Page 35 of Neat
Luckily, Chris proved that he could hold his own over the years, but he had a silent ally who watched his back from a far — just in case.
“It’s my own fault,” Mallory continued on a sigh. “I shouldn’t have ordered everything at once. I don’t even know where to start.”
“Maybe I could help you,” I offered — a little too quickly. My eyes darted to hers before I turned my attention back to the file in my hands, aiming for nonchalant as I shrugged. “I mean, if you want an extra hand. I could come by sometime this weekend, help you sort through it all.”
“You’d give up your weekend to sort through the pile of crap in my art studio?” she questioned. “Come on now, I can’t take you away from your hot dates.”
I scoffed. “The only hot date I have this weekend is with a Nat Geo documentary on Sunday night.”
She hummed a soft laugh. “That so? I’ve been wondering what you do outside of this place,” she said, motioning to the closet around us. Her eyes skated over the mountain of boxes we had yet to get to before they found mine. “What’s the documentary about?”
I scratched the back of my neck, murmuring a reply into my chest before tossing the file in my hand in the trash box and picking up the next.
“What was that?”
I sighed. “It’s calledCreatures of Light Underwater,” I said, loud enough that she could actually hear this time. “And I know what you’re thinking, but it actually looks really cool. It’s all this new footage put together by deep sea scientists who are finally able to get deep enough to capture some of the wildest displays of light from species that live in pitch black water. No external light reaches that far down, yet theycreatelight — to mate, to capture their prey, whatever.”
Mallory bit back a smirk, shrugging and putting her hands up. “Hey, I didn’t say a word.”
“You were thinking of some, I’m sure.”
“No, seriously. Zero judgment. If anything, I’m excited to seeyouso excited about something.” She tilted her head. “So, you get off on biology, huh?”
I shrugged. “I guess. I just love learning, in general. That’s why I like to read — to learn something new that I didn’t know before. And I love watching documentaries, mostly because there’s no acting or anything fake about it. There are so many fascinating stories that aretrue, that have real footage. It’s incredible.” I laughed through my nose. “Plus, I’ve lived in the same town my entire life and never traveled out of the state. It’s nice to go places — to learn about other people, other cultures, other ways of life.”
Mallory watched me for a long time without saying anything — so long that I peered down at her, and another shade of embarrassment tinged my cheeks when I found curiosity dancing in those blue eyes of hers.
“What?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. You just surprise me, that’s all.”
“Because I’m a nerd who listens to rock music?”
“No,” she said easily. “Because you’re smarter than you let on. And you’re cool.”
I snorted, deciding to make a joke rather than admit what her words did to my stomach. “If me geeking out over glowing fish is cool, don’t get me started about my love for space.”
Mallory laughed, tucking her feet closer and balancing her chin on her knees as she hummed along to the new song that had just come on. I eyed her from my peripheral, still flipping through the old training documents in the box I was working on, even though my attention was on her. I traced the black lines shaping her eyes, the long wisps of her lashes, the platinum strands of hair that had fallen from her ponytail and lined the edges of her jaw. I had the sudden urge to see her without makeup, to study the curves of her cheeks without them being covered with blush, or to look into her eyes without the tips of them being painted black, or to see the color of her nude lips, to feel them without smudging a line of lipstick…
To taste them.
That last thought zapped me out of my trance, and I cleared my throat, moving on to the next box in the stack. It was the one that had been buried on the bottom in the very back corner of the room, and it was extra dusty as I plopped it on the table in front of me.
I waved away the cloud, squinting. “Did it hurt?”
“When I fell from heaven?” Mallory snickered. “Come on, Logan. You’ve got better lines than that.”
I chuckled. “No, I meantthat,” I said, motioning to the ring hanging from her nose. I pinched the septum of mine to illustrate. “I feel like that had to be painful.”
Mallory reached up, fingering the diamonds that lined the bottom of the ring and shaped her too-perfect nose. It was ridiculous, really, that I noticed her fucking nose — but I did. It was perfectly sized for her face, the tip of it rounded like a little button, and that ring she wore only called my attention to it more.
“A little,” she admitted. “But then again, I was eighteen and on a mission to piss off my parents. It could have felt like childbirth and I still wouldn’t have backed down.”
I cocked a brow. “You got that pierced to prove a point to your parents?”
“No, I did it because I liked it and I wanted to,” she said, but the corner of her mouth lifted. “Driving my father insane was just a perk.”
“I’m sure he loved the tattoos, too.”
