NOAH #3
He still stood on the other side of the booth, curtain pulled and held by his arm. We stared at one another for an endlessly awkward moment. Sawyer breathed in, his chest rising, his eyes darting all over me.
“Um.” It was all I was capable of saying.
He knew, without a shred of doubt, what was going on in here. And down there.
I winced. “Curtain?”
“Right,” he said and nodded jerkily, still looking at me with pinking cheeks and glazed eyes. He had this look late at night when we studied together, too, if practice had preceded the sessions.
The realization struck me out of nowhere.
He was horny. A little, but enough to show.
The way his ears perked and his eyes narrowed and his teeth sank into his lower lip should have been enough to tell me as much.
Then again, I’d only ever seen such looks on TV.
People didn’t exactly exhibit lust in my general direction.
I wheezed in and licked my lips, somehow bringing Sawyer back to his senses.
It was like he had been looking at someone else for a moment.
It was like he slowly saw me the way I was, and not some Adonis that he had imagined in his lust-filled brain.
He frowned and nodded, then dropped the curtain as he stepped back.
When I changed back into my own clothes and stepped out, my problem had deflated enough that I could rest assured it wasn’t drawing any unwanted attention.
And when I met Sawyer, he was his normal self, too.
He smiled and showed me a huge pile of clothes.
“These are the pieces you’re allowed to wear.
Greens and blues are your best colors and all of these emphasize your figure.
You just have to choose the ones you like. ”
I blinked at him, then at the pile. He had picked up every last bit of clothing that had felt vaguely comfortable while I had been trying it on. All the ones I liked even a little were on one pile. And all the ones that had made me feel too lanky or skinny or cramped in their tightness were gone.
Sawyer tapped my shoulder and said he’d go and look around if they had anything to his liking.
I stayed with the pile of clothes and wondered how many pieces were too many.
I had a healthy balance from basically tutoring during all my waking hours.
I had a scholarship that paid me a small allowance on top of my accommodation and tuition fees.
And my parents were generous enough with their money, if not with their emotions.
As I sifted through the dark blues and deep forest greens, then all the brown and gold and silver accents that Sawyer had picked up for me, I couldn’t choose. At random, I picked up a little over half the things Sawyer had approved and carried them to the register.
Out there, while my stuff was being scanned, I watched Sawyer.
He had his bitchface on. The unapproachable and desirable kind.
He had mastered the contemporary mating calls, evidently, but as I looked around, there was nobody I could imagine Sawyer eyeing.
He just wore that expression when he wasn’t deeply immersed in something.
And when all my stuff was packed, Sawyer needed to help me carry it back to my room.
Our conversation was sparse on the way back, mainly because I was equally tired and embarrassed of the near-horrible encounter in the changing booth.
It was bad enough as it was. It could have been even more devastating, had he pulled the curtain back ten seconds sooner.
But when we marched into my room and dropped all the stuff on the floor, Sawyer sat down on my bed rather than finding an excuse to go back to his. “I was thinking, after my test, we could put together a little test for you, too.”
“Oh, yeah?” I asked, starting to unpack and fill my closet.
“We’ll do one of the bars in the student center,” he said confidently. “It’s a controlled environment and the guys there are the easiest because they’re looking for the same thing. We’ll go in separately, but I’ll be near you to observe. And if it goes wrong, I’ll just sweep in to the rescue.”
I grinned at that. “How wrong could it go that I would need rescuing?”
Sawyer laughed. “If you look like you’re on the verge of combusting, I’ll know.”
I joined him in laughing at the worst case scenario knowing well enough how likely that was. If someone even tried flirting with me, I would explode with embarrassment. And equally so if everyone just pretended I was a ghost and turned away from me.
Anxiety soon pressed down on my chest and made breathing in a little harder. “Let’s focus on your test, first, shall we?”
Sawyer nodded to that and the look of determination eased me a bit. “Play us some of your weird cyberpunk, will you?” he said.
And though I had expected him to leave any minute, the fact that he showed no intention at all pleased me. I hurried to hook up the speaker to my phone and find a good playlist while Sawyer kicked back on my bed, hands under his head, and a blissfully tranquil expression on his face.
My heart tripped and I wasn’t sure if it was the nerves over the impending test date or something else entirely.