The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer - Hodkin Michelle. Страница 39

“Because I never kiss and tell,” he said, ducking slightly to meet my eyes.

I turned away from him and opened the locker door. “Then anyone can say they’ve been doing anything with you,” I said, into the dark space.

“Does that hurt your feelings?” He spoke in a low voice from behind my shoulders.

“I don’t have feelings,” I said, my face buried in my locker.

Noah’s hand appeared on the locker next to me and I felt him lean toward my back. The air was thick with our electricity.

“Kiss me,” he said simply.

“What?” I turned around and found myself just inches from him. My blood glowed under my skin.

“You heard me,” Noah said.

I felt the stares of other students. In my peripheral vision, I saw them huddled under the covered path, waiting for the rain to let up. They gawked at Noah’s long figure leaning over mine, his hand pressed on the steel by my ear. He didn’t inch closer; he was asking, waiting for me to make the next move. But as my face burned with the feeling of his eyes and their eyes on me, the other students began to disappear one by one. And I don’t mean they walked away. They disappeared.

“I’m not into kissing,” I blurted, my eyes darting back to Noah’s.

Noah’s mouth tilted into the smallest of smiles. “Oh?”

I swallowed thickly, and nodded. “It’s stupid,” I said, checking for the once-assembled crowd. Nope. Gone. “Someone poking their tongue in someone else’s mouth is stupid. And gross.” Way to employ my AP English vocabulary. Mara doth protest too much.

Noah’s eyes crinkled at the corners, but he wasn’t laughing at me. He ran his free hand through his hair, twisting it as he went, but a few thick strands fell back over his forehead anyway. He didn’t move. He was so close. I breathed him in, rain and salt and smoke.

“Have you kissed many boys before?” he asked quietly.

His question brought my mind back into focus. I raised an eyebrow. “Boys? That’s an assumption.”

Noah laughed, the sound low and husky. “Girls, then?”

“No.”

“Not many girls? Or not many boys?”

“Neither,” I said. Let him make of that what he would.

“How many?”

“Why—”

“I am taking away that word. You are no longer allowed to use it. How many?”

My cheeks flushed, but my voice was steady as I answered. “One.”

At this, Noah leaned in impossibly closer, the slender muscles in his forearm flexing as he bent his elbow to bring himself nearer to me, almost touching. I was heady with the proximity of him and grew legitimately concerned that my heart might explode. Maybe Noah wasn’t asking. Maybe I didn’t mind. I closed my eyes and felt Noah’s five o’ clock graze my jaw, and the faintest whisper of his lips at my ear.

“He was doing it wrong.”

35

nOAH’S LIPS PRESSED LIGHTLY ON THE SKIN of my cheek and lingered there. I was on fire. By the time I opened my eyes and my breathing returned to normal, Noah wasn’t in front of me. He hung casually from the archway in the locker nook, waiting for me to get my things for Art.

The bell rang.

I still stood there. I still felt the imprint of his lips on my cheek. I still stared like an idiot. Noah’s smile spread into a smirk.

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and mustered up what dignity I had left before walking right past him, careful to avoid the rain slanting under the arches. I was glad Art was next. I needed to decompress, to watch my stress level as Dr. Maillard had said. And Noah was impossible to ignore. When we stood in front of my classroom, I told him I’d meet him later.

Noah’s forehead creased as other students walked past us. “But I have a study period.”

“So, go study.”

“But I want to watch you draw.”

I answered him by closing my eyes and rubbing my forehead. He was impossible.

“You don’t want me there?” he asked. I opened my eyes. Noah looked crestfallen and adorable.

“You’re distracting,” I said truthfully.

“I won’t be. I promise,” Noah said. “I’ll get some crayons and draw quietly. Alone. In a corner.”

I couldn’t help my smile and Noah saw his opening; he brushed right past me into the classroom. I calmly walked to a table at the far end of the room. Noah’s eyes followed me as I sat at a stool and withdrew my graphite and charcoal.

I ignored him and went to my happy place. I opened my sketchbook, quickly flipping past the pages filled with Noah, as the substitute cleared her throat before speaking.

“Hi, guys! I’m Ms. Adams. Mrs. Gallo had a family emergency so I’m going to be your sub for the day.” With her short bangs and glasses, she looked twelve years old. And sounded it.

When Ms. Adams took attendance and called out the name of an absent classmate, Noah’s hand shot up. I watched him cautiously. After she finished roll call, Noah stood, completely unself-conscious as heads followed his progress to the front of the room.

“Um—” Ms. Adams checked her clipboard. “Ibrahim Hassin?”

Noah nodded. I died.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

Noah wore a bemused expression. “Didn’t Mrs. Gallo tell you?” he asked her. “We’re supposed to start working on live models today.”

No, I was being tortured.

“Oh, umm. I didn’t—”

“It’s true,” a girl in a cheerleading uniform piped up. Brittany, I think. “N—Ibrahim’s supposed to go first. Mrs. Gallo said.” A chorus of nodding and murmuring supported Brittany’s assertion.

Ms. Adams looked baffled and a bit helpless. “Uh, okay, I guess. Do you guys know what to do?”

Noah flashed her a brilliant smile as he dragged a stool to the center of the room. “Definitely,” he said. He sat down, and I looked at my blank page, feeling the pressure of his eyes on me the entire time.

“Um, wait—” the sub said, a note of desperation in her voice.

My eyes flitted up to the front of the classroom. Noah was in the process of unbuttoning his shirt. Sweet Jesus.

“I’m really not comfortable with—”

He pulled his tie loose. My female classmates tittered.

“Ohmigod!”

“Holy hell.”

“Hot. So hot.”

He lifted the hem of his T-shirt up. Good-bye, dignity. If Noah heard the girls, he made no indication. He caught my stare and shot me a sly smile.

“M-Mr. Hassin, please put your clothes back on,” Ms. Adams stammered.

Noah paused, letting everyone enjoy the view a moment longer, then shrugged back into his T-shirt, then his dress shirt, redoing all of the buttons incorrectly and leaving the cuffs undone.

Ms. Adams exhaled audibly. “Okay, guys, get to work.”

Noah’s eyes held my face. I swallowed hard. The juxtaposition of him sitting in a room full of people while staring at no one but me was overwhelming. Something shifted inside of me at the intimacy of us, eyes locked amid the scraping of twenty graphite pencils on paper.

I shaded his face out of nothingness. I smudged the slope of his neck and darkened his delinquent mouth, while the lights accented the right angle of his jaw against the cloudy sky outside. I did not hear the bell. I did not hear the other students rise and leave the room. I did not even notice that Noah no longer sat at the stool.

I felt fingers whisper on my back. “Hey,” Noah said. His voice was very soft.

“Hey,” I answered. I remained hunched protectively over the page but half-turned to meet his stare.

“May I?”

I couldn’t deny him and I didn’t reply. I shifted out of the way so he could see.

I heard his intake of breath. Neither of us spoke for a long time. Then, “Is that what I look like?” Noah’s expression was unreadable.

“It is to me.”

Noah didn’t speak.

“It’s just how I saw you in that moment,” I said.

Noah was still silent. I shifted uncomfortably. “If you looked at everyone else’s drawings, they’d be completely different,” I added.

Noah still stared.

“It’s not that bad,” I said, as I moved to close the sketchbook.