Page 17 of Faking It with the Bad Boy

"Come on. Security will do their rounds eventually. Might as well be comfortable." I should have cited Rule 447 about maintaining proper distance. Instead, I found myself sliding down next to him, careful to leave exactly 2.5 feet between us as per regulation.

This is fine. Totally fine. Just two people trapped in a dark library with nothing but moonlight and questionable proximity and—focus, Sophie.

"Your notes on Pip's social climbing are pretty decent," I said, picking up his essay draft. His handwriting was surprisingly elegant, nothing like the careless scrawl I'd expected. "Though your comparison to modern sports recruitment is a bit of a stretch."

"Is it?" He shifted, reaching for his notebook. "Think about it - a lower-class kid gets noticed by someone with influence, suddenly thrown into a world he doesn't understand, expected to learn new rules while pretending he belongs..." He trailed off, suddenly very interested in the carpet's pattern.

"You're not talking about Pip anymore, are you?"

The silence was broken only by the soft rustle of pages as he flipped through his notes. The massive room felt smaller somehow, more intimate in the darkness. Outside, a half-moon hung in the Gothic window like a stage light, illuminating dust motes that danced between the shelves.

"Your tattoo," I said, noticing how the moonlight caught the ink on his forearm. "The one from Paradise Lost. It’s glowing in the moonlight."

He was quiet for a moment, then rolled up his sleeve. The tattoo was beautiful – intricate lines of text woven into angel wings. "Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light."

"What about the others?" I asked, moving closer to see in the dim light. Our open textbooks lay forgotten between us, pages rustling slightly in the draft from the ancient windows. Rule 447 protested weakly in the back of my mind.

"Shakespeare here," he turned his arm, revealing quotes wrapped in thorny vines that disappeared under his sleeve. "'We know what we are, but know not what we may be.' Got that one after my first playoff game. Dad wanted NHL photos. I wanted Hamlet."

His essay draft caught my eye - a surprisingly nuanced analysis of Pip's relationship with Joe Gargery. His margin notes drew parallels between Victorian class expectations and modern athletic pressures in a way that suddenly felt less like an academic stretch and more like personal insight.

"And this one?" I reached out without thinking, fingers tracing a line of text near his wrist. His skin was warm. Through the window, the moon cast enough light to read by, turning the library into a silver-edged dream.

"Careful," his voice was rough. "Pretty sure that violates at least three rules."

"I'm making an exception. For academic purposes."

Academic purposes. Right. Because there's nothing personal about sitting in the dark, touching someone's tattoos. Totally professional.

"Academic purposes," he repeated but didn't pull away. "It's Keats. 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'"

"Why that one?"

Around us, the library settled into its nighttime quiet. Ancient wood creaked as the temperature dropped. Somewhere in the stacks, a radiator clanked protestingly. Our abandoned coffee cups cast long shadows across scattered notes about Victorian social reform.

He was quiet for so long that I thought he wouldn't answer. "Got it after the library incident. A reminder that sometimes the beautiful thing isn't the obvious thing. Sometimes, it's late nights with old books and color-coded sticky notes."

His notebook lay open between us, pages dense with actual literary analysis. He'd mapped character relationships in neat diagrams, highlighted thematic parallels, and drawn connections between Victorian social mobility and modern class structures. This wasn't the work of someone pretending to study - this was real engagement with the text.

"Your turn," he said suddenly, closing the notebook. "Tell me something real. Not filtered through rules and requirements."

"Like what?"

"Like why someone who loves history and literature spends so much time with dental tools."

The moonlight had shifted, casting new shadows across the room's carved ceiling. A banner above the windows read "Scientia est Lux Lucis" - Knowledge is Light - the gilt letters catching occasional glints of starlight.

I stared at the shadowy bookshelves, at the neat rows of Victorian literature we'd been studying. Dickens. Brontë. Thackeray. Authors who wrote about people trying to find their place in a world of rigid expectations.

"My parents are doctors. Third generation. The Chen Family Medical Legacy." The words tasted bitter. "But I faint at the sight of blood. So the history of medicine was the compromise."

"That's why you organize everything? Control what you can?"

"Says the guy who color-codes rare books at 2 AM."

"Touché." He shifted, and somehow, we were closer than Rule 447 would ever allow. The scent of his cologne mixed with oldbooks and coffee. His essay draft lay forgotten between us, the page open to a surprisingly insightful analysis of class mobility in Victorian England. "You know what I think?"

"That's dangerous."

---