After we texted Monday evening, Chase sent me a copy of his essay and scammed me into coming over to help him with it the following day. And by scammed, I mean he was both incredibly charming and insufferably persistent until I relented. In other words, impeccably on-brand for him.

That’s not to say I minded. But that was a whole other ball of hockey stick wax.

Plus, it was a nice distraction from my rapidly disintegrating social life and the new Derek-Jill revelation.

That’s how I found myself in Chase’s bedroom for the second time, albeit under dramatically different circumstances. A bedroom that smelled of the delicious lingering leather-vanilla scent of his cologne. Had he applied said cologne before leaving to pick me up?

Combined with my three outfit changes while waiting for him and the sparkly pink lip gloss I swiped over my lips on my way out the door, there were some major questions as to what, exactly, we were doing.

But I wasn’t ready to unpack that yet.

I perched on the end of the bed across from the computer desk, rifling through my backpack for the printout I’d marked up with my suggestions. Chase faced me, straddling the computer chair, and turned his red Falcons baseball cap backward, then rested his arms on the seatback.

“I made a few edits.” I handed him a copy of his paper with my corrections and suggestions marked in red ink. Using track changes within Word would have been less work for both of us, but this way he had to do more heavy lifting by inputting the changes manually, rather than accepting them all with one click of a mouse button. While I didn’t mind helping him, I wouldn’t enable him, either.

Chase scanned the front page, then glanced back up at me with his dark eyes wide, like a deer in headlights. “Holy shit. I didn’t think it was that bad.”

“It’s not. You’ve got some good insights, and the conclusions are well-supported. It’s just a little…jumbled.”

“That sounds like a candy-coated way of saying it sucks.”

I shrugged. “My rough drafts are messy too. You have to revise and rewrite to polish a piece.”

“Ugh.” He folded his arms over the back of his chair again and hung his head, sighing dramatically. His forearms flexed, veins tracing their length. I watched, mesmerized, for a split second. Since when had I developed a thing for forearms? And had his hands always been that big?

“That sounds like so much work.”

“That’s sort of the point of schoolwork, Carter.”