee, presenting his back to me. “Wait.”
“What the hell are you doing?” I screeched, reaching around him like a kindergartener grabbing for her pencil tin back from a rude boy. “Don’t you dare screw with my research!”
“I didn’t,” Jax said in the same soft, controlled voice as though he wasn’t screwing with everything I’d put together.
My sketches were crap. Both my professor and I agreed on that, but even though they were basic, the diagrams were clear and they backed up my theories–of which there were so many floating about in my head that I could barely keep up with myself.
And not all of them made it in full to the pad just yet. If one page was ruined…tears prickled the corners of my eyes as I fought against the oncoming wave of abject panic and utter desperation.
“That book is a journal of everything I think, Jax. I know the work looks crap to someone like you, and I know it’s not ever going to be an artist’s standard, but it’s mine. Please,” I begged in a plaintive voice, hating myself more than ever.
He didn’t even bother to look up at me.
Each word punctuated how alone and isolated I’d become despite the plethora of students that zoomed around me every day, and the housemate who’d given up trying to make me socialize after a year of excessive–and failing–effort.
I bit my lip and tried again. “Please.”
“Since you asked so nicely, Waverly.” Jax folded my sketchpad, and trapped my lost pencil inside. He handed it back and patted my head as he rose, slinging his satchel across his chest. Golden eyes glowed at me as he held my gaze for a far too long moment. “Good study session.”
He walked away from my tiny, private space with no swagger whatsoever, liberating his phone and flicking off his torch to leave us both in darkness that swallowed half of him in an instant. The remainder of him I could see stood straight, but even I, with all my social failings, read the tension in the hard line of his shoulders where they strained across his upper body.
Swallowing back a fresh dose of panic, I fanned the pages to find the one I’d been working on, scrounging for my own phone and managed to turn on the torch app.
Under the too-bright illumination, bees flew around the accurately drawn hive, the grass and few weeds below it labeled in painstaking botanic accuracy. But it was the flight of the sole bee that captured my attention.
Jax changed nothing on the page, and highlighted everything.
I could feel the movement of the bee, could almost hear it buzzing even though the sun had already set, the hive’s last occupant returned for the evening.
Swallowing, I traced his lines where he added motion to the curves of my tiny bee’s path until I could feel them winding up and around but never down. The pattern I hadn’t been able to form completely in my mind clicked with his visual aid, his art.
What Jax drew was magical, and perfect, and now I owed him.
Damnit.