Chapter 4 – Waylon
chapter
four
Waylon
Why are you flirting with her?
I could still feel the imprint of her shoulders on my palms from the lobby, the warmth of her skin before she’d yanked her arm out of my hand and looked at me like I burned her.
It was the third time in less than a week this girl had been close enough to touch, and every time my body got stupider about it, and I cared less about fixing that.
She sat right next to me, shoulder to shoulder, with our students across the table when they showed up.
Until then, it was just us and six inches of space between her arm and mine.
I was aware of every one of those inches.
She had her pen out, her notepad centered, and her phone face down.
She smelled like shea butter and citrus, and it was worse this close.
Get it together, Johnson.
Marcus was my teammate.
Marcus is also a grade-A prick who you have personally watched bring two different girls upstairs at the last three Kappa Nu parties.
I had watched him with that blonde, her hand on his chest, and then thirty minutes later, I’d watched him grip Josie’s elbow hard enough that she flinched and steer her into the hallway like she was property.
And somehow that man had a girl like this one, who smelled like shea butter and hadn’t smiled at me once, and I had thought about her pretty much every hour since the sidewalk.
How the fuck did he get her?
She’s your teammate’s girl. That’s all that should matter.
It should have, but it mattered less every time I thought it.
The door opened, and a kid walked in with a stats textbook and a spiral notebook that looked like it had been through a war. The director pointed him to our table. He sat down across from Josie. Behind him, a girl with a blond ponytail and a chem book slid into the chair across from me.
Tiffany. She opened her textbook, looked up at my face, and turned pink from her neck to her hairline. “Hi,” she said, smiling with her whole face. “I’m having trouble with stoichiometry.”
I gave her what I hoped was a reassuring smile. “Show me where you’re stuck.”
She started explaining, except every few sentences, her eyes drifted from the textbook to my mouth, and she’d lose her place and start over.
About halfway through the mole ratio, her eyes landed on the left side of my mouth and stayed there.
Her lips parted, and she forgot what she was saying completely.
I knew what she was looking at. The dimple had its own fan club, and Tiffany had just joined.
Next to me, Josie’s pen stopped tapping.
Tiffany blinked and went so red I thought she might excuse herself to the bathroom. “Sorry,” she said. “The, um. The mole ratio.”
I pointed Tiffany back to the equation and walked her through it, while beside me, Caleb was telling Josie about the exam he was sure he was going to fail.
“I know the stuff when I’m sitting in my room, and then I sit down for the test, and it’s just gone.”
“It’s not gone.” Josie’s voice shifted into something steady and warm that still left no room for argument. “Your brain has the information. Your body is panicking, and your body is faster than your brain, so your body wins. We’re going to fix that.”
She pulled out a blank sheet of paper. “Close your eyes.”
“For real?”
“For real. Ten seconds. Picture the practice problem you did last night. The one you got right. Don’t think about the answer. Think about what the page looked like, where the numbers sat, what your handwriting looked like when you wrote the formula down.”
“Okay.”
“What’s on the left side of the equation?”
“The, uh. Sample mean minus population mean.”
“Open your eyes and write it down. Not from memory. From the picture you just saw.”
He wrote it down, and his hand was steady, and the formula was correct.
“That’s visualization,” Josie said. “Your brain stores images faster than it stores words. Before the exam, close your eyes and picture the practice page. Not the formulas. Your handwriting, the scratch-out in the corner where you fixed your mistake. Your brain fills in the rest because it already knows.”
Who taught her that?
She was teaching him to trust his own brain, and it seemed like she’d figured the technique out on her own because she’d needed it herself and nobody had been there to teach her.
Damn, she was good. Marcus had a girl who could put people at ease and teach them to think a different way and he spent his weekends bringing puck bunnies upstairs while she was a state away, thinking they were building something.
If she was mine, I wouldn’t take her for granted.
Ryder came in through the side door with his student nowhere in sight and dropped into a chair at the next table and slid his phone toward me without a word, Marli’s name on the screen. Marli and Ryder had been going out for the last year. But things were going off the rails with them.
“Have you tried a conversation?” I said quietly, eyes on Tiffany’s problem set. “Goes a long way.”
“You think that’ll work?”
“It’ll work better than playing bullshit games, I’ll tell you that.”
“Ugh. Fine. If you say so.” He put the phone back in his pocket. “I’ll call her after work.”
His eyes drifted past me to Josie and back to me, and his eyebrow moved a fraction. He’d been at the party. He’d heard Marcus tell the whole room she was his girl. He was putting it together, and I didn’t want him to.
I gave him nothing, and he let it go. But I knew the silence would only last so long. When it came to other’s mess, Ryder was discrete. He’d sve his questions for later.
Between problems, Josie’s arm was resting on the table close enough to mine that I could see the fine hairs on her forearm, and I was losing my mind about it without moving a muscle.
“So,” I said, low enough that the students wouldn’t hear. “High school sweethearts?”
She did a double take. “What?”
“You and Marcus. He said at the party you’ve been together since high school.”
“Three years,” she said flatly.
“What school?”
“Bridgeport Prep. You?”
“Bridgeport High. Different side of town from Prep.”
She held my eyes for a second, and I held hers.
“Funny,” I said. “I never saw you.”
“It’s a big town.”
“It’s not that big.”
Around five forty-five, her phone buzzed on the table. Her shoulders went up the second she saw the screen, the same way they had at the party when Marcus put his arm around her. The warmth she’d been giving Caleb left her face.
She picked up the phone under the table and typed something, then erased it, typed something, then erased it.
She sighed and started again, and the third draft she finally sent.
She set the phone face down and didn’t look at anything for a while, then drew a small box on the corner of her notepad and shaded it in.
She didn’t know I was watching like a creepy stalker. As a matter of fact, she hadn’t looked at me all session.
You’re cooked. You’ve got it bad, and you need to control yourself before the whole starting line ends up in a brawl over a girl.
Her phone buzzed again, but she didn’t pick it up. She pushed it to the far edge of the table and turned back to Caleb, her voice steady and her smile back, but it wasn’t the same smile she’d been giving him all session.
The session wound down. Tiffany kept sneaking looks at me between problems, and at one point, she full-on stared at my mouth while I was explaining electron configuration.
I had to look away because the heat crawling up my neck was not something I needed.
Ryder let out a low chuckle from the next table that he didn’t even try to disguise, and I kicked his chair without looking at him.
Tiffany left with a smile and a little wave that I returned because I was raised right.
Caleb closed his notebook and looked at Josie like she’d handed him a life raft. “You’ll be here Thursday?”
“Same time.”
“It’s a date,” he said, and then immediately looked like he wanted to crawl under the table. He was eighteen and hadn’t meant it like that, and his face told the whole room.
Josie blinked, and a flush crept across her cheeks that she tried to cover by looking at her notepad.
I grinned so wide it hurt. “Looks like you’ve got a date, Flash,” I whispered.
“Shut up,” she murmured, keeping her voice down and her eyes on her bag, but the flush was still there, and fuck, she was gorgeous with the hint of pink on her brown cheeks.
Caleb thanked her twice and walked out standing straighter than he’d walked in.
“At least I was able to help my student today,” she said, zipping her pen into her bag. “Unlike yours, who couldn’t even focus.”
“Can’t help it if I’m pretty.”
“Humble, too.”
It was dry and aimed at her notepad, but I caught the twitch at the corner of her mouth before she killed it, and I was going to be thinking about that twitch for the rest of the week.
She zipped her bag and stood, and I stood too.
“You good?”
“I’m fine,” she said brusquely.
I searched her gaze, willing her to give me more, but she didn’t. “Fair enough,” I added. “The visualization thing. What you taught him. That was really good.”
Whatever she’d been expecting me to say, that was not it. “It’s just a technique.”
“No, it’s not. You taught that kid to trust himself in forty minutes. Most people can’t do that in a year.”
She held my eyes for a beat, and I held hers, and neither of us said anything. I was going to be thinking about that at three in the morning.
She turned for the door.
“See you around, Flash,” I murmured. “Feel free to run into me anytime.” She didn’t answer. She was my teammate’s girl. That should stop me from flirting with her. But as he was a cheating piece of shit, that didn’t even slow me down.
I started counting the hours until Thursday.