“You actually believe that?”
“You say a lot without revealing much.”
His smile is small. “There’s something you learned.”
I roll my eyes and open my notebook to a fresh piece of paper. “What sort of outline should we sketch out?”
Crew leans back in his chair, stretching his legs out so his knee nudges against mine. My body reacts as usual. I’m always ultra-aware of his presence, especially when we’re sitting so close. “I was thinking we should do a compare and contrast.”
“Of what?”
“Of each other. Remember how Skov mentioned we’re similar? I know you do. You brought it up once.”
I see it, and then again, I don’t. Maybe it’s more I don’t want to be like him. “That could work.”
“We could break it down like this.” He leans over my desk and pulls my notebook closer to him, then starts to write—with pen. “You’ll introduce yourself, and then I’ll do the same. You’ll talk about our similarities. I’ll talk about our differences. Conclude that people who seem like polar opposites on the surface might share some commonalities after all. The end.”
He taps his pen on top of my hand. “What do you think?”
“It’s a good idea,” I admit, reluctantly. “What should we use as visuals?”
“We’ll come up with that later. Let’s focus on the information first. Then we can come up with the visuals.”
I grudgingly agree, not sure why I have such a bad attitude. Crew is actually pretty smart. I guess I never gave him enough credit before, though he’s been in my honors classes all four years.
Sometimes I see only what I want to see, not what’s actually happening.
I’ve walked through life with tunnel vision, especially at Lancaster Prep. I had all of these ideas of how I should act, and who I should be. And for most of my high school life, I’ve been perfectly content with the person I am here.
Until now. Until I started working on this project with Crew and his observations about me. They’ve been a complete eye-opener.
And of course, then there’s Crew. My feelings for him. He makes me curious. He makes me want things I shouldn’t.
I’m starting not to care so much about the repercussions anymore either.
“You want to take the similarities or the differences list?” Crew asks me.
“The similarities,” I answer.
“Really? I’m thinking that might be the harder one.”
“I can handle it.”
“I didn’t say you couldn’t, I just know you’ve been going through—a lot lately,” he says, his gaze dropping to my lips.
My skin grows warm the longer he stares at me, as if he’s thinking about kissing me. Which now I’m thinking about too.
“I’m all right,” I admit. “This will be a good distraction.”
He glances around the room, making sure no one is paying attention to us before he asks, “Still upset about your parents?”
“Yeah. I can’t help but think I was blind to what was going on. How did I not see that they weren’t happy with each other anymore?”
“You’ve been here for the last three, going on four years,” Crew points out. “There’s probably been a lot going on with your parents that you have no clue about.”
“Did I mention they were going to hide it from me until the end of the year? They didn’t want to ruin Christmas and my birthday for me,” I admit.
“No, you didn’t.” He tilts his head. “You reconsidering having that party?”