CHAPTER SEVEN- Sketches and Skeptics
"Excuse me," Lucia muttered, pushing past him and shoving the papers off the desk in an unceremonious move. She never would have made such a move any other time; she respected her work far too much to toss it on the floor. But it was an emergency, and emergencies called for rash actions.
She stood with her back to him, her hands spread out over the desk, her head hanging. She knew he'd already seen it. How could he have missed it? And how was she to turn around and face him? He already found her loony, completely crazy, absolutely intolerable.
So how would he find her now?
Rob rubbed the back of his neck, his head ducked. He could feel the blood creeping up his neck, reddening his face, and he cursed his propensity for blushing so easily. It'd been a cunning little drawing, if a bit inaccurate. She'd drawn a handsome face, a strong one, and though he'd been too stunned to take in all of the writing on the page, he'd caught the word brave.
It was absolutely incomprehensible.
Wanting to see her face, needing to see if she was joking, pulling his leg, making a fool of him, he grabbed her arm and spun her to face him.
She kept her head down, hiding behind the curtains of her hair, feeling her heart yawn open in humiliation, in pain. What had she been thinking, letting him into her home?
What had she been thinking, letting him into her heart?
Of course he was angry. She'd invaded his privacy more than once, disobeyed his requests, even when he'd stated them reasonably, and drawing pictures of him was just plain weird. He was probably angry and more than a bit freaked out, she reasoned.
"I can't talk to you if I can't see your eyes," he said tersely, tugging back her hair a little so she was forced to look up at him. He didn't think to be gentle, so great was his confusion, and he looked at her directly, his face bright red and his eyebrows drawn together. "Is that how you see me?" he asked, his voice laden with disbelief.
It spurred her into action, her own embarrassment forgotten in the face of his self-effacing behavior, the incredulousness of his voice shoving her own discomfort to the rear and raising her ire. "And why shouldn't it be?" she asked, moving his hands away from her hair and looking at him under her own power. "That's what you look like, Robert."
"Brave?" he repeated, dumbfounded.
"Yes, brave," she insisted, putting her hands to his cheeks and pressing, her chin raised so she could look him in the eye. "Why can't you see that?"
Now that her hands were on him, Rob was suddenly very uncomfortably aware of her proximity to him, of their positions, of all the thoughts he'd had the night before, of how he'd treated her, how he'd came here to apologize, and how he'd known, just known it was more than an article she was after.
And how she saw him in a way he'd never seen himself.
She stood flat-footed, watching the expressions flit over his face, feeling the heat of his skin under her palms, and for a moment, she was brave as she saw him as being, brave as she knew he was, and she rose to her toes, wanting to show him just how he looked to her.
She brushed her lips over his tentatively, drawing back mid-movement, then forging on again, the result a stuttering, chaste touch of the lips.
He felt her start to draw away, and before he even registered what she was doing, he knew he didn't want her to stop. Rob captured her wrists in his hands, the often fumbling fingers closing over slim bones-
She's so slight and I'm so damned clumsy-
And he kissed her, unable to make himself close his eyes though he knew he should, wanting to see her expression, trying to figure her out. She jerked when he tentatively touched his tongue to hers, and he stepped back, his face now an alarming shade of crimson.
"Oh," he said stupidly, looking at her wide eyes, her parted lips, the papers all over the floor.
With the desk already cleared, his brain was going to completely unreal places.
He dropped his sweater on the floor, bent to pick it up, fumbled, dropped it again, and abandoning pride, snagged it with the toe of his shoe and finally secured it in one tightly balled fist.
"I should go," he concluded, feeling like seven kinds of an ass and needing quite desperately to puzzle this out. He'd rather hoped she'd respond a little bit more favorably, as long as he was actually going to plant a real kiss on her, but instead she was looking at him as though she'd never seen him before, and really, that was just a bit more than Robert could actually digest at the moment. "I'll… I'll see you Monday, then, eh? Keep… keep up the good work."
He was a good half mile away from her house, having let himself out (after bobbling with the doorknob), when he realized what he'd said.
"Keep up the good work?" he squawked, sending errant birds scattering from the walk in front of him. "What the bloody fuck is that supposed to mean?"
And a half mile back, Lucia Lovejoy sat on the floor of her little study, a strew of papers laid over her lap, fingers resting on a likeness of the young man she'd just kissed, a young man who had all but run out of her home as though the hounds of hell were at his heels.
He'd never even gotten to say why he'd stopped by.
~~~
He caught her in the hallway, though she'd tried her best to sneak into her first classroom while he'd still be at football practice. She'd spent the whole weekend wondering how to make amends to him, and had come up absolutely empty-handed.
Well, so to speak. She hadn't been empty-handed, really, if you counted the bloody drawing she'd taken to keeping on her at all times, or the phantom feel of his flushed skin against her hands.
She'd taken the coward's way out, no longer brave as he was, and tried to sneak to her classes.
And damn it, she'd failed even that.
For his part, Rob had spent the whole weekend just where he'd started off on Saturday morning-wondering what, precisely, was going on in Lovejoy's head. She'd kissed him, hadn't she? And drawn him? Rationally, it would only mean one thing, but Rob wasn't about to peg her as rational, and his thoughts on the remainder of the weekend sure as hell hadn't been rational.
He'd let himself build up a tiny head of steam, just a little bubble of confidence, something he rarely ever allotted himself. After all, it did no good and nearly always got rather rudely burst, but this time…
He'd even given himself a reprieve from his morning training, something he knew he'd regret later.
But not now. No, just now Rob wanted to test something out.
"Lucia!" he called, jogging down the hallway to catch up with her. When she didn't turn, he tried again. "Lovey."
She turned at the nickname, her eyes darting around the hallway, flitting to the students around them. "Robert," she said faintly, licking her dry lips. She wouldn't be able to speak, wouldn't at all, wouldn't be able to manage so much as a sentence.
"Listen, about the other morning," he started, starting to walk again, acutely aware it looked like he was escorting her to her class.
But she wouldn't give him the chance to finish. "Yes, about the other morning," she picked up, finding she could speak even when her tongue was tangled and her throat was parched. "I'm really terribly sorry about that. I don't know what came over me."
He'd had collisions on the field that had carried less force than that.
He stopped in the middle of the hallway, his face suddenly colorless. "You're sorry?"
He was upset. Of course he was, Lucia rationalized, forcing herself to look at him. She owed him that, she figured, though he probably thought she was going to do something completely insane like try and kiss him again. "I'm really very sorry," she amended. "Though I know that's not half enough to make up for what I did."
"What you did…" he repeated, his bubble of confidence replaced by an entire biosphere of confusion.
"Was inexcusable, I know," Lucia said, really warming up, getting on a roll. Once you got started, apologizing wasn't so bad. It wasn't as though she had a surplus of pride to begin with, so swallowing it for his sake was hardly any chore at all, and she truly was sorry.
Well, she was sorry for him.
She didn't regret what she'd done at all.
She'd replayed the moment in her mind countless times over the weekend, knowing in some corner of her mind that he'd kissed her back, attributing it to his nerves, and tossing it away. She'd assaulted him standing in her study, and it was inexcusable.
She'd remember it forever.
"Inexcusable?" he repeated, and before she could pick up the thread, he held up a hand. "You think I wanted an apology from you? Great, Lovey, you're sorry we kissed. That shouldn't surprise me. It probably was quite sorry for you, wasn't it?"
And the bubble of confusion was now a bubble of derision, aimed completely at himself. He would wonder what he'd been thinking, going over there in the first place, but the answer was the same as it usually was. He hadn't been thinking.
He looked at her, her silence now passing for agreement, and he felt just a little bit desperate.
She'd called him brave, after all.
Thankfully, even blessedly, at that moment he saw something he thought he'd never be happy to see: his sister standing face-to-face with Mallory, holding his finger. When she walked away from the albino bastard, she gave him the perfect opportunity to enter, and the perfect opportunity to walk away from Lucia-again.
He was getting very good at doing that.
Lucia put her back to the wall, inhaled deeply, exhaled with tears standing in her eyes. She didn't understand, not one bit. She couldn't even pretend to understand what had just transpired. He looked so… enraged and disbelieving. She'd thought his anger had been aimed at her, but as she watched him rail against Drake, she replayed his words in her mind.
It probably was sorry for you, wasn't it?
And here she didn't think she could make anything worse.
As the headmaster approached the two young men-they looked ready to come to blows any minute, Lucia thought, and seeing that sort of power in Rob was oddly enticing-she took the opportunity to slip past the odd trio, the rich boy, the poor athlete, and the free-spirited headmaster, and she slipped into Dunmore's office.
He'd assigned her the article, he could get her out of this mess.