“Good,” Bran said, showing me his own watch—a chunky leather and metal thing with a face that appeared to show about fifty time zones. It was totally the watch a science nerd would wear, which make me like him a little better. I was kind of a nerd myself.
“Okay, now here’s how it works, people,” Mr. Barron intoned in a bored voice. “Using your first two fingers, find the pulse in the thumb-side of your partner’s wrist. Count the number of beats you feel in thirty second's time. Then multiply that by two to get their resting heart rate. Do this three times each and take the average. Write it all down and then list some activities you think would lower or raise a person’s heart rate.”
“Any activities?” Morganna Starchild gave Elian Darkwing a flirtatious, side-long look and giggled.
“Keep it G rated, please Miss Starchild,” Mr. Barron said dryly. “A good rule of thumb is, if you wouldn’t want your parents to read it, then don’t write it. Okay? Everybody got it? Good—go to it.”
He went back to the front of the room and settled himself behind his desk with a newspaper and a cup of coffee, leaving the class to fend for itself.
Mr. Barron was not exactly what you’d call a morning person.
“Okay, well I guess we’d better get started,” I said. Getting out a piece of notebook paper and a pen, I got ready to go. “You want to go first or should I?” I asked Bran.
“You go.” He held out his wrist to me and I took it awkwardly between my thumb and my first two fingers, feeling for the pulse.
Touching him this way gave me a strange little tingle, though I didn’t know why. I tried to keep my head down and focus on my watch face but it took me several tries to get an accurate count.
“You okay?” he asked at last.
“Hmm?” I looked up at him and the strangest thing happened. For just an instant my eyes focused on his face and I saw…well, I don’t know what I saw but it wasn’t the Bran O’Connor I knew. The face I somehow glimpsed looked like an angel or a god—high cheekbones, blazing blue eyes, a sensuous mouth—
I gasped and ripped my hand away from his wrist. What the hell just happened?
“Are you all right?” Bran’s deep voice sounded concerned. He leaned closer to me and for the first time, I noticed his scent.
It was amazing. He smelled fresh and wild, like cedar wood and salt from the ocean, and some other dark spice I couldn’t classify.
Like his voice, his scent didn’t seem to match the rest of him. Of course, I didn’t know what I had expected him to smell like—maybe glue from putting together model airplanes or chemicals from playing with a chemistry set? I don’t know.
It sounds crazy but I couldn’t help thinking if I just closed my eyes and listened to his voice and smelled his scent, I could almost imagine him as someone else. Maybe the god-like being I’d somehow glimpsed for just an instant when I touched him.
Which was nuts.
“Are you okay?” Bran asked again.
I kept my eyes open and answered him as calmly as I could.
“Sorry, I just got a little, uh, shock. Like, static electricity—didn’t you feel it?”
“As a matter of fact, I did,” he murmured in that soft, deep voice of his. I didn’t want to think about how it made me feel so I stuck out my arm at him.
“Here. You’re turn,” I said.
He took my hand in both of his and I found that his touch was surprisingly warm and gentle. My body was reacting in all kinds of weird and crazy ways which I was trying desperately to ignore as he found my pulse.
“Hmm,” he murmured. “Your pulse is jumping all over the place. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I said tightly, trying not to look at him because I was afraid I’d get that same freaky optical illusion of his face that I had when I was touching him a minute earlier. “I’m just fi—”
And that’s when my cell phone started to ring.
I knew it was mine because the ring tone was the Bach Cello Suite No. 1 Prelude. Yeah, I know I’m a geek but it so happens that I like classical music and I’m not ashamed of it.
Or I wasn’t until my phone started blaring in the middle of AP Biology.
Mr. Barron’s head jerked up at once like a dog on a scent.
“All right—whose is it?” He sounded like a dog too—his voice was a low, angry growl.
I felt my stomach drop all the way down to my school-issued Mary Janes. Mr. Barron had actually been known to suspend people for cell phone infractions and a suspension does not look good on a college application. Especially when you don’t have the money for college so you’re trying to get a scholarship to get out of this crappy little town in the first place.