Page 32 of Follows with Intent

“Drop to the ground, please.”

“Uh—oh.”

Out loud. Again.

Nico let himself fall. Jadon didn’t drop him, but he did, with a kind of exaggerated showiness, lower Nico and then release him. Nico got to his feet, and Jadon motioned for him to turn around again. His arms wrapped Nico a moment later. And Nico realized, with the inevitability of somebody watching a rocket launch, that he was chubbing up.

“Another option,” Jadon said in that same low, firm voice, “is to fall forward. Go ahead and try that one too.”

Nico did. And he stayed on the cold concrete, hoping for frostbite and shrinkage and anything, basically, that would save him from the embarrassment of that particular moment.

“Nico?”

“Right. Getting up now.”

Once again, Jadon’s arms encircled him, the hard lines of Jadon’s body tight against him. Do not, Nico told himself. Do not. Don’t you dare—

“You can also stomp on their foot.” When Jadon nudged the back of Nico’s knee, Nico pretended to bring his foot down on top of Jadon’s. “Good. Or you can go for their ears, their eyes, their nose, or their throat.”

He made Nico try each one, although fortunately, Nico wasn’t required to actually stick a finger up Jadon’s nose.

“If they grab you like this—” Jadon said, and he wrapped one hand—one big, strong hand with unmistakably masculine fingers—around Nico’s throat.

And that was when Nico lost yet another battle.

“—you can try any of the techniques we talked about, but you can also grab their fingers. You want to try to bend them back as far as you can, as hard as you can. Try to break them if that’s possible. Go on.”

It shouldn’t have had this effect on him. It shouldn’t have made him tent his shorts, made him aware of the blood pounding in his ears, embarrassed by his body’s reaction and unable to do anything about it. It shouldn’t have been so fucking hot. But when he grabbed one of Jadon’s fingers and pulled lightly, arousal washed through him again, even as Nico tried, desperately, to remember why it had seemed so important, not so long ago, to prevent anything like this from happening.

Jadon let Nico peel his hand away, and then he stepped back. The cold pressed against Nico’s back like a flat, hard hand. His cheeks were hot. He shoved his fists into the hoodie’s pockets and prayed to the saint of unruly boners that the old middle-school trick would provide cover once again.

“How do you feel?” Jadon asked when Nico finally turned around.

Nico’s voice sounded thick when he said, “Fine.”

“Any questions?”

Nico shook his head.

That little smudge of worry was back. “I’m sorry if that wasn’t appropriate. I—I thought of it, and I didn’t actually stop to think if it was a good idea.”

“No.” That was better—a little more normal, a little less like a teenage boy whose voice was about to break. “No, that was—thank you.”

Behind them, a goose honked furiously. Jadon’s mouth slanted into a smirk. Nico shoved him off the sidewalk.

Then, with a backwards grin for Jadon, Nico took off running back to the dorm.

11

Nico

By the time the seminar ended that afternoon, Nico’s head was pounding. He followed the other students out into the blustery gray, the sky full of scudding clouds, leaves whipped up into tiny whirlwinds that spun away and died. One more day, he told himself as the breeze raked his hair. One more day. He could do one more day.

It wasn’t simply the amount of new information he was learning from the professors—and, he reluctantly admitted, from the other grad students. It was the questions. The on-demand critical thinking. The passages of text presented and then, after barely a moment to read (or, if Nico were lucky, re-read) them, the dissection, anatomization, analysis. The fact, at the bottom line, that the whole thing was such a fucking performance.

Gio always had something brilliant to say, of course—a grudging admission, but one that Nico couldn’t avoid. As did Clark. Between the two of them, they probably answered sixty percent of the questions. But Kaylee, when pressed, came up with excellent answers (for which she would then, every single time, apologize profusely). And Ridson had a trick of staying silent until delivering a bombshell response. Maya, of course, was crushing it—sliding in after Gio and Clark had blathered on to say something incisive and succinct. Nico tried to say something when he could, but that was becoming less and less frequent.

And, of course, it didn’t help that he was supposed to present his paper tomorrow, on the final day of the seminar. It was probably a good thing. Probably a great thing, actually. Because it would be Saturday, and the seminar would end, and he could go get tanked and forget about how he had epically failed at this big opportunity.

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