Jia Li’s gaze moved to the table when he looked up at her. He was a good looking guy, but too much had happened between them. She had a hard time meeting his gaze because of it, even if he didn’t look angry. Green eyes picked up the masses of papers scattered around the table, but before she could really pick up more than a cartoon drawing and a bunch of numbers, the entire pile was swept into a neat stack and stashed away from her view.
There had been so many papers that it even seemed unlikely that he was doing homework, but why else would a slacker like Jack be in a library? For what reason would a slacker be doing homework at all, though? He was a conundrum to her, and she wasn’t sure she would ever fully understand him. Well, she understood him a little now that she knew a bit of his past. He hid who he really was from everyone else. They were a little alike in that aspect, but he was more extreme about it.
How quickly his work disappeared made her realize that he was still hiding. He didn’t want her to see whatever he’d been doing, and she respected that. She didn’t pry, but she’d seen a part of him last time they’d been together, a part of him that she had never seen prior to that. He could be kind and gentle. He had been the only person in the world other than her father who had told her that her scar wasn’t something that ruined her physical appeal. He’d even touched it without hesitation, without disgust. However, he’d gone back to his usual mask, hiding even from her.
Jia Li realized she wanted to know more about him, not just why he was an asshole – that was obvious to her already. She wanted to know what made him tick, what his real interests were. Her mind immediately shut down that thought. She couldn’t really want those things, right? Despite that one moment of kindness, he had consistently been a jerk toward her. Even now, that attitude was back, and he was calling her Suzy again and blatantly scratching himself or something. From her position on the other side of the table, she couldn’t really tell, and she just assumed it was another part of his aloof and disinterested persona; she wasn’t very well versed in guys and sex, after all.
Her eyes followed the movements of his hand as he twirled his flask before it was deposited into his pocket. Even with her excellent coordination, she couldn’t do that – not with a flask anyway. She could probably do it with a knife or a baton or something narrow, but flasks were wider, bulkier. Jia Li thought it was kind of neat that he could do that, and she suddenly realized that he probably couldn’t have done that if he was drunk. “Are you sober?” She asked. It seemed so rare that he would be. Most of their encounters had enabled her to detect some kind of alcohol on his breath. Of course, he’d been sober the day.
Then he had some lame excuse about sleeping. Those papers certainly didn’t look like they’d been written by a sleeping hand, but maybe he’d napped between working on them or something. She wouldn’t put it past him, but she’d discounted him a lot in the past which was exactly what he probably wanted. If people discounted him constantly, they wouldn’t feel a desire to get closer to him. The dryad understood that, and she wasn’t willing to help him push people away the way he did.
She proceeded to try her apology again, but she found she was too embarrassed to just say it all out loud. Jack was not the same way, and he proceeded to finish her sentence in a way that was definitely worded in a way that the dryad would not have said it. Her cheeks burned hotly, and her stomach clenched. For a moment, she was speechless, and the sound of a book dropping caused her tightly wound nerves to jerk at the sound. It was close, so whoever had dropped it had to have heard him. He wasn’t exactly whispering. Damn… this was embarrassing.
Actually, Jack’s reaction was also kind of embarrassing, and she turned her head toward where his dark gaze rested menacingly as he growled like an animal. Jia Li was just in time to see a girl dash out of the library. From behind, she didn’t look familiar, so she hoped the girl was some freshman who didn’t know her. She didn’t need her name filling the ears of anyone through gossip.