Chapter Twenty-One
Twenty-One
“OH, HI.”
I turn, toothbrush tucked against the inside of my cheek, to find Mikey standing in the open bathroom door, her mouth curled in a knowing smile. She’s in the usual white button-down she wears for her server job, paired with a black knee-length skirt I’ve never seen before.
I spit into the sink and swipe my hand over my mouth.
“This super interesting thing happened,” she says. “See, I woke up and wanted to check on Jamie, but when I stuck my head in his room, you two were—!”
I grab her wrist and yank her into the bathroom, shutting the door firmly behind her. “Shh, shh, shh! Mikey!” I rinse my mouth and drop my brush into the cup by the sink.
“You two were cuddling!” Mikey squeals, pointing at me.
“We were not.”
Mikey levels me with a look. “You were literally spooning. I know what I saw.”
My heart hammers, and when I catch sight of my reflection, a flush has splotched its way up my neck, coloring my cheeks.
“He’s sick,” I whisper. “It wasn’t anything—it wasn’t like that.”
She leans against the door, crossing her legs at the ankles. “My darling little Bumblebee. Do you have something you want to get off your chest?”
“Nope.”
“Not even the tiniest, itty-bittiest something?”
I screw my mouth up, shaking my head.
She shrugs. “Well, when you do, you know where to find me. I might not seem like it, but I can keep a secret. And sometimes unloading your feelings to a friend can relieve emotional constipation.” She grins, popping the door open again.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I reply weakly, rubbing my eyes. I peek at her through my fingers as she leans against the wall, wiggling her feet into her nonslip work shoes. “Is that skirt new?”
Her expression falters. “Yep. My boss decided girls can’t wear pants anymore.”
“What?”
“Apparently business picks up when we have certain people on the schedule. You know, pretty girls in skirts, so perverts can get their rocks off on bare legs.” She twirls a finger in her hair. “I’ve also been encouraged to try pigtails.”
“Ew? Ew.”
Mikey smiles. “Tell me about it.”
“Is that even legal?”
“No idea, but I can’t afford the fight anyway. Other places won’t start hiring until fall semester, so I’ll have to stick it out a few more weeks. I do look hot in a skirt, though. Maybe the tips will be worth selling my soul a little. And having to wear it on my bike.” She rolls her eyes.
“Do you want to borrow my car?”
“Nah, I’m good. I’ve got shorts on under this.” She heads for the door, pausing to turn back and give me a knowing look. “Also, offering me your car is simply not enough butter to grease my brain into forgetting what I saw this morning.”
“Mikey!” I whisper-yell in protest.
She grins, flinging the front door open. “Byeee, love you!”
The door bangs shut behind her, and I stand there momentarily stunned. Love you?
“It would kill her to do anything quietly, wouldn’t it?”
I whirl. Jamie is crossing the living room, headed for the kitchen. His skin is still pallid, dark circles stark beneath his eyes, but his mouth lifts in a lazy smile, one side hitching higher than the other.
I get the pins-and-needles feeling of all my limbs being asleep. “Hi.”
His head tilts, smile tinged with confusion. “Hi.” He pauses in the kitchen doorway, and I have a momentary crisis—to flee or to face him?
“Can I make you something?” I ask, my voice shaking enough that I worry he’ll hear it. “More soup, or…?”
His smile slips. “I got it. I feel okay today, but—are you okay? You don’t sound good.”
I exhale a reedy laugh. “I’m fine. Just—” I break off before the word “tired” can leave my mouth.
I don’t need to remind him why I’d be tired.
His fever returned around dawn, which I only knew because I woke to his shivering body curled around me, his knees tucked against mine, his arm banded tightly around my waist.
I should’ve made him take another dose of medicine and sent him back to his side of the bed, but instead I did the worst possible thing—I sank into it.
I put my hand over his at my ribs and slotted our fingers together, and I told myself I wasn’t really awake.
He was sick, and I was overtired and confused, and maybe it was all a dream.
When I woke again, Jamie was still holding me, and my fingers ached where they were entwined with his. I lay there for a long time debating what to do, forcing myself not to relish in the feeling of being held.
I wonder if he remembers. If he woke at all as I extracted myself as painstakingly as possible from his arms and slipped from his room with my heart lodged in my throat.
“You’re just…?” he prompts now, his expression giving nothing away.
I swallow. “Busy. Um, let me know if you need anything. I’ll be in here.” I tip my head toward my room. “I have a ton of work to do.”
“Right,” he says, his eyes tracking me as I back through my door and out of sight. “Hey, Blair?”
I pretend not to hear him. Last night was too much, too soon after our kiss.
I’m in total system overload. I shouldn’t have let him hold my hand, hold me.
What I should have done was give him his medicine, check on him before I went to bed, and retreat to my own room for the night. The bare minimum.
But I kept hearing the way he said he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been taken care of, and even now I have to squeeze my eyes shut against the memory. Unguarded Jamie Atwater is a final boss, and I’m a simple level-one beginner about to get my softhearted shit rocked.
“Blair.”
“What?” I say sharply, whirling.
Jamie stands in my doorway, and his brows jump at my tone. “I thought you’d need this?” He holds up a laptop, and I realize it’s mine. I must have stupidly left it behind when I snuck out of his room this morning.
I exhale, the fight going out of me. “Thanks. Sorry, I’m—I’ve got two assignments due at the end of the week, so I’m…”
Jamie takes a tentative step into my room, offering my laptop. “Stressed?”
I take it from him. “Yeah.” It’s not a lie, at least. I’m so stressed, I’m riddled with fractures, all the darkest, saddest parts of me threatening to leak out like sludge.
Jamie draws closer, nodding to my chair. “Show me. You’re going into week four, right? So, sorting algorithms?”
“No. I already told you, I don’t want you looking at my stuff.”
He sighs, putting his hands on my shoulders and steering me to my chair. “There’s nothing embarrassing about having a hard time. Show me what you’re struggling with, and I can help you.”
“Jamie—”
“Sit.” He pushes on my shoulders, forcing me into my seat, and then crouches at my side, his face angled up to me. “You took care of me. Let me take care of you.”
“It’s not a barter system. You don’t have to repay me.”
“I know. But I’m in a position where I can, and I want to. I should’ve been helping you this whole time.”
“Except we weren’t supposed to hang out, or talk, or do anything beyond the bare minimum of communication it took to work on Cram Session.”
We definitely weren’t supposed to kiss. Or cuddle. Or care.
A muscle tics in his jaw. “I’m aware.”
“That was your rule—”
“Fuck the rule, Blair. Don’t you think we’re a little past that at this point?”
A few years ago, I was at a paddock party when a thunderstorm rolled in, and before the rain started, the air suddenly grew stagnant and oppressively hot.
The hair on my arms stood up, and my skin began to tingle.
Then lightning struck a tree in the distance, sending all of us screaming and scattering to our cars as the sky opened up and released the deluge.
This feels a little like that—the warning of a lightning strike, the electricity so sharp, my hair could stand on end. Awareness sizzles along my skin.
Oh no.
Oh no.
I turn my head away, my stomach somersaulting. No, no, no!
“Let me help you,” Jamie says quietly. “Please.”
My brain whirs like an ancient, overloaded computer.
Am I developing feelings for Jamie Atwater?
Not just attraction, not only want, but the kind of feelings that could keep me up at night, tossing and turning, remembering what it feels like to be held by him? To kiss him? To have him care about me?
“Blair,” Jamie says, and it’s clear this isn’t the first time he’s tried to get my attention.
“Okay,” I say at last, taking a steadying breath. I can ignore this. No problem.
Jamie relaxes beside me. “Show me what you’re working on.”
I obediently boot up my laptop and navigate to my open assignments. “Our ongoing project is an inventory management system. I have to write the functions for three sorting algorithms in Python, and then I have to do a comparative analysis report.”
“Yeah, we did this too. Ours was a personalized fitness tracker.” He straightens from his crouch. “Let me get a chair. Which one do you want to do first?”
“I already started the Quicksort function. I’m working on the partition part.”
Jamie ducks out, returning with a chair from the kitchen table. He walks me through each moment I get stuck—when I incorrectly swap the pivot element, and when I use a relational operator that degrades performance.
“What’s this?” Jamie asks after a while, nodding at the soapstone on my desk. “Some abstract piece I’m too dumb to understand?”
I laugh. “Um, no. That is a block of soapstone.”
“What are you doing with it?”
“I haven’t decided. Soapstone is softer than it looks—somewhere between clay and stone—but I’m still worried about messing it up. I might just pick something I’ve already done in clay and take it easy on myself. I’d rather not become a failure on every front in my life.”
“You’re not a failure, Blair.”
I save my work and click away from my assignment, going back to the main APM portal, where I pull up my stats for him. There are no high scores in the bunch, all culminating in my 72 percent average, teetering just this side of passing.
“From what I can see, you’re not failing,” he says. “And I’m going to help you through the rest of the modules. All you have to worry about are your exams. When’s your midterm?”
“Next week.” The first thing I have to look forward to after Fourth of July weekend, which will certainly see me chained to my desk like a movie study montage.
“So we have the long weekend. I’ll help you study.”
I stare at him. “Jamie.”
He meets my gaze, unwavering. “Blair.”
“You have your own stuff. You don’t need to worry about me.”
“I think we’ve already established that I do. Worry about you.” He turns away, drawing my laptop toward him. “Ready to do the next one?”
Jamie and I spend days working together. We run through old practice modules until I have a better grasp of the material. I retake the cumulative quizzes, rewrite old code, and assess my assignments to find the errors that resulted in my low scores.
As we work, something between Jamie and me shifts, solidifying beneath our feet.
He jokes with me. He smiles. He shares details about his life, things I never knew—all the time he spent alone in middle school when his dad was working nights, the first food he ever learned to cook on his own (scrambled eggs), and how, despite the way my parents treated him, he liked being at my house because it was always full of noise.
He even talks to me about the harder stuff, things I already knew. The track-meet fight that landed him in anger management. That he got into computers because he wasn’t allowed to run at night, and it was another way to get out of his own head.
And if I desperately want to kiss him again? If I have to suffer through the onslaught of my growing feelings, which can never, ever take root? It’s worth it to be close to him. The treasure-hoarding dragon in me gathers up these stories and truths like jewels, warmed by my growing collection.
“Do you still have the code you used for testing edge cases?” I ask him now, looking across the kitchen table at him. He’s toiling away at Cram Session while I finish last-minute testing for my week four submission on my ongoing project, which is due tonight.
“I just want to make sure I cover my bases,” I add.
Jamie nods, rubbing his eyes. “Yeah, it’s on my old external hard drive.”
I push back from the table. “I can get it.”
“In my desk drawer,” he says, stretching with a yawn.
I get up and go to his room. It should feel strange, this trust from Jamie, who once so clearly marked the threshold of his room as a boundary. But I guess it helps that I don’t have anything nefarious in mind anymore. He must sense that from me.
I move to his desk, sliding open one of the drawers. “Top right?” I call to him.
“No!” Jamie’s response isn’t quite a shout, but it’s strangely urgent. I freeze, staring into the drawer I’ve opened.
On top of pens and other common desk detritus is a small stack of used sticky notes. The top note is crumpled but re-flattened. I recognize it right away—the one he stole straight out of my hand the night he was watching Star Wars alone in the living room.
I pick up the stack and quickly flip through. Each one bears my handwriting, dating back to my very first note. Most of them are the simple, meaningless products of my pettiness, simply scrawled with the word Done. Others are my longer messages, though they’re equally passive-aggressive.
Why would he keep these?
I’m distantly aware of fast-approaching footsteps, and I drop the stack and snap the drawer shut, heart hammering as I turn toward the doorway.
Jamie stops at the threshold, his expression tense. “The left,” he says.
I still have my hand on the drawer, flat against the handle. Can he tell I looked? And what does it mean? Is it just a junk drawer, or…
I turn, sliding open the left drawer and pulling out the external hard drive sitting on top. “Found it.”
Jamie doesn’t move, his hands flexing at his sides.
I plaster on a fake smile. “I promise I wasn’t peeking at your diary.
” I try to make it sound like a joke, but catching a peek of his diary is exactly what I feel like I’ve done.
Because I can’t think of a single reason why Jamie would have kept my sticky notes.
And not just one or two, but from the size of the stack, it was all of them.
His gaze strays to the drawer, then flicks to my face, assessing. “Right.”
I hold up the hard drive. “Thanks for this.”
I cross the room, and Jamie automatically steps aside, letting me pass. I don’t look at his face, because if I were to see my own raw, open yearning reflected back at me, I might snap the leash I worked so hard to construct from the moment Jamie said kissing me was a bad idea.