Page 5 of Study Games

One look at those cheekbones that could cut diamonds and I pressed my hands over my face in the facade of stealing a single, private breath for myself. But I couldn't block him out, and the dove’s cry I needed to heed about running far and fast echoed between brainstem and non-firing synapses.

“Why can't you find someone else to torture?”

“But I enjoy tormenting you.”

Uncovering my face, I looked at Jax, who patted my piece of plastic. Keeping his gaze locked on mine, he raised his fingers to trace along my tights over my calf muscle where my skirt had ridden up. He hadn't moved an inch otherwise, but the look on his face was nothing short of curiosity. Maybe a flicker of something else undecipherable.

Part of me desperately wanted him to keep looking at me the way he did now–not the way others did, like I was a pickled specimen in a lab to be poked at, a rarity at Rippton U, but something he needed to figure out.

“If I promise not to tease you for an hour, will you sit down and teach– talk to me?” he corrected himself, the ghost of a smile etching the corners of his perfect mouth that damned me with every word.

I knew I was going to agree to anything he said. I knew it, damnit.

Also, my mouth moved on its own. “You can do that?” I stared at him with incredulity.

I expected a grin, a laugh, even a snarky comment, but Jax’s face remained open and carefully neutral. Too careful, like he reined in whatever weighed on his mind with pure purpose.

But whose purpose, his or mine?

I learned early on in our lesson planning that I couldn't trust him. Not when he didn’t turn up the first few times and when he did, he fell asleep.

And I still couldn't say no.

Head over heels, stuck in a loop, in love with the bad boy bully, anti-Stockholm, what you wanted to call it. I was all in. And all paid up. Hence, the inability to leave part. And stuck with Jax.

I couldn't trust him and I needed my time to be done as fast as I could make it work. Which didn’t include crouching beside him on the grass as dusk set in like some sort of lovelorn teen that I’d never been in the first damn place.

Neutral is good.

I repeated the phrase over and over in my head until my brain rattled with it.

Not a laugh or a snicker came from him as he stretched out that one hand. Golden eyes fixed on mine, holding me in place for a single moment.

Managing to grasp control of my faculties, I ignored his reach and settled on my situpon, scooting a foot away from him. And I was back to where I started.

Cue sigh.

“All right. One hour. Then I have to finish my diagrams of my bees who are now sleeping, just as I would like to be, and get my assignments done.”

“You want to be in bed right now?” Jax did laugh at me now but it was more in a friendly manner and so alien I couldn’t possibly accept the response at face value.

Then the insinuation hit me like a slap in the face with a cold comb of honey, and my face flared with heat again. “Do you have to make everything about–”

He waved my indignation away. “I know, I know. You have a lot of things to do, and you don't have the time to waste on a poor artist who doesn't take the time to learn important facts of the universe.”

Jax had never been poor in his lifetime, but I didn't harp on that.

“Fine.” I turned the book face out and hovered over the page I found earlier.

Jax kept his silence, though I felt the weight of his assessing gaze as I speed read through the passage and gathered my thoughts. Pushing his darkening presence aside as best I could, I worked out what I wanted to push him on, and then I started to talk.

Miraculously, he listened.

By the time we finished the long shadows that crossed the beehives to the garden to us when we started melded into a haze and I could barely pick out the words on the page. A lone bee buzzed contentedly around us, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was past his bedtime, too.

At some point, Jax turned the torch on his phone on and edged a little closer, flipping the edge of his leather jacket around us. I didn’t start itching, and I didn’t object either as I kept talking while tracing my bees’ progress with my finger, and eventually completed my diagrams under his watchful eye.

For maybe an hour, a little more, my peace returned with a strange artist I never shared a slice of quiet with at my side, one who chose to watch for once rather than tease.

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