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Entangled
Excerpt:
“I haven’t
forgotten we kissed, obviously, but I can’t remember details, like what the most
effective elements were.”
I shifted in my
seat. Every second of that kiss was burned into my memory bank. It seemed that
hadn’t been as mutual as I’d suspected. I blew out a breath and focused on
being a teacher in the situation, not a man who’d been carried away with his
own lesson.
“I think you’re
over-analyzing this. The elements don’t matter on their own. It’s more about
the big picture.”
“Would you say
that to your undergrads? Don’t worry about the specifics of the aqueducts, or
which emperor came to power in what year. It’s more about the big picture of
knowing there was a Roman Empire?”
“Well, no, but
it’s completely different,” I said, looking down the hall and wondering if I
could escape the conversation by simply leaving.
“How?” she
persisted. “In both cases, you’re teaching something. So the student needs the
topic broken down into bite-size pieces.”
At the word
“bite” all the air left the room. Scarlett must have interpreted my silence to
be disbelief because she grabbed a pen and a sheet of paper.
“Here.” She
smoothed it out on the coffee table in front of us. “I’ll graph it for you.”
That snapped me
back. “You’re going to graph our kiss?”
She drew
an X and Y axis, then a line that went up
across the page, but not smoothly—there were spikes and bumps along its
progress.
“So, here, for
example”—she pointed to a sharp rise in the line—“you did something and the
kiss took off. What was it?”
“Seriously?” She
wanted to talk as if it had been a clinical experience?
“If this had
been a kiss for kissing’s sake, then, sure, we could leave it alone. But it was
a lesson. How am I supposed to learn if I don’t remember the stimulus that
caused the response?”
“You don’t need
to. You were great. There’s nothing more to learn.” Better than great. Her
kissing had been phenomenal.
“Again, if an
undergrad wanted to learn more about the Roman Empire than they needed to for
the first-year exam, would you tell them they were fine, or would you point
them to more resource material?”
I blinked. “I’m
resource material?”
She threw her
hands up in the air, as if she was the one who was exasperated. “You’re the one
who offered the lesson in the first place, so yes. You are my resource material
on kissing.”
I looked over at
the array of empty beer bottles on the coffee table. “We really need to make it
a rule that we don’t talk about kissing after we’ve been drinking.”
“You’d rather
have this conversation stone-cold sober?”
“I’d rather not
have this conversation at all.”
“Oh.” Her face
fell.
“What?” I asked
warily.
“It’s just occurred
to me that although I thought the kiss was good, you might not have enjoyed it
at all. That’s why you’re fighting so hard against a follow up lesson.” She
scrunched up her nose. “It was awful for you.”
I rubbed my
temples—I was getting a headache trying to keep up with her thought processes
and keep us out of dangerous territory.
“It wasn’t
awful.” Amazing would be closer.
“Then why are
you so against a follow-up lesson so I can focus on the bits I’ve forgotten?”
Something in the
way she said “forgotten” made everything inside me rear up and protest. Maybe
it was vanity, maybe it was neediness, but whatever it was, I didn’t want to be
considered a forgettable kisser. Especially by Scarlett.
My gaze zeroed
in on her mouth as I wrapped an arm around her and tugged her closer, but not
quite touching. Her eyes widened and her pink tongue darted out to moisten her
lips. I groaned.
“See if you can
forget this,” I said, and lowered my head.
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