Fangirl

your sister on this.” Courtney giggled. “She knows all the farm boys.”
    “He’s not my hot librarian,” Cath had said.
    No one is my hot librarian, she thought now, losing her place in the fic she was reading. No one is my hot anything.
    And besides, Cath still wasn’t sure whether Nick was actually hot or whether he just projected hotness. Specifically in her direction.
    Someone sat down next to her on the bench, and Cath glanced up from her phone. Nick tilted his chin up in greeting.
    “Think of the devil,” she said, then wished she hadn’t.
    “You thinking about me?”
    “I was thinking … of the devil,” Cath said stupidly.
    “Idle brains,” Nick said, grinning. He was wearing a thick, navy blue turtleneck sweater that made him look like he was serving on a Soviet battleship. Like, even more so than usual. “So, what did Piper want to talk to you about last week?”
    “Nothing much.” Cath’s stomach was such a mess today, she hardly felt it wrench.
    Nick unwrapped a piece of gum and set it on his tongue. “Was it about taking her advanced class?”
    “No.”
    “You have to make an appointment to talk to her about it,” he said, chewing. “It’s like an interview. I’m meeting with her next week—I’m hoping she’ll give me a teaching assistantship.”
    “Yeah?” Cath sat up a little straighter. “That’d be great. You’d be great at that.”
    Nick gave her a sheepish smile. “Yeah, well. I wish I would have talked to her about it before that last assignment. It was my worst grade of the semester.”
    “Really?” It was hard to make eye contact with Nick—his eyes were almost buried under his eyebrows; you had to dig into his face. “Mine, too,” Cath said.
    “She said that my writing was ‘overly slick’ and ‘impenetrable.’” He sighed.
    “She said worse about mine.”
    “Guess I’ve gotten used to writing with backup,” Nick said, still smiling at her. Still sheepish.
    “Codependent,” Cath said.
    Nick snapped his gum at her. “We writing tonight?”
    Cath nodded and looked back at her phone.
    *   *   *
    “Reagan isn’t here,” Cath said, already closing the door.
    Levi leaned into the door with his shoulder. “I think we’re past that,” he said, walking into the room. Cath shrugged and went back to her desk.
    Levi flopped down on her bed. He was dressed in black—he must have just gotten off work. She frowned at him.
    “I still can’t believe you work at Starbucks,” she said.
    “What’s wrong with Starbucks?”
    “It’s a big, faceless corporation.”
    He raised a good-natured brow. “So far, they’ve let me keep my face.”
    Cath went back to her laptop.
    “I like my job,” he said. “I see the same people every day. I remember their drinks, they like that I remember their drinks, I make them happy, and then they leave. It’s like being a bartender, but you don’t have to deal with drunks. Speaking of  … How’s your sister?”
    Cath stopped typing and looked at him. “Fine. She’s … fine. Back to normal, I guess. Thanks, you know, for driving me. And everything.” Cath had told Levi thank you Friday night, but she felt like she owed him a few more.
    “Forget about it. Did you guys have a big talk?”
    “We don’t have to have big talks,” she said, holding two fingers to her temple. “We’re twins. We have telepathy.”
    Levi grinned. “Really?”
    Cath laughed. “No.”
    “Not even a little bit?”
    “No.” She went back to typing.
    “What are you working on?”
    “A biology essay.”
    “Not secret, dirty fanfiction?”
    Cath stopped again. “My fanfiction is neither a secret, obviously, nor is it dirty.”
    He ran his fingers through his hair, making it stick up in the middle in sandy blond plumes. Shameless.
    “What do you put in your hair to make it stick up like that?” she asked.
    He laughed and did it again. “Nothing.”
    “Nothing? Something—”
    “I think it does that because I don’t wash it.…”
    She grimaced. “Ever?”
    “Every month or so, maybe.”
    Cath wrinkled her nose and shook her head. “That’s disgusting.”
    “No, it isn’t. I still rinse it.”
    “Still disgusting.”
    “It’s perfectly clean,” he said. He leaned toward her, and his hair touched her arm. This room was too small. “Smell it.”
    She sat back. “I’m not smelling your hair.”
    “Well, I’ll smell it.” He pulled a piece down his long forehead; it came to the bridge of his nose.