Page 23 of Shutout
Like half of the class is over already
Good enough. I’ll hold her to that promise because she’s never slipping away again.
I’m going to have to beg someone for notes after class. I’ve been paying even less attention than her and I actually don’t want to flunk, even if I took the elective entirely for Liv.
Thank goodness that I accidentally saw her schedule. I was originally planning to remove the two electives I’d signed up for—and I did. Then I signed up for this one instead. Just this session alone has made spending extra time in future coursework worth it. Especially if Liv and I study together at the library like we used to.
See? Right where we left off. I can totally pretend like I didn’t basically make love to her mouth.
I cover the lower half of my face with my hand and face forward. My lips tingle at the memory. Unfortunately, the rest of my body tingles too.
You’re delicious. I nearly punched myself in the nose right after sending that email.
Liv was so cool after the kiss. In fact, the rest of the night she hung out with her friends at O’Malley’s without even glancing my way once.
Me? I could barely tear my eyes off her. I especially fixated on the back of her neck, where my right hand parked itself the entire time we made out. It took all my self control to not tear through the place, pull her up against me, and kiss her neck like I had any right to.
It’s like I’ve opened Pandora’s box and I’m desperately trying to jam everything back in, meanwhile pretending like I haven’t just unleashed the catastrophe all on my own.
Because I’ve always known this isn’t a game I should playwith Liv. I would one hundred percent lose. There’s no way a girl who calls her guy friend Body Odor has any interest in him. And if I make that play, she’d check my heart against the boards so hard I’d never recover.
I have to make sure she knows I’m only after the title of best friend, not the other type of BF. I can’t risk losing her again.
Drumming my fingers on the table, I try to focus on the lecturer for once. But from the corner of my eye I can see Liv’s fingers as she types on her laptop. The same fingers that clung to my T-shirt while we made out.
Back to the front my eyes go. And then the lecturer says something in English. “The assignments will be done in groups of four people so you can practice together and give feedback to each other.” I look at Liv. She pretends like I’m not even here. The lecturer continues. “Go ahead and find your partners now. Just email me with the final groups after class.”
“Liv, do you want to?—”
“No.” She glares at me.
“Well.” I glance around. “Do you know anyone else in this classroom that you’d like to group with?”
The stubborn set of her lips falters and I get momentarily distracted by them. She opens them to say something when a different voice interrupts.
“Hi. You’re Brooklyn Tatum, right? Captain of the Bolts?”
I catch as Olivia mouthscaptain?before turning to the speaker. Three girls sitting in the same row as us watch me. When the hell did they sit there?
“Um, yeah?”
The one nearest to me tucks her hair behind her ear. “We just need one more person in our group. Would you like to join us?”
I feel a shift on my left and turn to find Liv standing, looking around like a meerkat trying to find other meerkats. Icurl my hand around her arm and pull her down to sit flush against me. Circling my arm around her shoulders and ignoring her outrage, I turn back to the other girls and say, “Sorry, but we just need two more people. Thanks, though.”
Rather than being daunted, the girl in the middle says, “Rock, paper, scissors?”
And as if this was par for the course, they do three rounds until it turns out the one in the middle loses. There’s some shuffling until she, and the girl farthest from us, trade seats so she can find a different group.
“Are you sure you wanna do this, blondie? You might lose some fans this way.”
Liv’s husky voice so close to my ear is torture.
I turn to face her and have to use my considerable willpower to not stare at her mouth. Blinking slowly buys me some time until my brain manages to scramble words that make a coherent sentence together.
“What do you mean?”
Liv pushes against my side and since I don’t budge, she ends up sliding away back to her previous seat instead. “Don’t give people the wrong idea,” she responds before shifting her attention to the other girls. “Hi, I’m Olivia Rodriguez and?—”
