Page 39 of Mostly My Boss
I wasn’t doing something stupid like waiting for him, was I?
“Jules, gimme.”
Give him what? My virginity? I had concerns about that, but I hadn’t absolutely ruled it out. There was something comforting about the idea of my first time being with Ethan. Like he would protect me and soothe me and help me learn how to give myself over to someone else.
“Your notebook, give me,” he repeated, making a motion with this hand to turn it over.
I handed him the notebook and he made a few notations on the page with his pencil. It scratched over the paper and the sound irritated me.
“I hate that you use a pencil,” I told him.
“Get over it,” he mumbled.
“Get over it? You can’t walk into this room without straightening Nicki’s posters—”
“I’ll never understand why she chooses to hang them crookedly.”
“But I have to get over the sound of your pencil, which is annoying.”
He frowned at me. “Pen is too permanent. I don’t like it. A pencil is fleeting. There for a time but never forever. And it never runs out until it stops existing. A perfect creation.”
Since I’d only mentioned the pencil to pick a fight with him, I shrugged and let it go. Then I listened to him making some more scratching noises on the page.
“I should drop the class. Drop it before I can fail, and it screws with my GPA.”
He glanced up and looked surprised. “You’d quit?”
“Strategic retreat,” I said. “Not the same thing.”
“I don’t like that attitude, Jules.”
“You’re not the boss of me, Ethan.”
“I have a mug that begs to differ.”
I kicked him because I could, and he passed the notebook back to me. Not only had he solved the equation, he’d also written out how he’d done it, which made the concept the teacher was trying to explain that much more understandable.
“There are times I hate you,” I said, frowning at his perfect work. The reality was, when he was focused, there wasn’t any problem Ethan couldn’t solve.
“No, you don’t. You care for me despite your best intentions. It’s what I count on when I’m really annoying.”
“Which is, like, every day,” I said snottily.
But I hated that he was right. Ethan felt different to me than other friends I’d had in high school. Both the guys and the girls I’d known. Like he was this piece of myself I’d been missing.
Did that mean I wanted him to put his dick inside me?
I squirmed on the bed. “Can I ask a question?”
“About calculus?”
“No.” I swallowed. Would this make things weird between us? Strangely, I didn’t think so. We were impervious to the normal bullshit between guys and girls. We always had been. “Why don’t you want to fuck me?”
His bushy eyebrows practically lifted off his head.
“I’m serious. I’ve seen you hook up with girls who are hotter than me, but you’ve also been with ones…”
“Not as hot as you?”
