Back to You(17)

She seemed so at ease with him. It didn’t make sense. He found himself watching her face, her movements, constantly appraising her. If it was an act, he would have seen through it by now.
“I don’t know what I got,” he said, leaning down to grab his notebook from his bag. “I definitely don’t have all of them, though. That man is a goddamn lunatic.”
Del placed his notebook on the table between them and flipped it open, and she leaned across the table to get a better look, bringing herself closer to him in the process.
She didn’t even flinch. Not the slightest hesitation.
The words were out of his mouth before he’d even decided to say them. “You’re not afraid of me.”
A beat of silence passed before she spoke. “Why would I be?” she asked, her eyes still on his notebook as she tried to decipher his notes.
“Most people are.”
She didn’t react to his words at all, and he found himself wondering if it was possible she hadn’t heard about him, that she didn’t know the rumors. But even if she didn’t—and the chances were small—she should still have her own reasons for being uneasy.
“And I mean, after what I did on the first day of Health…”
She looked up at him, her expression smooth before she looked back down at his notes.
“You know why I did it?”
He watched her take a small breath as her tongue darted out to wet her lips, but her eyes remained on the paper in front of her. “No, I don’t know why you did it. But I know you’ve had some bad things happen to you.”
So she had heard the stories. She knew all about him: no father, dead brother, angry kid with a vendetta against the world. And God only knows what other embellishments. And yet she was still here with him, calm and casual.
He didn’t understand.
People either kept their distance from him or grilled him for information about his ugly past, information he had no intentions of sharing with anyone. Avoidance or scrutiny, that’s how people handled him.
But she did neither.
And he hadn’t expected to like it as much as he did.
“Anyway,” she said, her voice indicating she was changing the subject. “Wendt always adds more notes after the fact. He’s totally unorganized. I swear, I think he plans his lessons at the stoplights on the way to school,” she said with another one of those eye rolls that made him grin. Instead of looking annoyed, she looked adorable. An angry kitten.
“I just leave a few lines in between the notes as I take them,” she went on. “This way when he starts skipping around, I can go back and fill them in where they actually belong. Otherwise, your notes end up as unorganized as he is.”
She tilted her head, looking back down at Del’s notes as she absently tore the crust off her pizza.
And then she reached across the table and handed it to him as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
He glanced down at the crust and then back at her; her eyes were still on his notebook as she flipped a page and began reading again, and he felt something settle in his chest. It was pathetic, but that was probably the nicest thing anyone had done for him in a long time.
“Here,” she said, reaching to pull a pen out of her bag, “let’s just rewrite these so they make sense before we start trying to figure out what you missed.” She spun his notebook so it was facing her fully before she flipped to a clean page and began to write.
He watched her with a small smile { display: block; text-indent: 0%;Sn the of appreciation. “I like how you act around me.”
She lifted her eyes, and when she looked up at him that way, he noticed her lashes were so long, they brushed just beneath her eyebrows. “How do I act around you?”
He shrugged. “Normal.”
Lauren stared at him for a second before she smiled softly. “Hand me that textbook,” she said, nodding toward the book sitting on the booth next to him.
As he placed it on the table, Lauren squinted at the page in front of her, pointing to his notes. “What’s this?”
“What?” he asked, tilting his head to see what she was pointing at.
“Pair-a-ballis?” she asked, sounding it out slowly like a child learning to read.
He pressed his lips together, fighting a smile. “Parabasilids,” he said. “I think pair-a balls is a different unit.”
She looked up at him for a second before she cupped her hand to her mouth and laughed. He brought his can of soda to his lips, trying to mask his own laughter and failing miserably.
“God,” she said, shaking her head as a slight blush lit her cheeks. “I think after we work on your note-taking skills, we might need to do something about your handwriting.”