Secret. Brigid Kemmerer
idea what Adam was thinking.
Then Adam broke the eye contact and called his class to order, dismissing them for the night.
Nick let go of a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. He rubbed a hand across the back of his neck. He’d left a sweaty handprint along the spine of his physics book.
“Try not to do that while I’m dancing, okay?” said Quinn. Before he could answer, she was climbing down from the risers, stripping out of her sweatshirt, pushing through the crowd of parents fighting for the exit.
Adam had disappeared into the hallway, too.
Damn.
Nick flung the textbook open on the bench and told himself to get excited about mass and acceleration and inclined planes. The room emptied, and when Quinn flicked on the stereo to start warming up, Nick tried to convince himself he would’ve been better off staying in the car.
His brain wasn’t convinced. He didn’t move.
The air told him when Adam walked into the room. Nick ignored the swirl in the currents, the minute temperature change as his element reacted to his tension.
Study.
He tried. He read the same equation sixteen times. It could have been written in crayon by a dyslexic toddler for all the sense it made.
Adam walked over to the risers.
Nick’s eyes froze on his textbook. Now he couldn’t remember what subject he was studying.
Adam put his hand on one of the wooden benches and leapt to the upper level.
Nick had forgotten how he moved, like a jungle cat crossed with an acrobat. Powerful yet agile. Instead of sitting beside him, Adam sat cross-legged on the riser in front of him.
It left Nick looking down at him. The position was casual and nonthreatening.
And kind of hot.
Nick told his eyes to stay on his frigging notebook, but they found Adam’s feet, following the line of his calves to his knees and thighs and—
Up. Up. Look up, before you get yourself in trouble.
Nick looked at his face. The darkness of Adam’s eyes, the barely-there start of shadow across his jaw. The crooked scar that dragged his lip away from perfection.
Nick flashed on what it had felt like to kiss him. He jerked his gaze back to his book. “Hey.”
Hey. Wow. Suave. Maybe Quinn should be videotaping this.
“What are you studying?” said Adam, his voice gently teasing, almost provocative. It made him sound like he wasn’t talking about studying at all.
If it had been a girl, Nick could have flirted back. You, he would have said.
Say it. Say it, say it, say it.
“Physics,” he said instead.
Ugh. Suddenly he felt like such a dork. Next he’d say he needed to get home to his bug collection.
He cleared his throat. “I enjoyed your class.”
“Thanks. They’re good kids.” Adam paused. “Did you come to watch Quinn?”
No, I came to watch you.
But he couldn’t say it.
“Come on,” Quinn called from the floor. “You guys can make out later. Let’s get this done.”
Nick slammed his textbook closed. “Damn, Quinn.”
Adam uncurled from the bench. He was smiling. “I forgot you were such an easy blush.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Adam started to move away, but then he paused and leaned back to whisper. “It’ll make for interesting conversation later.”
Nick studied the whole time Adam and Quinn rehearsed.
No. That wasn’t true.
He pretended to stare at his textbook the whole time. In reality, he never turned a page, he never took a note, and he didn’t take his eyes off Adam.
This was ridiculous. Any minute now, he’d be doodling hearts down the margin of his notebook.
An easy blush. He wasn’t usually. But he could feel his cheeks warming just thinking of Adam’s last comment.
He wasn’t the only one blushing, either. Some younger girls were clustered and giggling in the doorway, whispering about Adam.
Nick couldn’t blame them. Adam and Quinn made an eye-catching pair as they spun across the floor. His dark hair and olive skin seemed to shadow her blue-eyed-blond-peaches-and-cream complexion. Nick wondered if Adam played to that, if he’d choreographed the dance to highlight their differences.
The routine was powerful, putting Quinn in the air as often as she was on the ground. She’d told Nick she was trying to live on lettuce and saltines to spare Adam’s biceps.
From where Nick was sitting, said biceps did not need sparing.
He forced his attention on Quinn. He’d seen the first incarnations of this dance a few weeks ago, when Quinn and Adam had scraped it together in the back room of the Y. Quinn had been awkward, trying to keep up with Adam’s polished movements. But she’d been working hard—now her motions looked like a perfect extension of his.
The air liked their partnership. He could feel their energy in the atmosphere like an electric current through water.
It was good to see Quinn focused on something positive.
By the time they killed the lights in the studio and Adam was locking up, it was after ten. Nick told himself he could force physics lessons into his brain when he got home. It wasn’t that late yet.
Then Adam said, “Want to grab a cup of coffee?”
He should refuse. It was late enough, and he had Mike’s truck.
Then again, Michael would never give him a hard time about staying out. He probably wasn’t even concerned. Nick never did anything wrong.
But coffee would be public. Would Quinn come? Did he want her to?
“Don’t worry about it,” said Adam, his voice easy. “I didn’t mean to throw you into an existential crisis. It’s all right.”
“No! I want to. It’s—yeah. Coffee. Yes.”
“Maybe decaf,” said Quinn. Nick shot her a look.
She yawned. “What? Drop me at home first. I need to crash.”
So he’d be alone with Adam.
Normally it took fifteen minutes to get Quinn across town. Tonight it seemed to take three-point-two seconds. Nick was very aware of his fake-girlfriend sitting between him and Adam, providing a buffer of estrogen and snark and pretend heterosexuality. When he couldn’t seem to generate any better than one-word answers, she turned her attention to Adam, prattling about the routine and Adam’s audition and their practice schedule for the rest of the week.
In her parking lot, Nick hoped she’d want a walk up to her apartment, if only to give him another minute for his nerves to settle.
But she didn’t ask and didn’t linger, and before he knew it, she was gone, climbing the stairs and disappearing through her door. The air in the cab was chilled from Nick’s anxiety, but not enough to make his breath fog—yet. He kicked the heat up a notch and backed out of the parking place. Once they were moving again, Nick focused on the road more closely than he had in driver’s ed. They drove in silence for a minute.
That left too much time for thinking, and really, he wanted to turn his brain off.
He cleared his throat. “Starbucks?”
“Your call.”
Adam’s