Page 9 of Campus Crush
His hand brushing my hair aside, his mouth slanting over mine, the two of us tangled together on his bed.
The heat of his hands on my hips.
The desperate crush of our bodies—until suddenly he wasn’t moving anymore.
Until I pulled away and found him slack-mouthed, snoring, passed out cold beneath me.
Mortification roared through me all over again, fresh and searing.
I squeezed his hand once, firmly, professionally, and let go before he could feel the tremble in my fingers. “Abby Walker,” I responded, even though it was clear he already knew my name because Marco said it several times already.
Marco clapped Foster on the back. “Great, I’ll let you two get acquainted and get a schedule going.”
Then he darted off, leaving Foster and me standingalone in the entryway of the tutoring center. Foster stared at me like he was excited to work together while I was desperately wishing the floor would open up and swallow me whole.
But I wasn’t that lucky.
FIVE
“Um, here, come on. I’ve got a table set up this way.”
“Great,” he said, although there was a hint of something in his voice that lacked sincerity. I took a covert glance at him and noticed his smile was still on his face, but there was a stiffness to it I hadn’t seen before.
Not that I made a habit of noticing Foster Kane.
I led him to my table and gestured to the seat across from me, tucked safely out of sight from the entrance. Not wanting to extend our time longer, I got right to work and pulled out my notebook. “So, you need help with math? What math class are you taking?”
He glanced over to where the door would be if he had a clear shot of it and grabbed the back of his neck in what was clearly a nervous gesture.
“Uh, do you guys do, like, um, confidentiality agreements here or anything?”
I arched a brow. “Why?”
He leaned forward and I caught a whiff of his clean and woodsy scent. I hated the way it made my stomach tighten.
Maybe I just ate something bad, and my stomach wascramping. That was preferable to admitting there was anything I still found attractive about Foster.
“I don’t really want people to know I’m getting tutoring,” he said.
His blue eyes pierced into me with a hint of desperation like he was genuinely concerned about people finding out he was at the tutoring center.
I swallowed thickly, ignoring the way my heart was racing.
Maybe I was coming down with a cold.
“We don’t go advertising who we tutor,” I told him, keeping my voice even and gentle and not giving away how much his anxiety concerned me.
I’d never seen Foster as anything but completely confident and sure of himself.
This version of him was…disconcerting.
Foster let out a sigh of relief as his shoulders dropped, and he took a breath like he’d been holding it this whole time. “Okay, cool.” Then, taking another deep breath, he pierced me with those eyes again, his face pinched like he was embarrassed about what he had to say. “I need help with Mitchell’s math class.”
My pen had been poised over my paper, expecting him to say one of the notoriously hard math professors like Hopkins or Kenney, but Mitchell was one of the easier math professors at CFU and typically only taught intro math classes.
“Which section?” I asked, wondering if maybe Mitchell had added an upper-level section this semester.
“104,” he said.
