Page 6 of Study Games

By the time I finished Jax lay on his back with his arms crossed behind his head on his satchel as he watched me, his phone held up unwaveringly. His knees bent, feet planted firmly on the ground, he wasn’t bad company for the hour and though I already knew the subjects I talked on, I didn’t mind revisiting them, despite how geeky that sounded in my own head.

Maybe I was as bad as he accused me of being, but I didn’t care. Working through my own headspace let me filter over the thought that eluded me earlier, before he broke into my peace and then repaired it again.

I stopped talking and frowned. My fingers traced the pattern of the lone night flying bee again and again. “They move in figure eights,” I murmured, “but see when the next rotation is slightly higher? He always goes up, and over. Never below. I wonder if it’s just this hive.”

“I wonder.”

I glanced over at Jax to where he no longer stretched out on the grass but hunched over his knees, his long arms wrapped around them as he watched me the way I studied the bee’s flight and with the same intensity. I shook my head then glanced back to my bee, my mind still turning the thought over. Moving away from him had been a good choice. I could breathe again. Jax sucked all the air away from me.

On the other hand, I didn't mind tutoring him, providing that he at least appeared to be listening and not being the incessant asshole he’d been previously. Jax the mystery artist for the win. I’d never seen his art, nor had I asked to, despite looking up his art name online when we were first paired up. But that was as far as my stalking went.

After that I closed the browser and never weren't back. I didn’t need to. Jax Palmer had a reputation. More than once I’d thought about it, but his attitude hindered anything more I might offer in a personal nature. No doubt I’d be considered a flirt in return or a…whatever.

He spent his college hours studying the origins of fine arts for a graphic design degree though for whatever reason he had opted to take on two math and science subjects. To be honest with myself, asking him anything in terms of art was so far out of my league as to be laughable. One only had to look at my bee sketches to see that. Plus, I couldn't bring myself to open a fresh conversation with him on the topic.

Not that we had actual conversations, just his incessant teasing. And my teaching, if it could be called that. Hanging out for that bit longer just to get my last few minutes in the garden hit beyond the realm of unusual for us, though the last hour had passed in a quiet type of peace that mirrored the one I’d sought outside the college classrooms in the first place.

Sliding the abandoned textbook off my legs, I flipped to a fresh page in my sketch pad. My hand hit dewy grass, seeking my pencil and when I glanced back, my pad was gone.

It was in Jax’s hands, however. He didn’t flick through the pages like he had before while I watched on tenterhooks. No, sitting in the quickly falling darkness, phone torch clenched between his teeth, he drew over my damn bee paths.

A strangled sound that could have been more appropriate on a dying domestic animal ripped from my throat as I lunged forward, and grabbed at air.

Jax twisted away, up on one knee, presenting his back to me. “Wait.”

“What the hell are you doing?” I screeched, reaching around him like a kindergartener grabbing for her pencil tin back from a rude boy. “Don’t you dare screw with my research!”

“I didn’t,” Jax said in the same soft, controlled voice as though he wasn’t screwing with everything I’d put together.

My sketches were crap. Both my professor and I agreed on that, but even though they were basic, the diagrams were clear and they backed up my theories–of which there were so many floating about in my head that I could barely keep up with myself.

And not all of them made it in full to the pad just yet. If one page was ruined…tears prickled the corners of my eyes as I fought against the oncoming wave of abject panic and utter desperation.

“That book is a journal of everything I think, Jax. I know the work looks crap to someone like you, and I know it’s not ever going to be an artist’s standard, but it’s mine. Please,” I begged in a plaintive voice, hating myself more than ever.

He didn’t even bother to look up at me.

Each word punctuated how alone and isolated I’d become despite the plethora of students that zoomed around me every day, and the housemate who’d given up trying to make me socialize after a year of excessive–and failing–effort.

I bit my lip and tried again. “Please.”

“Since you asked so nicely, Waverly.” Jax folded my sketchpad, and trapped my lost pencil inside. He handed it back and patted my head as he rose, slinging his satchel across his chest. Golden eyes glowed at me as he held my gaze for a far too long moment. “Good study session.”

He walked away from my tiny, private space with no swagger whatsoever, liberating his phone and flicking off his torch to leave us both in darkness that swallowed half of him in an instant. The remainder of him I could see stood straight, but even I, with all my social failings, read the tension in the hard line of his shoulders where they strained across his upper body.

Swallowing back a fresh dose of panic, I fanned the pages to find the one I’d been working on, scrounging for my own phone and managed to turn on the torch app.

Under the too-bright illumination, bees flew around the accurately drawn hive, the grass and few weeds below it labeled in painstaking botanic accuracy. But it was the flight of the sole bee that captured my attention.

Jax changed nothing on the page, and highlighted everything.

I could feel the movement of the bee, could almost hear it buzzing even though the sun had already set, the hive’s last occupant returned for the evening.

Swallowing, I traced his lines where he added motion to the curves of my tiny bee’s path until I could feel them winding up and around but never down. The pattern I hadn’t been able to form completely in my mind clicked with his visual aid, his art.

What Jax drew was magical, and perfect, and now I owed him.

Damnit.

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