Deja could feel her face heating and sweat forming at her hairline, but she refused to look up. Toni and Marie did this to her every month. Apparently, teasing her about her crush on Alejandro was the highlight of the Faculty Senate meeting for them. Meanwhile, every month Deja wished she could crawl under the table and hide, but that would probably only make her friends cackle loud enough to get the entire auditorium’s attention, including Alejandro’s, and the thought of him seeing her like that made her want to expire and leave this plane of existence behind for good.

“Oh, that’s a nice suit,” Marie said, leaning into Toni’s side and shoving her harder into Deja’s body. “Is that a new tie?”

“How should I know?” Deja huffed weakly.

Toni cackled. “Because we all know the only person who knows Alejandro’s wardrobe better than you is…him. So, is that a new addition or not?”

Deja scowled at her friends’ gleeful faces as they waited for an answer or for Deja to overheat and start to melt from embarrassment, whatever came first; they weren’t picky, and any form of entertainment — even at her expense — would appease them. She glanced at the clock on her laptop and saw that the meeting was set to start any second. This was her friends’ terrible genius. If she wanted to take a good look at Alejandro before the meeting started — and she wanted to do so with the thin veneer of a casual perusal instead of a schoolgirl crush — she needed to do it before the Senate President started the meeting. Even though she’d just seen him in the coffee shop, she hadn’t had much time to drink him in like she wanted to. And she did really want to see him, touch him, taste him; a fact that her friends knew all too well.

Deja rolled her eyes, pushed an annoyed breath out of her nostrils, and sat up in her chair. She tried to play it cool, dipping her head to stare — unseeing — at the screen for a second, before she slowly lifted her eyes to look just over the top of her laptop screen. She could have done a lazy scan around the auditorium, but she didn’t have time. Or maybe she just lied to herself about that last part because she was excited to get to see Alejandro again. Pathetic, she thought to herself with a sigh as her eyes settled on him at once.