Never one to miss an opportunity for minor hysterics, Thu shrieked through Harper’s fog as she rushed down the stairs, adding to Harper’s already pounding headache. “Ohmygod, ohmygod, Harper!!”
But, as Thu’s voice hovered directly above Harper, it morphed from a dramatic shriek to a mischievous drawl. “Wow. Oh my God, Harper.”
Harper squinted her eyes open to look up at her friend, who was staring with a shocked grin at Harper’s chest.
Harper looked cross-eyed down her body in confusion. Short waves of chocolate brown hair fanned across her chest. Her eyes traced over a golden profile, down the graceful slope of a strong nose, to a cheek pressed firmly against her breastbone. A tan powder dusted the face and clung to long, dark eyelashes.
Head still spinning, she reached out, dusting the powder off the lovely nose. With a startling flash, the eyes shot open, and the head moved slightly to look up at her. The intense and uncomfortable feeling of falling swamped her all over again as forest-green eyes rimmed with honey locked onto hers.
“Are you okay?”
It took Harper a minute to realize where the voice was coming from. It wasn’t the words or the movement of the finely formed mouth that made her aware of it—not even the rumbling of the question reverberating against her chest—but the tip of a tongue darting out, wetting a delicious pair of lips and removing the coating of powder, that made Harper return to her senses … and fully acknowledge that a random man’s face was pressed extremely close to her boobs.
With that, Harper came back to earth, and her torso shot up from the floor. The man let out a soft groan as his head jolted from her chest and landed awkwardly in her lap. She scrambled to sit up on her knees as he disentangled himself from her. At the same time, Thu crouched down, pretending to drape a comforting arm across Harper’s shoulders as she whispered, “Holy shit, he’s hot.”
Harper whipped her head to look at her friend, eliciting another wave of throbbing pain through her skull. Massaging her temple with one hand, she pushed Thu away with the other.
“Are you okay?” the man repeated, looking at her with genuine concern. Seeing him head-on made Harper feel like her heart was throwing confetti around her chest.
Okay. Wow. He’s absolutely gorgeous. Cool.
She squeezed her eyes shut and took a steadying breath. No one actually looked that good; she must be hallucinating.
But, opening her eyes, it was confirmed with a red alert of embarrassment that no, she wasn’t seeing things, and yes, the man she’d body-slammed was, in fact, as good-looking as he’d first appeared.
His hair had that perfectly mussed look that begged her fingers to run themselves through it. His jaw and cheekbones could cut glass, and the tiniest hint of stubble dusted his skin. Where she expected to see an equally chiseled nose was one that was a touch big, the tip forming an adorable, rounded bulb. It was a nose that could easily look goofy on a softer face, but it worked to ease the sharpness of his other features just enough to create an endearing and approachable quality.
Harper continued to stare at him, now unable to look away. She must have really hurt her head.
“I … I fell down the stairs,” she explained, surveying the scene around her. Thu let out a snort that she disguised as a distressed sob.
The stranger cocked a lopsided grin at Harper, a small dimple peeking out of one cheek. The urge to touch him struck her again.
“I saw. It was hard to miss if I’m being honest,” he said with the slightest hint of teasing. “But seriously, are you all right?”
Harper opened her mouth but wasn’t sure of the right words to explain that she’d never felt this disoriented in her entire life, dazed and tongue-tied by his face, of all things.
He studied her carefully, and her cheeks flushed to the point of discomfort. Harper pushed herself to standing and dusted off the weird powder from her scrubs. Glancing around for its source, her stomach dropped as she realized what she’d done. Not two feet away, a shattered stone model of a patient’s dentition littered the ground.
One of the trickiest parts of dentistry was taking a good impression of a patient’s upper and lower teeth. A dentist had to work quickly to mix alginate powder to the perfect rubbery consistency, then jam it into the patient’s open mouth and mold it around their teeth, often causing them to gag and dry heave in the process—throw up was not a rarity in the whole ordeal.
It was pure torture for everyone involved, and a task that often took many tries for students to master before they had a workable mold, much to the dismay of the patient. The mold would then be taken to the wet lab for setting into stone, which was a bitch of a process itself. All in all, models were an absolute pain in the ass to make and something you guarded with your life if done well.