Chapter 4
Four
Colin
18 Years Old
“Happy eighteenth birthday.”
Scarlett reeled back like Colin had slapped her across the face, and he again reconsidered getting her a donut. Maybe that wasn’t a normal thing to do for a new lab partner. Maybe she didn’t like maple bars. That seemed to be the likeliest option, so he asked out loud.
“Ms. Matthews told me you’d be my new lab partner a few days ago, and it’s your birthday, so I got you a donut. If you don’t like maple bars, I can give it to someone else.” Colin reached for the donut Scarlett had dropped on the lab counter as if it had caught fire and burned her. He had barely even stretched his long fingers toward the brown paper bag before Scarlett snatched it off the counter and held it away from him.
“No! I will stab you with my pencil if you try to take this away from me.” Scarlett clutched the donut to her chest, and Colin did his best not to drop his eyes to where her shirt scooped to reveal the tops of her breasts. Quite frankly, it was hard because Scarlett was objectively the kind of girl who turned heads. It might have been her wavy red hair, but more than that, Colin thought it was her lips. They were full and pouty, and redder than usual, like she had applied lipstick that morning, but he had only ever seen her use a swipe of Chapstick. The scattered freckles that danced across her face were oddly symmetrical in their placement. Or maybe it was just that there were so many of them that there was no telling what wasn’t symmetrical. He would have to sit down and map out her face, which he had suggested doing once for Emma Stone when he and his brother Carter were arguing about her general appeal. But apparently mapping someone’s face with math was serial killer behavior. Sometimes Colin’s ideas came across as over the top, which was probably why Scarlett wanted to stab him so soon after becoming his lab partner.
“Okay.” Colin lifted both hands in a sign of surrender. Today would be a very bad day to get stabbed. Not that any day would be great, but today in particular wouldn’t be the best. “If you’re going to stab me, can you wait till tomorrow?”
“Are you…” Scarlett blinked and stood up straighter. “You know I’m joking, right? I’d never legitimately stab you with a pencil.”
Colin released a breath and bobbed his head. “Oh. I mean, I don’t know you or your murderous tendencies very well, so how was I supposed to know you weren’t going to stab me?” He hadn’t meant it as a joke, but the giggle Scarlett let out made the corner of his mouth quirk up.
“I’m just very serious about my food. I love donuts.” She smiled, and he almost wanted to mimic it. “And you don’t know me, but you know when my birthday is?”
“It’s pretty easy to remember.” Colin reached beside his backpack again and grabbed his own waxed paper bag, dangling it between two fingers for show. “It’s also my birthday. Both our moms used to bring in cupcakes for the class in elementary school on the same day.” He swallowed back the lump in his throat he had acquired just from the mention of his mom.
Scarlett’s mouth dropped open. “I-it’s your birthday? I didn’t know that. I would have… I, um…” She floundered around in her backpack for a moment, and Colin stood awkwardly, unsure of what to do with his hands while he waited for her to get to the point. By the time he had shoved them into his pockets, pulled them out, and shoved them in again, Scarlett had retrieved a sketchbook and ripped off a page, passing it over to him. “Here.” He took the piece of paper hesitantly, his fingers skimming over hers. Her hands were warm, and he fought the urge to press into the touch. The gentle grazing of skin made him almost itchy with discomfort.
What finally pulled him out of his hyperfocus was the drawing. It was almost like she had been reading his thoughts earlier about mapping out her own face. The sketch was of a face, but only half of it resembled one, while the other half spiraled and bloomed from the center line above the nose in chaotic wildflower bouquets.
“It’s not my best work, but it did take a while. The concept was cool in theory, but my execution was not the best.” Scarlett tucked a strand of her copper hair behind her ear, getting a piece tangled in her oval-shaped wooden earring and wrangling it free before she pointed to a small spot on the picture that she must have decided was a mistake. Colin stared down at the drawing, cataloging everything about it, and concluded that he had no clue what she was talking about.
“It’s perfect.” The smile that was threatening to come out earlier spread. “I can’t keep this. You should give it to someone important.”
“Who’s to say you aren’t important?” Her eyebrows rose, and she leaned closer to him, dropping her voice into a low murmur. “I mean, I don’t know if you know this, but we share the same birthday.”
“Is that… a joke?” He floundered for some sort of sign that she was teasing, but now she just looked confused. “Because I do know. That’s why I gave you the donut?”
“Not a fan of sarcasm?” Sarcasm . He sighed heavily and shook his head. He had the absolute worst time figuring out whether someone was dead serious or just being sarcastic. Sometimes the bitter way people delivered a line felt true, even after they said they were joking.
“No, sorry. I can’t tell when it’s sarcasm unless I know you well. I can usually tell when my brother and uncle are being facetious, but I’m more of a pun or punchline kind of guy.”
“Got any good ones?”
“I make them up on the spot. And… most of them are dirty.” He grimaced, knowing this was probably the worst introduction ever. He had read a few books on job interviews and meeting someone new, and no matter how much he had studied Scarlett from afar, this was probably supposed to be similar to that. It was decidedly uncouth to bring up anything sexual at a job interview.
“Oh?” She seemed genuinely shocked by this, and he was weirdly pleased he could surprise her.
“You can blame my brother for encouraging it.”
“I can take a dirty joke. Half of the male population at this school come up with the most vile things to say every day, so what’s new?” Colin had to agree with her on that considering that the very large breasts on her chest (which he was attempting to not home in on) were the frequent subject of his previous lab partner’s commentary. He supposed Scarlett’s womanly figure was shocking to people whose prefrontal cortexes weren’t developed enough to determine appropriate topics of conversation. “Plus, we’re legally adults today. Bring it on.”
“I, uh, well…” Colin looked around for something to pull inspiration from other than Scarlett before his eyes landed on her drawing and a half-thought-out idea popped into his head. He slid the paper across the lab table and pointed at it. “It looks like someone planted their seed on her face.” The pregnant pause with no viable response from Scarlett made his skin crawl. Then it made him explode into a frantic explanation so she would get it. “It’s a play on words because wildflowers come from seeds, but also, people call ejaculation ‘seed’ sometimes. I guess that’s more old-timey, but?—”
Scarlett burst into laughter. It was so loud and bubbly that Colin flinched before his ears regulated the sound a bit better. It wasn’t quite loud enough to set off the claustrophobic feeling he always got from loud situations, so he shouldn’t have been feeling any sort of pang in his chest, but the sound had a strange effect on his body anyway. It wasn’t altogether a bad feeling, so he watched her, enraptured in the way the red on her collarbone spread up her neck. A second later, Scarlett had slapped her hand over her mouth, muffling her laughter. She wheezed behind the press of her palm. The whole class was looking at them now, and Colin was no longer sure of what to do with his body. Not that he was ever really sure how to carry himself, but with everyone’s eyes on them, he felt like he was the animal at the zoo everyone was pointing at.
Their teacher, who had been dutifully writing on the whiteboard as everyone got settled, raised her eyebrows as she looked over at them. “Scarlett, do you have something to share with the class?”
Hands fidgeting in front of himself, Colin grasped for an explanation to give Ms. Matthews to save them both. “Sorry,” he announced, voice wavering. “It’s my fault. I told her a joke about?—”
The back of Scarlett’s hand smacked against his sternum, and he let out a surprised whoosh of air. When he jerked his head to look at her, she started coughing violently all while shaking her head. “Don’t…” she wheezed under her breath. “Please don’t tell her.”
“Can you breathe?” Colin whispered somewhat frantically. Her reaction was starting to make him panic. It was quite possible that she wasn’t laughing at the joke, but at him .
“I’m okay,” Scarlett squeaked out and managed to find control, giving the class a timid wave. “Sorry.”
Scarlett’s breathing slowly leveled as her chest heaved in and out. For all of Colin’s self-beratement about sustaining eye contact with people, he seemed to have zero problem dropping his gaze again to watch her heaving breasts. She still didn’t look like she was getting enough air, and he had just enough mental forethought to not take a pair of scissors or his bare hands to the front of her shirt to help her breathe better. While he had recently read one of his uncle’s ghostwritten novels—a historical bodice-ripper—he was fairly certain that this was not the time to destroy the front of her shirt.
Eventually, Ms. Matthews ignored Scarlett’s outburst and began her lesson. Colin would normally pay attention to the lesson, but he had already read ahead to prepare for this class, and he knew the material. His focus today was Scarlett: to help her understand the basics, and, apparently, to gawk at her chest, which was finally taking steady breaths again.
“Well, that was embarrassing,” Scarlett whispered.
“Me?” Colin asked.
“What?” She looked up at him, and he met her eyes briefly, counting to two Mississippi in his head to make sure the gaze held for an appropriate amount of time before he could break eye contact. “No, I meant me. I was expecting a knock-knock joke with a pervy punchline or something even more ridiculous, and you just came out swinging with a,” she dropped her voice even lower, “cum play joke. And one that was so highbrow that it took me a second to recognize the genius of it all. And who says ejaculation with a straight face like that?”
He shrugged. “I can say most things with a straight face.” He kept his voice at a low hum so as not to disturb the class. Most students were chatting amongst themselves anyway because it sounded like Ms. Matthews was gearing up for a lab.
“Should we test that theory?” The corner of her mouth twitched.
Colin tilted his head to the side. “Shouldn’t you be listening to the lesson? Ms. Matthews said you needed help understanding the material.”
“I hate to break it to you, but listening to the lesson isn’t going to help me. I’ve tried that. I don’t get it, and I hate science.”
This argument was his favorite argument to ever exist. Colin frequently had the same conversation with his brother Carter, who claimed the same thing as Scarlett. No one really hated science, though. They maybe weren’t good at learning all the different facets of it, or they were confused by it, but hate it? Impossible. “You can’t just say you hate science. Everything is science. All of our surroundings are science. You are science.” And very attractive science at that , he thought.
Scarlett sighed. “I’ll look up some YouTube videos on this information later. My brain doesn’t work well with lectures. I try to listen, but it all goes in one ear and out the other. I need visuals to make sense of anything.”
Considering the artwork she had gifted to him, he agreed that she seemed to do very well with visuals. “YouTube videos aren’t the same as hands-on experience in the classroom, though. I can watch a thousand videos and read a thousand books on sex, but I can’t say I know it completely because I’ve never experienced it.”
Scarlett blinked up at him, her green eyes flicking across his features. “You were not kidding about saying everything out loud with a straight face.”
“I don’t like to beat around the bush.”
“And have you?”
“Beat a bush?” He pulled his eyebrows together.
“Read a thousand books on sex.”
A mental calculation of the number of books he had read on the subject jump-started in his head as he pictured the covers of each one on the shelf in his room. “I’ve read seven in total.”
Scarlett gaped at him and squeaked out, “Seven?”
He nodded. “You want my Goodreads username?”
“I’m not much of a reader. I get distracted and end up reading the same page fifty times over, so the book has to be really good for me to finish it.”
“Right, because you need visuals.” He flipped through the covers of the books in his head again. “Two of them had very detailed diagrams, if you want to borrow them. You’d have to be careful with them, though, because I hate cracked spines and page smudging.”
“Oh, um.” Scarlett tapped her fingers on the counter, and it reminded him a bit of the way his fingers twitched when he didn’t know what to do with them. “That’s nice of you. Maybe I will. I mean, I’ve seen diagrams before, but maybe your diagrams—er—the book ones will be different.”
Ms. Matthews interrupted their conversation with a direction to the class to start the lab from the packets she was passing out. They stood in silence for a moment until the chatter in the room picked up again, and Colin felt the odd sensation that he wanted to keep their conversation going. Scarlett was easy to talk to. She seemed to genuinely think he was funny, too, which was a first for anyone outside his immediate family and the occasional teacher.
“I have books on all of this, too.” Colin gestured to the classroom. “Most of them don’t have pictures, but if you come over I’m pretty good at the Play-Doh thing in all those timed trivia games. Maybe I could show you with that? I’m not as good at drawing as you are, or I’d sketch it for you.”
A smile returned to her face. He liked the way she brightened after he said things. “Really? You’d do that for me? We could study at my house. I have like thirty different-colored containers of Play-Doh because my uncle bought them preemptively for his baby, as if she could even play with it yet. At least, I don’t think babies can play with Play-Doh. But maybe Play-Doh is non-toxic?” Colin opened his mouth to tell her that he would probably be more worried about the Play-Doh being a choking hazard for a baby when she continued to rattle off more thoughts. “She’s not even on a full solids diet yet, but she’d probably like it if I waved the colors in front of her face. That’s a good sensory thing, right?” Colin opened his mouth again, and she cut him off. “Babies and me, we both need visuals.” She seemed to realize a second later that she had veered off track and redirected. “I’ll pay you for your tutoring services. I’m desperate for the help if you still want to after that tangent. If you’re any good at math, too, I would love to ace my stats final. I can’t promise there won’t be more Play-Doh monologues in your future, though. I ramble and stutter when I’m nervous.”
“And I make you nervous?” Colin asked, curiosity sparking.
She bit her lip. “A little.”
“Interesting,” he contemplated. He was usually the most overwhelmed person in a room, so this concept was foreign to him. “You make me nervous, too.”
“But not nervous enough to back out of being my tutor, right?”
Colin chuckled. “Right.”
Scarlett bounced on the balls of her feet with a squeal. “Thankyouthankyouthankyou!” And then before he even knew what was happening, her arms were tossed around his midsection, her breasts pressed into him in a hug. He was so shocked by it that he could feel his muscles stiffen under her touch before they released the tension and sank into the embrace. Usually, he hated when people touched him, but Scarlett’s hug was so enthusiastic that the pressure lessened some of the tightness in him before she jerked away from him, her arms curling into her chest like a T-Rex. “S-sorry, I don’t normally hug strangers. That was… I-I don’t know what that was. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Colin assured her. It was better than okay. He wished it would have lasted a little longer so the relief from it was a bit more permanent. “We’re not strangers now, remember? I’m your tutor.”