Page 30 of A Totally Platonic Thing
“Doesn’t even rhyme, huh?” Lucas blinked at me innocently.
I pulled a face. “Shut up and watch your show. You philistine.”
He grinned and went back to his show.
And we did it all over again on Sunday, only minus the waking up together, because I crashed out in my own bed on Saturday night and I definitely, totally didnotmiss being held.
I should’ve known it would be too good to last.
Chapter Seven
Chris
Monday sucked giant, multicolored donkey balls.
First we ran out of coffee, and I’d slept in so late that I didn’t have time to stop for any before my TA’s office hours. When I apologetically handed him the paper, he told me brusquely that he didn’t accept late work even for points off, and oh yeah, that if I missed one more of his sections he’d fail me automatically.
Mellow my sweet, round, well-spanked ass. What a dick.
I left his office fuming and practically shaking with anger and frustration and shame, and I flung the paper into a recycling bin in the hall. God. I’d reallytried. And he couldn’t cut me even the smallest break. This wasn’t even the class I’d thought I might fail—that one, my senior seminar on Jane Austen, met on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I got to deal with that one tomorrow.
Discouragement and panic had me bubbling inside, my brain light and spinning. I wanted a drink. I wanted coffee. I wanted Lucas. I wanted to lie down in my bed and cover my head with the blankets and pile the pillows on top, and never ever come out.
But I forced myself to go to my next class anyway, the one I’d done all that poetry reading for. The professor showed up twenty minutes late, announced that there had been an error in the syllabus and all assignments for the day had been wrong, gave us forty pages of reading to make up for it, and then took off again for a “personal emergency.”
Right. Like the sunglasses indoors and shaky hands and the faint scent of gin underlying her heavy perfume weren’t enough to clue us all in that she meant a personal freaking hangover. Ugh. Some of the comp lit professors were the worst.
So I stepped out of the building in a cluster of other muttering, grouchy students forty-five minutes early, blinking in the sudden, blazing sunlight, since apparently the fog had burned off since I’d been inside twiddling my thumbs.
I reached in my pocket, and I’d forgotten my sunglasses.
And all of a sudden that was it.
All she wrote.
I simplycould not evenwith the day. Lucas. I had to see Lucasright now.
Filled with new purpose, I strode off, nearly running, toward the little coffee stand between the building that had the comp lit classes and the building that held Lucas’s engineering department labs. My eyes burned from tiredness and the sun and from blinking away tears, but I managed to get two lattes without breaking down.
Five minutes later, I rounded the engineering building heading for the back, where there was a smaller entrance all the seniors and grad students used to access their lab spaces.
And I stopped dead, half hidden behind a little grove of eucalyptus trees.
Lucas was outside, a few feet from the door. And with him stood a pretty blonde girl I recognized from seeing her in passing when I visited Lucas, though we’d never been introduced.
They were both holding coffee cups. My hands tightened around the two I carried, fingers twitching. They were laughing at something, Lucas grinning and the girl smirking at him. I could pick out Lucas’s low rumbly chuckle even over the whispery rustle of the trees’ long leaves, and over the echoing noise from the basketball courts on the other side of the small parking lot at the back of the building.
That girl was standing awfully close to Lucas.
And then she took another step even closer, looking up at him in a way I could only describe assultry. Lucas smiled down at her. He didn’t step away.
My eyes stung. Of course he hadn’t stepped away. A pretty girl was flirting with him, and he’d been single since Emmaline or whoever, and she’d probably brought him that coffee. Or maybe he’d bought her coffee.
How could I go over there now? They didn’t need me barging in, the awkward third wheel, bringing Lucas this worthless, redundant latte, interrupting their little flirt session.
Was I overinterpreting? No, definitely not, by the way she kept brushing her hand over Lucas’s nicely developed upper arm.
If I went over there, I’d be thinking about his arms too, standing on the other side of him competing for his attention. I’d be flashing back to those arms around me holding me close, or to how much strength they’d had when he’d taught me a lesson.
