Page 63 of She Likes It, Hey Micah
I love the way she blushes, eyelashes fluttering. She opens her mouth, but whatever she might have said seems to lodge itself in her throat. Instead of delaying the moment when she leaves me, like I hope she will, she pats my chest and then heads for her sister, looping their arms together and not looking back as she leads the two of them to a downward staircase and disappears.
Brooklyn, on the other hand, glances back, giving me a wide-eyed appraisal before she’s out of sight, like she couldn’t have expected someone like me to fall for someone like Micah.
I’m just as shocked as she is, and I have no idea what to do about it.
Right as I pull up outside Kale’s building, my phone buzzes with a text from Micah. She sent me a picture of her grumpy face, asking if she’s made it look any better than before. And I sit there in my car with a stupid grin for longer than I’d care to admit, gazing at the woman who has no idea she holds the fate of my future in her hands.
Chapter Eighteen
Micah
“So, what’s the 411 onyou and Jordan?”
As she plops onto the couch, Brooklyn shakes her head and gives me her signature “I mean business” look. I’m pretty sure she uses it with her students with great results because it makes me feel like I’ve done something wrong. “Nope,” she says. “First we’re talking about you and Fischer.”
I scoff, though my traitorous cheeks start to heat. “There’s no me and Fischer.” Which is technically true. Yeah, maybe he gave me a hug goodbye and it was one of the best hugs of my life, and maybe I feel like I’m floating whenever he looks at me. But that doesn’t change one very important fact. “He doesn’t date coworkers,” I tell Brooklyn.
She raises one blonde eyebrow. “But you wish he would?”
She can pretend all she wants that she’s not good with relationships or body language, but with the way she’s reading me right now, it’s like my big sister is looking into my soul.
“I don’t know,” I tell her. “I hadn’t really thought about it before this weekend because he was never interested, and he’s just so different from me. But then we got caught in the storm, and it’s your classic forced proximity.” I grab one of the blankets she keeps in a basket by the couch and furiously wrap myself in it, as if that might help me make sense of the way I’m feeling. “How am I supposed to know if I like him or if this is just a trope trying to push us together? It’s a workplace romance with an age gap thrown in there. Opposites attract. Sapiosexuality.”
“Wait, which one is that?” Brooklyn asks, pulling her eyebrows together.
“Attraction to intelligence.” Thankfully, her question stopped the stream of tropes that was sure to continue spewing from my mouth. “I don’t know, Brook. Nothing with Fischer has felt the way love’s supposed to feel.”
My sister turns bright red at that, which is a pretty convincing argument toward something going on between her and Houston’s best friend. “I think love is a lot more confusing than the movies say it is,” she mutters, fiddling with a loose thread on the bottom of her leggings.
“So.” I twist in my seat and scoot forward so my knees are touching her leg. “Are you telling me you’re in love with Jordan?”
“No!”
“Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”
Sighing, Brooklyn shakes her head. “I don’t know, Micah. He hung around all of last weekend because I hurt my ankle, and then everything went down with Mark and—”
“Hang on.” I grab her arm. “What do you mean, ‘everything went down with Mark’? What everything?”
Though her eyes go wide, she’s smart enough to know that I won’t let this mention of her longtime crush get brushed aside. “I may have gone on a date with him. Jordan helped me, uh, learn how to flirt.”
I snort a laugh. Though I am a few years younger, Houston and Brooklyn lived at my dad’s house when they were in high school. AKA when Jordan was hanging around all the time. I may have had a teensy crush on him at one point, but his interest in Brooklyn was always pretty obvious. Though, I don’t think it was ever obvious to him. Or to either of the twins. Houstondefinitelydidn’t notice. Still, I know Jordan well enough to know that I dearly wish I could have seen those flirting lessons. Jordan is the king of flirting, but he is also one of the most genuine people I know. If he was showing Brooklyn how to flirt, that likely means he wasactuallyflirting with her.
“How was the date?” I ask. “You’ve been crushing on Mark for a million years, so I hope it lived up to the expectation.” It probably didn’t, though. Not if Brooklyn is clearly interested in Jordan now.
Sure enough, she drops her gaze. “I don’t really want to talk about it. We were talking about Fischer, anyway. Tell me all about him!”
I give her the rundown, from our first meeting to working together on the event, even including the ridiculous “would you rather” texts we’ve sent back and forth. Idon’ttell her about falling asleep in his lap or the way he looked at me when I startled him awake. I want to keep those for myself.
“He’s kind of a really good friend now,” I admit with a shrug. “And I think he could really use a friend. He seems pretty lost right now.”
“Has Chad looked into him yet?”
I chuckled. “Of course he has. But there’s a lot he wouldn’t tell me.”
Rolling her eyes, Brooklyn grabs her phone. “I both love and hate that he does that. Sometimes I wish he would just come right out and say some of the things he knows.”
“But other times ignorance is bliss?” I say with a grin. Then I notice what she’s doing on her phone, and I grab it out of her hand. “Oh no, you are not ordering pizza.”
