Happy Place(22)

“Because I’m loud?”

“Because they’re brilliant like you,” he says. “And also because you laugh like a helicopter.”

Unfortunately, that causes me to prove his point. “Wow. Stop hitting on me.”

“It’s cute,” he adds.

Another full-body flush. “Okay, now you really need to stop flirting with me.”

“You make it sound so easy,” he says.

“I believe in you,” I say.

“And you have no idea how much that means to me,” he replies.

I turn over and bury my face in my pillow, mumbling through a grin, “Good night, Wyn.”

“Sleep tight, Harriet.”

The next night follows the same pattern: We climb into bed. We fall into silence. And then Wyn turns onto his side and asks, “Why brain surgery, specifically?”

And I say, “Maybe I thought it sounded the most impressive. Now I can constantly respond to things with Well, it’s not brain surgery.”

“You don’t need to be any more impressive,” he says. “You’re already . . .” In the corner of my eye, he waves his arms in that huge circle again.

“A freakishly large watermelon,” I say.

He lets out a low laugh, his voice gone all raspy. “So was that it? You chose the hardest, most impressive thing you could think of?”

“You ask a lot of questions, but you don’t like answering them,” I say.

He sits up against the wall, the corner of his mouth curling, dimples sinking. “What do you want to know?”

I sit up. “Why didn’t you want to guess what our friends told me about you?”

He stills. No hand running through his hair, no jogging knee. A very still Wyn Connor is an almost lewdly beautiful thing.

“Because,” he says eventually, “my best guess would be they told you I’m a nice guy who barely got into Mattingly and didn’t get my credits in time to graduate, and honestly might never manage to.”

“They love you,” I say. “They’d never say anything like that.”

“It’s the truth. Parth’s off to law school next year, and I was supposed to be moving to New York with him, but I failed the same gen ed math class for the second time. I’m hanging on by a thread.”

“Who needs math?” I say.

“Mathematicians, probably,” he says.

“Are you planning to become a mathematician?” I ask.

“No,” he says.

“That’s good, because they’re all going to be put out of business once this calculator thing catches on. Who cares if you’re bad at math, Wyn?”

His gaze lifts. “Maybe I hoped to make a better first impression than that.”

“No part of me believes,” I say, “that you struggle with first impressions.”

He brushes his thick hair up off his forehead, and it stays there, all except that one strand, of course, which is determined to fall sensually across his eyebrow. “Maybe you make me a little nervous.”

“Yeah, right,” I say, spine tingling.

“Just because you don’t see me grabbing a mop every time you walk into a room doesn’t mean I don’t notice you’re there.”

It feels like a bowling ball has landed in my stomach, a sudden drop. Then come the butterflies.

Blood rerouting, vessels constricting, I tell myself. Meaningless.

“Why?” I ask.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” he says, “and please don’t ask me to act it out.”

“You make me a little nervous too,” I admit.

He’s waiting for me to say more, the weight of his focus on me. An ache starts behind my ribs. Like having this small bit of him has transformed all the pieces I can never have into a kind of phantom limb, a pain where there should be more Wyn.

“Why?” he says finally.

“Too handsome,” I say.

A strange look flits across his face, something like disappointment. He averts his gaze. “Well. That has nothing to do with me.”

“I know that,” I say. “That’s the thing. Abnormally good-looking people aren’t supposed to also be so . . .”

“So . . . ?” He arches a brow.

I wave my arms in a circle.

He cracks a smile. “Spherical?”

I latch on to the closest word I can find. “Vast.”

“Vast,” he repeats.

“Funny,” I say. “Interesting. It’s like, pick a lane, buddy.”

He laughs, tosses a pillow across the room at me. “I never would have pegged you for a snob, Harriet.”

“Huge snob. Huge.” I toss the pillow back with another circular wave of my arms. It lands about three feet shy of his bed.

“What was that?”

“The pillow you threw at me,” I say, “perhaps you remember it.”

“I know it’s a pillow,” he says. “I’m talking about the throw.”

“Now who’s a snob?” I say. “Just because I’m not an athlete—”

“It’s a pillow, Harriet,” he says, “not an Olympic throwing hammer, and we’re four feet apart.”

“We’re like ten feet apart,” I counter.