“I know Sydney has a thing for him.” Holden leans back in his chair and stretches. His shirt rides up a few inches, revealing the dusting of brown hair below his naval and the distinctive V that makes my mouth go dry every time I see it. Ridiculously ripped isn’t even a quality I’d look for in a guy. It’s that they’re his abs.

His arms drop, and so does his shirt.

I quickly avert my eyes back to the papers. “You actually wrote the outline?”

“Yup.” He pops the P, leans forward, and shoves the papers closer to me. The spicy tang of cinnamon fills the air between us.

I skim the first couple of pages. Holden was right; he doesn’t need a tutor. Not that I thought he did. His lackadaisical attitude about school has never been because he’s incapable or daunted by the work. He’s just indifferent.

I jot a few comments in the margins, then shove it back toward him. “Did Mrs. Golden give you a deadline for the rewrite?”

“Nope.” He pops the P again, and I grit my molars in response to the irritating sound.

“How long will it take you?”

“An hour, probably.”

I scoff. “Yeah, right.”

“Start a stopwatch,” he tells me. Then pulls his laptop out of his backpack and opens it.

I drop my gaze back to my Calculus homework, trying to refocus on the derivatives I was working on before. But I keep stealing glances at Holden. At the piece of hair that continuously flops onto his forehead. The focused expression on his face. The way his nose wrinkles and his mouth quirks while he types.

We work in silence. The library is mostly cleared out by the time Holden closes his laptop. I look up as he stands and walks over to the printers. He returns with a neatly stapled stack he drops in front of me. The pages are still warm when I pull them closer.

“Here you go.”

I glance at the clock hanging above the circulation desk. Mrs. Henderson, the librarian, is sitting below it, knitting. “It hasn’t been an hour.”

He shrugs. “I know you’ve got somewhere else to be.”

I blink at him, surprised he knows I volunteer on Tuesdays.

“Your room probably needs to be cleaned. Maybe there’s some homework you already did but could redo just to see if there’s—”

Holden shuts up when I grab his essay off the table and shove it in my backpack, rough enough to make it wrinkle. More so when I push my own work on top of it. I stand and sling my backpack over one shoulder. It lands with a heavy thump against my spine, exacerbating my irritation.

“I’ll get it back to you tomorrow,” I say, then start striding toward the double doors that lead out of the library and into the hallway.