“What would I even dress up as?”
Sasha plops into the seat beside Ansel. “Ooh, Halloween party planning? I’m going as a sexy kitten.”
Ansel gives her an irritated look. “How predictable.”
She flips her curly blonde hair over her shoulder, covertly giving him the finger as she does.
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Seth snickers and I jump, looking over at him and wondering when the hell he slipped in. I would think the guy is a ghost if Ansel and Sasha didn’t very clearly see him as well.
“What are you going as?” Sasha counters, pursing her lips. “A brooding artist? You already fake that every day, maybe you should pick something a little easier to pull off, like a judgmental prick.”
His dark brows narrow. “What crawled up your ass and died?”
“Nothing.” She looks at her French-manicured nails.
“La pute,” Ansel mutters under his breath, shaking his head.
I press my lips together, trying not to laugh. Something tells me Sasha likes Ansel, but he’s completely oblivious.
Lunch is tense after that, and Ansel doesn’t mention Halloween or the party again, but I know he hasn’t forgotten about it either.
The four of us end up parting ways early and I take the rest of my lunch downstairs with me. I sit beside Lachlan’s closed office door. Normally I barge right on in, but since there are still fifteen minutes until the lunch period ends I decide to wait.
Digging out my unfinished lunch I start to eat.
A few minutes pass and I nearly jump out of my skin when the door opens with a whoosh. My bag of chips falls off my lap, a few spilling out onto the white and gray linoleum floor.
“Oh, fu—sorry. Dani? You’re early.”
I look up, up, up Lachlan’s impossibly tall frame. He stands there looking like a Dior model in a pair of black slacks and white button down. There’s a small stack of papers in his hands. His Clark Kent glasses start sliding down his nose and he pushes them back up. He’s never worn his glasses to school before.
“Yeah, sorry.” I pick up the fallen chips from the ground, stuffing them in a Ziplock baggy. “Lunch got kind of awkward so we disbanded early.”
His lips turn down. “Want to talk about it?”
I shake my head. “It was dumb.”
“Well, you can head on in. I have to go to the office to make copies of these.” He flips through the papers in his hands. “I should only be five minutes.”
“Okay.” I smile up at him, watching as he passes and turns at the end of the hall.
Gathering up my stuff, I move into his office and finish my lunch, disposing of the trash in the bin in the corner.
He returns, leaving a trail of his cologne in his wake, an even larger stack of papers in his hands than before. He lays them on his desk, sticking his stapler on top, and grabs his chair, pulling it out from behind the desk before sitting down. He lets out a deep breath once he does and smiles.
“Other than lunch how has your day been?”
“Uneventful. Dull. Boring. Should I continue?” I joke, rubbing my left hand on the rough fabric covering the loveseat.
“No,” he grins, chuckling lightly, “I think I got the gist.” His blue eyes sparkle like the stars in the night sky. I’m fascinated by his blue hues. They’re the brightest eyes I’ve ever seen and such a unique color.
“No contacts today.”
He looks confused for a second before he reaches up and feels his glasses. “Oh, yeah. My eyes were bothering me.” He leans back in his chair, cocking his head to the side as he studies me. Normally when someone looks at me the way he is I feel like some rare specimen being inspected beneath a microscope—something to be studied, probed, figured out like an alien from another world. But I don’t feel that way at all this time. There’s something slightly different in the way he studies me, a warmth, like there’s some part of him that feels the deep-seated ache and pain living inside me and he wants to thaw it. “What would make your day better?”
“Huh?” I’m taken by surprise with his question.