“Only if you like scrubbing toilets,” she replies with a grin.
“What makes you decide between toilets and laps?” It’s a legitimate question. She’s only given me laps or push-ups, which I appreciate. If I were forced to scrub toilets early on, I probably would’ve stopped with the attitude much sooner.
“It depends on the offense and what I think will better curb the undesired behavior. ‘Pumpkin’ isn’t nearly as disrespectful as other things that have come out of your mouth.”
“So you think laps work better for me with bad offenses?”
“Yeah.”
“Interesting.” I guess it makes some sense, especially early on. I did come here about as lazy as a person could be.
“Am I wrong?” she asks.
“Nope,” I say, popping the “p.” Even with my sore legs, I’d run all day long over cleaning nasty toilets, but I’ll keep my aversion to human excrement to myself.
We reach the classroom building, and I hold the door open for her. She stops in her tracks and stares at me with a wrinkled nose and brows, almost like she’s been hit by a horrible smell.
“What?” I ask, sniffing the air. It seems fine to me.
“Don’t do that,” she says.
“Do what?”
“Hold the door for me.”
I laugh and roll my eyes. Only she would fault me for doing something nice. “Why?”
“It’s demeaning.”
“No, it’s not. It’s nice.”
“Would you do it for a guy?”
“Well … no.”
“Exactly.” She steps behind me and grabs the handle, then motions with her hand that I should go first.
“I also wouldn’t kiss a guy, but you didn’t seem totally opposed to the idea a few weeks ago.”
This is the first we’ve mentioned the almost kiss since agreeing it was momentary lapse of judgment. I expect her to blush, but she seems totally unfazed. “Those are two entirely different scenarios. One infers I’m unable to open the door myself; the other…”
I put my hands on my hips and tilt my head. She trailed off, but it’d be nice to her what she was thinking. I’m sure it’s surprising and possibly a little cringeworthy. “What exactly does the other mean to you?”
“A kiss?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s…”
I raise my brows, waiting for her answer.
She takes a moment, then says, “It’s a sign of mutual interest. A test of physical compatibility. An expression of intimacy between two people who care for each other.”
I grin.
“What?”
“You have a warm, mushy heart in there after all, don’t you?”
“What’d you expect?”
“Nothing,” I say, shaking my head. She doesn’t need to know about my Tin Man thoughts from weeks ago. “So just to be clear,” I say as I enter the building, “is opening the door for you only demeaning on campus or always?”
“Always.”
“Then you can feel free to open it for me. One of us should be nice, and since you won’t let me do it…”
She enters behind me. “You’re hilarious, you know that?”
I smile at what may be her first use of sarcasm ever. Score another point for Logan. “I like to think so.”
She shakes her head, but I catch the half grin before she turns away. She thinks I’m hilarious, even if she won’t admit it.
* * *
“Is this real?” I ask, shaking a jar with a brain. Noah and Eddie, his roommate, have transformed the classroom into a creepy lab with numerous vats of bubbling liquid, blinking lights atop what look like torture devices, and a variety of skeletons from the animal to the human kind. There’s also smoke seeping out of the red strobe-lit closet. The whole thing is actually a little freaky, and it’s hard to imagine I sit in here every fourth period for physics.
“Yep,” Noah says proudly. “Got it from the butcher. It’s a goat brain. He said we could eat it after we’re done.”
“You’re joking, right?”
He shakes his head. “I’ll give you twenty bucks if you do.”
“In your dreams.”
He laughs and then claps his hands once. “Okay,” he says. “Logan and Lieutenant Commander Durant will take the far table, and me and Eddie will take this one. We’ve only got twenty-five minutes before go time. Let’s get costumed up.”
The sun is setting, which means the younger kids will be leaving and the older ones will be arriving soon. Paige and I walked through the tame halls, enjoying the cute Charlie Brown, Casper, Garfield, and other cartoon scenes. I was surprised by what an awesome job the cadets did, although I shouldn’t have been. They put 110 percent into everything, so why would this be any different?
“Here’s your blood,” Paige says, handing me a tube.
“And a tattered shirt for you,” Noah says, tossing me what looks like scraps of white fabric.
I exchange my cammies top for the shirt from Noah, then climb onto the table. After opening the tube of blood, I start squirting it on my chest. It dribbles down, looking eerily realistic. We decided Paige would be implanting computer chips inside me, so I need to make what looks like a nice long incision.
“Hey, did you want to implant my chest or my belly?” I ask, glancing in her direction. She’s got her white lab coat and fake glasses on. It’s nerdy but cute. A huge change from soldier Paige, yet equally … nope. Not gonna go there. Student officer. Mentor. Navy SEAL dad. Pain-in-the-ass guy friend. Way too many reasons for me to not think about how adorable her eyes are in the black frames. Or how the lab coat is hanging open to reveal a white T-shirt that’s tight across her chest and cinches in at her waist, giving me a taste of those nice curves that are usually hidden.
She walks to my side and inspects my body, her eyes roaming from head to toe. She’s watching me keenly.
Very keenly.
Too keenly.
I gulp.
This is worse than the almost kiss. That was in the middle of the afternoon and we were alongside the road. Now we’re in a dark room and I’m lying on a freaking table. It’s too easy to imagine …
Nope. I shake my head.
“How about chest?” I say.
She nods. “Sure.”
“Great,” I reply, completely ignoring the elephant in the room. I maneuver around the fabric scraps as I squirt a line from my throat to below my ribs. It all runs downhill and doesn’t look anything like an incision. I glance over to Eddie. He’s lying on his back as Noah uses his fingers to paint with various colors of costume makeup in between the shards of his shirt.
“Hey,” I yell to them. “Can we have some of that?”
Noah chucks a few tubes at us. I open them and start working on a line with the red and black, trying to make it look three-dimensional like Noah’s doing, but I failed art class in seventh grade.
“You’re making a mess,” Paige finally says, grabbing a tube from my hand. “Lie down.”
I do, and she spreads the tatters of the shirt and tries to fix the damage I’ve already caused.